Practical Experience with Christensen's Innovation Methodology JOBS(R) Jobs-to-be-done when creating the Avaya Flare User Experience, Avaya Digital Video Device and Cloud Offer. Learning: Add focus on emotions.

Clayton Christensen's Jobs-to-be-done approach describe a series of steps to create innovation systematically. This article describes the application of the methodology to the creation of the Avaya Flare User Experience, the Avaya Digital Video Device and the related enterprise cloud offer. We found key for success is to add focus on emotions. And the result to be a condensed job description as more work is required to detail the solutions that it becomes testable against objectives and barriers. This blog is complemented by a slide deck in slideshare covering this topic. Disclaimer: The blog represents my opinions and not the views of my employer Avaya.

Practical Experience with Christensen's Innovation Methodology JOBS(R) Jobs-to-be-done when creating the Avaya Flare User Experience, Avaya Digital Video Device and Cloud Offer. Learning: Add focus on emotions.

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1.  Overview of the JOBS Methodology.

JOBS(R) ( atrademark of Innosight) consists out of 4 steps: Jobs-to-be-done, Objectives, Barriers, and Solutions.

1. Jobs-to-be-done is the description of the problem a customer tries to solve. Christensen suggests to create complete job descriptions in the form: (Customer) wants to (solve a problem) in (this context).
2. Objectives. These are the criteria the customer is using to select a solutions. Note this includes functional criteria "like should not cost more than" as well as emotional as well as social objectives.
3. Barriers. List those which prevent customers to potentially use solutions. Christensen points out the barriers are typically functional as "battery life time beyond 2 days".
4. Solutions. Create a candidate list of different ways the job could be done. And look for outages of existing solutions.

2. The Context of our experience with the JOBS methodology: What we wanted to achieve with the Avaya Flare User Experience, The Avaya Digital Video Device and the related cloud offer

Goal of the project was to move Avaya beyond voice: Add Video Conferencing and Web Conferencing to the portfolio.

3. Step One: Identify the Jobs-to-be-done.

We visted customers and observed users during virtual conferences (voice, video, web conferences). As part of the process we learned its important to start observing users substantially before the actual activity as well as after the activity. It allows to uncover further "Job-to-be-done" that can fuel novel innovation.

We captured our observations in the form above. Examples are: "Team lead" wants to "exchange information as effectively as possible" in the "distributed team" context. Or "Sales person: wants to "have the latest up to date information on the calling party as fast as possible" in the "inbound call" context..

We learned that "saving time" and "getting related information" are key elements.  These findings are crucial for the next step: Objectives.

Thus in addition to Christensen's method we suggest: create a list of objectives when writing the Jobs-to-be-done.

4. A new step added to Christensen's method: Use Show and Tell so that team members and customers understand the characteristics of great products: Emotions make great products.

Enterprise products are typically around solving pain points. However we not only wanted to solve pain points - we wanted to create a great product. To learn what makes a great product we asked project participants to bring products, tools or services they really loved. What we learned was: A great product is

1. Multifunctional AND simple to use. You would say no surprise.
2. Makes people's eyes shine when they use and when they talk about it. Note - this is pure emotions.
3. Feels good when you touch it. Note this is pure emotions.
4. One can learn how the complete product works in less than 5 seconds. This translates into: the user gets instant gratification. Again this is about emotions.

We learned that great products are around emotions and not only about solving pain points.

5. Step Two: Objectives.

We found the functional objectives to be straightforward. Here some examples:

• 100% of users wanting to save time
• 100% of users looking to get background information on the task at hand quickly. I.e. save time.
• 50% of users were looking for a solution that makes collaboration of graphically dispersed teams effective.

Based on the learnings from Show and Tell the soft objectives are THE key to create a great product. Here some examples for emotional objectives:

• 16% of users - the innovators and early adopters - want to show they are thought leaders
• The early majority (34% of users) want to make it safe to use the product. Note that specifically for senior executives face loosing is a substantial issue. (note we excluded the late majority (34%) and the laggards (16%) from the target audience.
• Users stated: "I don't want to waste time - i have to get work done"
• Users stated: "Needs to be fun to use - like in a game". This is about instant gratification - leading to shiny eyes.

