Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On

Jimmy Buffett penned a great song after his native Gulf Coast had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina.  Like most Buffett ballads, it has a memorable tune and great lyrics.  But one doesn’t need to go further than the title to find the full message — Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On.  Jimmy’s sage advice to Katrina victims was collect yourself and move forward.

I don’t mean to compare my lot with the suffering of those caught in Katrina’s path, but I am experiencing a setback that reminds me of Buffett’s song.

I have been laid off by IBM after 4+ years with the company.  Today is my final one as an employee of Big Blue.

I won’t go into the circumstances of my employment termination here, because I think it isn’t appropriate to discuss such things in public.  I certainly wouldn’t use this medium to rant against IBM for any reason.  I’m simply sharing the news of my layoff so I can begin to move forward, hopefully with your moral and active support.  Breathe in, breathe out, move on…

I have been a thought leader, researcher, consultant, and educator in the domains of collaboration and knowledge management for the last 10 years.  I would like to continue to work in that realm, as my passion is helping people connect with others so they can do whatever they do more efficiently and effectively.  While I’m not sure what my next role in this ever-evolving space will be, I do know that I have no interest in working under a body shop consulting model — ever again!

As I move on, I will appreciate receiving any information about relevant job openings and business opportunities that you can pass my way.  You may contact me at any of the following:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/lehawes
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lehawes
e-mail: lehawes@gmail.com

Thanks in advance for your assistance while I’m seeking employment.  I will, of course, continue blogging, twittering, and otherwise making my views known on collaboration and a wide variety of other topics.  I look forward to continuing our conversations both during this personal transition and after I’ve settled in a new job.

Reuniting Collaboration and Communication

Hats off to Penny Edwards, who posted Are We Really Collaborating?, in which she reminded us that collaboration and communication are not one in the same.  Her post sparked some thinking on my part about the relationship between the two terms and why many equate them.

Let’s begin by defining each term in the context of virtual, online work environments:

Collaboration: The sharing of a virtual space to complete defined tasks, with control passing from one party to another, either asynchronously or in real-time (e.g. wiki, document, desktop, whiteboard)

Communication: The act of relaying information, knowledge, or opinion to one or more individuals through either synchronous or asynchronous virtual messaging channels (e.g. phone, e-mail, blog, IM, microstreaming)

To most of us, collaboration used to mean working together in the same physical place.  Getting work done together required communication, to be sure, but it was an assumed aspect of the collaboration.  We talked to each other as an integrated part of the idea flow and development that was taking place.

Now that more workers are interacting virtually — not face-to-face — both collaboration and communication technologies are necessary to complete a task.  The problem is, that these technologies have not been combined well in a single application; we still need separate applications to successfully collaborate online.  There are application suites that provide both collaboration and communication functionality, but that functionality is experienced as separate, disconnected components.  We have not yet reached a point where virtual collaboration and communication are nearly one in the same, as in a face-to-face working session.

Virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life, Active Worlds) promise to bring these two elements back together.  In a virtual world, users in the same space can communicate synchronously while working together on an object, just as we would in-person in physical space.  From a technical perspective, the technologies for collaboration and communication are still separate, but they are experienced as a single, integrated technology by the user.  Recreating the seamless experience found in physically co-located work sessions is the key to improving virtual collaboration.

Clearly then, virtual worlds are the next frontier for online collaboration and the most promising way to replicate the experience of a face-to-face collaboration in a virtual environment.  We have a long  way to go before enterprise use of virtual worlds becomes mainstream, but I believe adoption will increase as the technology improves and as younger people enter the workforce.  However, now is the time to start thinking about how and where to use virtual worlds in the enterprise (and between organizations) to improve virtual collaboration, so you are ready to pilot and deploy for competitive advantage before the tipping point is reached.

Microstreaming in the Middle

I noted, in a post titled Shifting Sands, last week that I am twittering far more than IMing these days and gave the key reason why – it’s about us, not you or me.  I still think that’s the most important reason, but I have also discovered another:

Twittering is neither synchronous nor asynchronous; it lies somewhere in between.

“Whoa!”, you say.  “That’s impossible.”  You are correct from a technical standpoint, of course.  Twittering (and microstreaming in general) is an asynchronous form of communication.  There are delays between tweet publication, reading, and response.  Those delays could take days or hours, but they are most often measured in minutes or even seconds.  It is this broad range of possible interaction time with tweets that leads me to say that microstreaming lies somewhere in the middle of real-time and asynchronous communication.

Let me explain this further by contrasting two other forms of online communication — instant messaging and e-mail.  As the name clearly states, IM is instant or synchronous.  There are slight delays between message and response, but those are generally measured in seconds.  If it is believed that there will be a significant delay in response, most of us would choose to send an e-mail instead.  On the other hand, we may quickly receive a response to an e-mail (i.e. in a minute or two), but we don’t have that expectation when we use the medium to communicate.  We clearly classify e-mail as an asynchronous communication vehicle and IM as a synchronous one.

Microstreaming seems to have a different, flexible set of expectations for communication time associated with it.  In some cases, we hope for a nearly immediate response to a tweet.  Other times, we really don’t care how long it takes to get a reply.  In fact, we occasionally tweet with no expectation of any response whatsoever!  We merely communicate a thought or feeling to the collective just to get it out of our head.  These varying expectations for microstreaming communication time are what leads me to say that the channel is neither synchronous nor asynchronous, but somewhere in between.

Is temporal flexibility the secret sauce of microstreaming?  Please let me know what you think.