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!

Considering the Cost & Value of Digital Content for an Enterprise

The way that the value of digital content changes over time, and how an enterprise content management (ECM) system might help to realize and/or retain greater value was the subject of my last post (http://martin-fulcrum.blogspot.com/2010/06/calculating-value-of-content-in-ecm.html).

Lee Dallas retweeted that post, but also referenced a very interesting earlier blog post (2008) by fellow member of 'Big Men on Content' Marko Sillanpää
on the cost of content (link). Sillanpää considered content lifecycle costs as follows:

Cost of Content = (Annual Authoring Costs + Annual Review Costs) / New Objects per Author

Content authoring and review are not the only activities that incur cost – there are costs associated with each step in its lifecycle, notably including the costs of distribution, storage and ultimate destruction. Effective content distribution is becoming increasingly important to the realization of value.

Cost and value are of course different concepts. The cost of an item does not necessarily reflect its value, as anyone who has watched the TV show "Antiques Roadshow" knows!

In business, where there is an emphasis on the bottom line, the value of content ought on average to exceed its cost, or it should not have been created. But for a given piece of content, its cost is generally related to size and complexity, not what it enables. On the other hand, value is tied to enablement and varies over time – often declining gradually or precipitously, but sometimes increasing!

It can be hard to explain to people how managing content benefits a business. However, I have found that identifying its 'enterprise value' is powerful. A good top-down approach is to reference the value chain of a business, using Michael Porter's original simple model.

People understand that enterprises take input from suppliers and partners and, through a series of steps, add value that can be realized in a final sale to customers. Clearly the effective execution of those steps adds to efficiency. When challenged, most people can identify content that contributes or is even essential to the completion of each of those value steps and their constituent processes. For example, an Engineering Department must create, review and approve engineering drawings, and then pass them on to the Manufacturing Department (see E, C & O value chain).

In my experience, taking a value perspective is generally more attractive, especially in growth industries, than a cost and cost avoidance perspective – which has classically been the basis for return-on-investment (R.O.I.) approaches to software justification.
 
Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Calculating the Value of Content in ECM

It's only worth expending effort to manage something if it has value – usually positive, but sometimes negative. So the concept of content value is implicit in enterprise content management (ECM).

On the other hand, the value of a given content object (i.e. digital file) such as an email or document generally declines over time – or at least this is the common wisdom. I have seen graphs drawn mapping 'value' over 'time', with a smooth decline of value tending to zero. However, such a representation is clearly an average of value across many types of enterprise content.

If you look at individual pieces of content, then you'll find different profiles:

• In compliance, a piece of content may retain 100% of its value for a defined period of years and then abruptly drop to having no value, or even having negative value (liability) that should trigger its destruction
  
• In knowledge management, a piece of content may have declining value over time, but then because of some new event may suddenly have increased value
  

But this perspective is of the Inherent or Independent Value of a piece of content – the value is assessed entirely based on the information contained in the object. But it seems to me that there are at least two other factors that impact value:

• Context – when correctly combined with other prices of content a given piece of content may have greater value. For example a specifications document is more valuable together with the associated requirements document. Value can often be realized by the way in which context is presented between content items – how they are grouped, ordered or ranked.
  
• Impairment – Ironically, the value of a piece of content may be impaired by efforts to manage content. If you mix valuable pieces of content with large amounts of irrelevant materials, that should have been destroyed, you reduce the chances that the valuable content can be found and its value realized. Keeping everything is usually a bad idea. And often users impair value when they misclassify content.
  

So the available value of a piece of content to an organization may be expressed as follows:

Available Value = Inherent Value x Context / Impairment

What this says is that content management efforts can be beneficial, but if not done well can actually be destructive.

Taking the Pulse of your Business Content with microblogging

When many users first encounter microblogging they don't 'get it'.

Twitter is of course the classic and most widely known microblogging site, and its style has been taken up by many others such as Facebook in a broader set of social media approaches. A common initial reaction is something to the effect: "I don't care if your cat just threw up – in fact, I'd rather NOT know!!"

Once people start to microblog, they find many different ways that it can provide value, beyond answering the question: "What's happening?" that twitter poses. Commentators have described endless ways of using twitter such as: 5 marketing approaches, 10 diverse applications, 50 different topics, etc.

But how does microblogging add value within an organization? Most of the discussions about business value have been on better ways to reach outside an organization to customers and partners by breaking down barriers, increasing transparency and the like.

At first blush making the case for microblogging in the workplace might seem to be hard. People often comment that they are too busy to engage in 'chit-chat' while at work. But over the last couple of years the use cases that have real business value have become clearer.

For me there are two general styles of internal business microblogging:

1. User status updates – close to the twitter model, but with a distinctly different topic set
   
2. Content status updates – fairly unique to business and keyed to the fact that many work processes produce and manage content (i.e. documents and other business files as understood in content management)
   

At Open Text we recently released the Pulse module for Livelink 9.7.1 that adds microblogging capabilities to support both styles (available for free to customers from the Knowledge Center).

Status updates are pretty much what you'd expect – you can make a post about anything, although some of the most useful ones are:

• "I'm looking for..."
  
• "Anyone interested in..."
  
• "Have we..."
  

These have value because they help people to be more effective through better networking in an organization.

You can select specific users to follow and you can follow the stream from all users. We have a very similar Pulse capability in Open Text Social Workplace.

BUT, I think the real advance in Livelink/Content Server Pulse is to follow the status of content irrespective of location in a range of very powerful and comprehensive ways.

Sure you can post a link to content in twitter, and many microblogging services allow you to attach documents or other kinds of files to your posts. But the advance here is to have the act of adding or changing a piece of content anywhere in an ECM system create a status post. The feed is reporting a content action by another person. If I'm following Joe and he adds a new sales presentation anywhere I can see it in the status stream – provided of course I have permission in the repository to see the added content. All of the important support for compliance is maintained.

There are many ways to slice-and-dice: by following specific people or all people, and following changes in user status, content or both.

You can also 'pulse' specific content objects, so all changes and all comments about a piece of content are seen in the unique Pulse stream of that object. It's like a filtered window into the stream looking at just one object, even if the ECM system contains millions of documents.

And Pulsing is not just limited to files/documents, but is applied to containers like folders and places such as project workspaces and communities. You can imagine the power of an accumulated stream of all content and status activity related to a project!

Livelink has had a notification capability for many years, but it requires users to first identify existing documents and containers that they would like to follow. Pulse adds the human dimension – you can be notified of changes based on the people you follow and what they do with the content.

To honest I'm still 'figuring out' all of the ramifications and power of Livelink/Content Server Pulse but I'm very excited!
 
If you'd like to learn more:

• Initial description in the May 2010 issue of NewsLink
  
• Free Webinar Thursday 3 June 2010
  
• Software and documentation in the Knowledge Center
  
• And if you are an Open Text Online Communities member you'll be able to use Pulse very shortly (announcement)
  

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Social collaboration for productivity and problem solving

Check out this SlideShare Presentation from my colleague Deb Lavoy, covering the Open Text Social Workplace (OTSW) offering. Just this week we put an OTSW system dubbed 'Hub' into full production use for Open Text staff (now over 4,000 users).

Social collaboration for productivity and problem solving

View more presentations from dllavoy.