And a number of examples for social objectives:

• For leaders -  50% say "I need to be in control"
• Be connected with the rest of my leadership team
• Effectively broaden my network inside the organization. Make me more visible. That makes me more effective and powerful (note this is emotional).

6. Step Three: Barriers. We added emotional and social barriers to Christensen's methodology.

We found the functional barriers of the current solutions. Examples are

• 35% of uses stated the quality/performance of current solutions is not good enough
• 20% complained current solutions are diffult to implement or
• 20% did see security issues as the barrier.

We found that there are a significant number of soft barriers. Examples for emotional barriers are

• 39% of uswers were concerend its more difficult to multitask in videoconferencing setting. Reason being one might face boredom.
• 35% raised increased nervousness presenting.
• 25% of users were concerned being controlled in a video setting.

And we identified social barriers as well. Examples:

• Group adoption might be required to make the solutions productive.
• The leaders might need to use the solution first.

7. Step 4. Solutions. We found the above is not enough to create solutions. We did derive a condensed job description instead.

We found that more work is required to create the solutions. The reason being that the solutions need to be sufficiently detailed to be testable against the objectives and the barriers. This instead we created a condensed job description that served as the focal point for next steps.

This is how it read.

We want to build

• A universal tool to collaborate, that saves me time. Universal like the human hand - the most versatile tool ever invented.
• The tool delivers the background information I need for the job at hand.
• It feels good, makes my eyes shine when i use and other folks can learn it in less than 5 seconds. So its safe to suggest to others to use it.
• We want to make measurable if we are on track: Goal is a net promoter score of 75% during development.

We used that to guide the next phase - searching for the solution. That's a different story for another blog at a different time.

8. Results

We succeeded. Avaya Flare made it to the top of the stack of no jittters cool enterprise products 2010. It consistently rated 8.5+ out of 10 in wow factor and 9+ out of 10 in ease of use. And people get in 2 seconds how it works.

User Experience of Cloud based Mobile Systems

Many readers of my blog asked in email: could i please compile the relevant research with references? Here you go: Today we want to focus on page load speed and latency. 

 

Faster cloud based web for mobile devices latency and how to accelerate by christian von reventlow v1

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(Note the views represent my personal opinions and are not the views of my employer Avaya, detailed references are in the embeeded powerpoint presentation)

1. What are the page load limits for an acceptable user experience?

Google, Yahoo and others have researched this. The findings are:

• The time users are willing to wait before they navigate away from a page has decreased from 8 seconds in the year 2000 to 3 seconds in 2009. 2 seconds load time of a landing page decreases both the conversion rate and the total number of pages viewed by 10% - when compared to a 1 second load time.
• In addition users never get in a flow if the load time is too long. When a page loads in 200ms users click within 500ms. They experience that as a smooth flow. However time to the next click increases by 4 seconds when a page loads in 2 seconds.

Thus my view is: 2 seconds is the 2011 page load limit for an acceptable user experience. And i expect it to become less in the years to come.

2. How are various mobile web pages compare to the 2 seconds page loading speed limit? And are the cloud service providers giving you response times that allow to hit this limit/

There is a very limited number of mobile web pages with a load times below 2 seconds. In a recent review by blaze.io only 20% of the web pages were below this limit. Specifically a Google and a Microsoft Bing site were below this limit. This shows that both companies have taken their published research seriously.

I measured the actual latency of applications run on various clouds during 6 hours on a Monday morning on the east coast - resulting in 2.9 seconds to 4 seconds on wired network. Content delivery networks measured over 7 days showed between 6 and 12 seconds with an average around 8 seconds. Variability was quite large and reached 120% in an instance.

3. What is the right architecture to deliver your mobile web?

Typically LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or similar setups are used.

When designing the systems avoid sessions. Use cookies to store userID and login status. Scaling the webapps, image conversion, audio and video is easy - they scale horizontally. Use Hardware loadbalancers followed by SW loadbalancers as Wackamole, Poud, perbal or Apache with mod_proxy. And just add more servers.

Queuing helps for peak periods. However at some point you want to turn off the page as people learned from Macy's and JCPenny's web site performance at a recent Black Friday. People return later when the page is not available. But they are frustrated if the page is extremly slow and are reluctant to return.

