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.

Shifting Sands

I’ve noticed a pronounced shift in my synchronous online communication activity lately.  In this post, I’ll share details and then ask whether or not you are experiencing a similar shift and why.

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I began using Twitter and IBM’s internal equivalent, BlueTwit, about three months ago.  I know — way late to the game, but better late than never!  Since then, I have found that tweeting has replaced IMing as my preferred method of communicating virtually in real-time.  That’s true both behind and beyond the IBM firewall.

There are probably several reasons for this shift, but in retrospect I believe they can be summed up in one statement:

It’s about us, not you or me.

In the Twittersphere, communication is generally addressed to the collective rather than to an individual.  You can post a question to no one in particular and quickly get an answer back (or, more likely, several answers!)  Conversely, information can easily be shared instantaneously with several people.

Twitter expands real-time communication to a one-to-many model, as opposed to IM, which was created to facilitate person-to-person, synchronous communication.  I explained this difference to my wife just last night, when she asked me with whom I was twittering.  When I explained how I interact with the Twittersphere, she looked at me as if I was a crazy man talking to thin air in public!

Isn’t it more productive to share what you know or what you are learning with everyone, rather than just one person?

The belief in the verity of the affirmative answer to that question has driven me to nearly stop using IM altogether and communicate almost exclusively via Twitter and BlueTwit.  Perhaps I’ve had an epiphany much like my colleague, Luis Suarez, had regarding the use of social software instead of e-mail (chronicled here.)  More likely, it was my non-techie wife’s innocent question and disbelieving reaction that made me realize that my online synchronous collaboration channel of choice had changed, probably irreversibly, and why the shift had occurred.

How about you?  Has tweeting begun to occupy a larger percentage of your real-time virtual communication activity, at the expense of IMing?  If so, why?  If not, why not?  Please share your thoughts in a comment below.  If the accumulated feedback is interesting enough, I might create a short, quantitative survey on the topic!