Content Matters

I was chatting with a colleague yesterday and he related how he interviews people to join our company. We quickly dropped into role playing – with me as the job candidate. He had a compelling proposition, but as I told him, he was missing the thing that excited me = Content Matters!

As I started to tell him why content matters I found myself getting excited. I realized I'm actually quite passionate about it! Not content itself, but what it enables and how it's used.

Content matters to companies in a way that changes how they work, how they create value and whether they succeed. It matters whether they recognize that fact or not.

If you want to understand what drives a company look at their value chain – how they create value – and how they are organized to execute each stage in the value chain. Within each stage there are typically many processes, each with many steps. At almost every step there is some content that is created, reviewed, followed or otherwise used; how well this is done makes a difference to effectiveness.

It's no surprise to people that you can understand a business by 'following the money' or 'following the customer' and that is the basis for ERP and CRM systems.

On the other hand most people are only just coming to realize that 'following the content' is just as important, so while we've talked about content management for many years, that conversation is starting to be important to business.

The Myth of Real-time Collaborative Authoring

In the document management field there has been a succession of products designed to support users working on a document at the same time, even if they are in different locations. These products have failed. They have failed because people don't work on documents together very often.

I wonder where the belief in concurrent creation of documents came from. In the physical world you seldom see people saying, "Come to my office and we'll write a document together," so why expect users to want to do it virtually?

Documents may well be created to summarize a brainstorming session or record the minutes of a general meeting, but the designated author usually 'goes away' to somewhere quiet to write the first draft.

Even in the review phase, reviewers independently make comments, suggestions and edits at different times. The author then pulls these together to make a revised version. Email is no different, especially since emails of any length are essentially documents.

Sure the stepwise, asynchronous approach to content authoring and review takes place over a longer period, but it actually makes best use of each participant's time, and is therefore more efficient overall.

I started to think about this again with yesterday's announcement that Google Wave will not be further developed (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html). As the blog post says, Google Wave was, "...a web app for real time communication and collaboration". For the purposes of this discussion let's consider both collaboration and communication independently.

Collaboration in Authoring

A technical tour-de-force, Wave enabled users to see others changing content as they themselves changed it. Very cool, but actually disconcerting. I wouldn't have wanted you to have watched me author this blog post, for several reasons:

• I'm easily distracted and need to concentrate to develop some cohesive thoughts
  
• While writing I jump around adding sections, changing others, moving text blocks – it would be hard to follow and I'd have to explain what I was doing which would further slow me down and distract me
  
• I'm the World's worst typist
  

I'm probably no different than most people, at least regarding the first two points. And perhaps more lethal to the concept of concurrent authoring:

• You'd get bored – it takes far longer to author a document than read it, and you'd probably want to be doing something else while I work, preferring to comment on my finished work
  

And that's the crux of the matter – most people are busy, with many demands on their time, and collaborative authoring is just too inefficient.

Communication Delays are Good

While Wave was designed for collaboration, it was also intended for communication (see quotation above). Essentially email and instant messaging rolled into one. But I think there is a problem there too – most people actually don't want to use real-time communication!!

Many commentators have remarked on the tendency for young people to use their mobile phones for text messaging far more than as telephones. You'd think it would be easier to engage in a conversation by talk rather than typing, so why is texting preferred?

I think people prefer texting because it allows them to be engaged in many, independent conversations with different people. For this to work they need to be able to send and receive messages in real time, but also need an agreed expectation that replies may take several minutes. Awkward silences of several minutes on a phone aren't agreeable, and since voice isn't cached locally like a text message you have to listen to each voice channel concurrently – which isn't practical.

Interestingly while they are short, both mobile text messages and instant messages (IM) are generally only sent when they are completed. It is usually enough to see that the recipient is typing (i.e. with Instant Messaging) or to just assume that they are (i.e. with texting). All stumbles, pauses, and corrections are not sent – but they were with Google Wave.

Summary

With small pieces of content: true real-time communication is often undesirable, with near real-time being better.

With larger pieces of content: collaborative authoring is best done asynchronously.

Collaborative authoring seems to be something that IT professionals believe will lead to greater efficiencies, while end users don't have the time for it!