Scaling the database is more tricky. As Carl Henderson puts it: Avoid it and go for a bigger box if possible. If you can't avoid it go for database replications. In most applications the read/write ratio is 80/20 or 90/10. That allows Master-Slave replication. Add memcaching to make scaling cheaper. A sideline cache as Danga will help.

When you need High Availability go for Master-Master replication, or to increase bandwidth Dual Tree architecture. Even more scale can get created with ringlike MySQL databaser clusters. Or by dividing tables into disjoint sets, federating by users or partitioning the database horizontally (Shards). Have a look on the Flickr architecture in the slide deck as an example of these methods.

4. What are the challenges on the device side and how to resolve them?

There are so many devices out there with so many different screen sizes. And so many different browsers with different capabilities. ..unfortunately on a global scale - IOS, Android, and Blackberry devices are a minority...

Coping with this variety gets done best by starting the design of a web page with a mobile only web page assuming a browser with minimum capabilities. Use a default stylesheet. And then enhance the view progressively using Javascript and @mediaquery. And adapt the content of the screen for the devices you want to support. WURFL is a database that contains hundreds of devices with their specific capabilities. Use CSS instead of Javascript for performance. And compress data. Plus - very relevant -send only data that will rendered on the screen.

Note that many PC oriented web pages have lots of data that never gets rendered. Find an example in the presentation where around 80% of the data transmitted to the mobile device never gets rendered.

Some tools help in the process. As an example: the open source phone gap tool allows to build Javascript based application that run on Apple's Ios, Android and Blackberry. And it supports WURFL easing supporting various screen sizes and resolutions.

Take Yahoo!'s 14 or now 34 performance rules and suggestions by people as Yibuu, Jason Grigsby, and Steve Souders to heart:

• Make fewer HTTP Requests. Don't forget that HTTP connections pipeline requests - slowing things down. And that according to the standard many browsers only support 2 connections per domain. Thus you want to use multiple domains to parallelize things. (and how many a browser supports varies from browser to browser...)
• Limit cookies as they get loaded with each request. Better only one. Or zero on some connections.
• Encourage caching with expire headers far out. And test if it works on your target browser.
• GZIP compression. Can take out up to 75% of transmission volume
• Javascript and CSS need to go external. And use only 1 each. Go for CSS and not for table layouts. And use CSS sprites - at least some browser support it.
• And minimize DNS lookups - as the are blocking till the DNS is resolved.

Testing your results is key. Tools like Yslow or Safar Web Inspector allow to understand the size of the individual elements of a page being downloaded, display a waterfall chart showing how time gets consumed and come up with suggestions on what needs to be done to improve the page.

Find some more suggestions in the powerpoint. And if you want to take things to the next level read Steve sounders article: Faster Webpages from the velocity-20090622.ppt. Just Google it.

5. And is the cloud making things better and simpler?

Unfortunately it does not look like it. Recent research shows that on average 8 hosts are involved in each transactions: Hosts delivering session information, search or CMS content - all inside of the firewall. And other hosts like Web Analystics, CDN content, Videos from a media server, ads from an adserver or information from a shopping card server.

And measurement shows, that more is required to be below the 2 seconds page load limit for a great user experience. At least for the majority of web pages out there. And even more so for mobile devices.

6. Conclusion

The quest for page load speed and low latency will continue. And many organization will need to continue to invest in optimizing their mobile web experience.

As a consequence all types of mobile applications - fat mobile apps, hybrid apps downloading data from the cloud and web based applications will be around.

It will be fun to see how HTML 5 with resident data will impact the game..


Let me know what you think. Questions? Suggestions?

The future of business intelligence (BI) is beyond DSS. It makes rich contextual collaboration (as in Avaya Flare) a reality

Business intelligence (BI) is the phrase used to describe data driven decision Support System (DSS). Large amount of data get analyzed. The systems help identify trends, relationship between data sets and identify anomalies. Results get represented as briefing books, through report and query tools and executive information systems.  Target audiences are analysts and selected executives supporting their decision processes. Collaborative decision making has been the new trend.  Gartner stated it in their strategic planning assumption: "In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social media software with BU platform capabilities."

What we are talking about in this blog goes way beyond this. The world of Business Intelligence is poised to change dramatically. Connected sensors and data collection are everywhere or can get easily created even by non-geeks.

Look at these stories:

• Product and services rating systems are part of purchasing platforms (e.g. Amazon, trip-advisor).
• Purchasing transaction data and credit card information are captured my many organizations.
• Connected sensors or ID devices are being built into a multitude of products: From smart-phones, Bluetooth headsets, shoes (Nike), RFID tags embedded in car wheels (originally purposed to support the manufacturing process) to wireless scales
• High end sensor technologies become available to everybody. A great example is computer vision programmable & usable by nonprogrammers (like openCV) - allowing computers to capture information and make decisions based on what they see. 

These input and sensor data get fed into on-line services. Over time these will turn into a sensor web with API's for automated access through other services. Plus all documents and communication in organizations become retrievable and searchable. As a consequence new services will appear leveraging all these data to provide business intelligence to a much broader audience in organizations and to the individual. Why is that relevant today?

Human's invented organization thousands of years ago because division of labor and specialization are key drivers for efficiency, quality and speed. However with the division of labor comes the need to collaborate - that is bridging the gaps between the individual specialists or specialist organizations. Making collaboration most effective is thus the next step in organizational development. Business Intelligence has the potential to supply the context information making the collaboration most effective - thus creating what I call "Contextual collaboration".

With that Business Intelligence will move substantial beyond its origin - Decision Support Systems (DSS).  New services will appear delivering contextual information to individuals and groups in an organization and in their private life. This will move BI out of the ivory tower of analysts and specialized executives - making it a main stream tool available to everyone. And personal BI sounds new or frightening? I bet you used it already and loved it: didn't you use personal BI last time when you purchased a product online - picking that product with the most stars in the online retailers customer ratings?

Key element of the Avaya Flare user experience is contextual collaboration. Information from BI systems can get fed to Avaya Flare - presenting the information required to make collaboration most effective. 

Please leave comments on my Avaya blog

http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2010/11/the-future-of-business-intelligence-bi-is-beyond-dss-it-will-be-transformed-through-cloud-computing-.html as well as on my private blog.

Or reach out to me at reventlow@avaya.com or mailto:vonreventlow@yahoo.com%22%3Evonreventlow@yahoo.com and follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/vonreventlow

Keywords: Contextual Collaboration, Business collaboration, Collaboration software, Project collaboration, Team collaboration, Web based collaboration, Collaboration tool, Collaboration, Collaboration strategy, Collaboration management, Collaboration strategies, Collaborate, Online collaboration, Collaboration technology, Collaborative tools, Hosted collaboration, Collaboration open source, Group collaboration, Document collaboration, Google collaboration, Web collaboration

Why was Android used to implement Avaya Flare?

Network world reported in his article “New Avaya device takes on Cisco (Apple, too) in tablet war" on Avaya Flare. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/091510-avaya-tablet.html. 

They call it “a powerful  Android-based touchscreen tablet that support new communications software to rival Cisco’s recently announced communication tablet Cius”.  And move on to describe the user experience “Members are drawn in from a Rolodex of contacts listed on the right of the screen and dragged into a spotlight at the center, representing the conference”.

Check the user experience out at Guided tour of the Avaya Flare user experience. Plus see how our customers use the device in the videos: An executive using Avaya Flare,Higher customer satisfaction in financial institutions using Avaya Flare.

In the comments section at network world readers asked: why was Android used to implement Avaya Flare? The reasons are

1)   Android is an open platform. The tablet thus can run 10.000’s of standard applications off the shelf

2)   There is a large Android developer community – so it’s easy for an Avaya customer to find someone building special applications for the customers business context. In addition leveraging Avaya Ace no special telecom skills are needed to write applications.

3)   Android did give my development team a jumpstart. Many functions we had to develop in projects before were available right out of the standard Android load.

4)   Last – but not least – its fun to develop with new technologies. Our developers love to learn new things and apply it to our customer’s business environment. As a consequence we have a motivated and energized team.

Let me know what your thoughts on the use of Android are! Here as well as on the Avaya blog at http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2010/09/title-why-was-android-used-to-implement-avaya-flare.html

Christian von Reventlow, VP new Products at Avaya, Inventor of Avaya Flare.

Tags: Contextual Collaboration, Business collaboration, Collaboration software, Project collaboration, Team collaboration, Web based collaboration, Collaboration tool, Collaboration, Collaboration strategy, Collaboration management, Collaboration strategies, Collaborate, Online collaboration, Collaboration technology, Collaborative tools, Hosted collaboration, Collaboration open source, Group collaboration, Document collaboration, Google collaboration, Web collaboration

Just released my baby: the Avaya Flare User Experience and the Avaya Desktop Video Device. An Android tablet with HD Video conferencing

Avaya yesterday released the results of my work from the last year: the Avaya Flare User Experience and the Avaya Desktop Video Device. Its an Android tablet with HD Video conferening. iI got created through my MoJo project which some of you know.

It's build to make collaboration really easy:
1) A user experience that is intuitive, fun and easy to use. It has consistently rated 8.5+ out of 10 in wow factor and 9+ our of 10 in ease of use. And it takes less than 5 seconds to figure out how it works.
2) It integrates stereo voice, HD video conferencing, Web conferencing & document sharing, email, instant messaging, Facebook, Linked_In, PC screensharing, remote access to your office PC and desktop virtualization.
3) It brings contextual collaboration to life - automatically showing information relvant for the specific context. For example for people it shows previous communication you had with that person, documents you might have worked on or where the person lives.

Special thanks to all of you - customers, business partners, Avaya Associates and friends and family who helped and worked day and night to create Avaya Flare - both the user experience as well as the Android based HD video collaboration tablet!
Check the user experience out at Guided tour of the Avaya Flare user experience.

Plus see how our customers use the device in the videos:
An executive using Avaya Flare,
Higher customer satisfaction in financial institutions using Avaya Flare and
Using Avaya Flare in a doctors office to solve medical issues faster

I want to evolve the user experience and capabilities of Avaya Flare. Thus please let me know what you like and what you want to get improved. Plus let me know new ideas you might have. Pls post a comment so that we can discuss.

Practical Video Guide on Contextual Collaboration. Part 1 Introduction

Practical Video Guide on Contextual Collaboration. This blog series covers how to use technology to leverage context to make collaboration more productive.

Part 1: Definition of contextual collaboration.

This video explains the concept of contextual collaboration: All collaboration happens in a context. Examples are
1) if you reach out to a person by phone your relationship to the person is the context
2) if you have a team meeting your team might be the context
3) If you send an email to a customer the customer relationship is the context.
Your collaboration will be more productive if you have all relevant information for that context readily available. Thats why we talk about Contextual Collaboration.

The blog series covers
1) Whats relevant in various contexts
2) Technologies which you can use to make contextual collaboration more productive
3) How to deploy it in your enterprise and private life such that true value is created.



Part 1 of the practical video guide on Contextual Collaboration: Use the context to make your collaboration more productive. from Christian von Reventlow on Vimeo.


Pls leave comments on my Avaya blog
http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/2010/08/video-blog-series-on-contextual-collaboration-part-1-introduction.html or
http://www.avaya.com/blogs/archives/author/authord5beb/
and my private blog
http://telecomdisruption.blogspot.com/

Or reach out to me at reventlow@avaya.com or mailto:vonreventlow@yahoo.comand follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/vonreventlow

Enterprise 'Chat Roulette': Planning For Unplanned Collaboration (Part 3 in a Series)

(This is part 3 in the "Contextual Collaboration" series. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.)

Series Summary: Modern enterprise collaboration technologies have been designed to address the need for workers to efficiently and productively collaborate using realtime communication solutions. However, despite hundreds of collaboration solutions deployed and used, most businesses are still losing productivity. Why is this happening? In this "Contextual Collaboration" series I explore how the "Loss of Context" in business communications affects and limits the productivity gains promised by business collaboration technologies. With "context" as a filter, the series explores which collaboration technologies are able to deliver measurable productivity gains, which ones actually make the problem worse and what kind of new solutions are needed as the nature of work and life change in the face of a constantly changing enterprise business landscape.

In prior posts in the series I explored the growing realization by all of us that information has become too abundant. Enterprise workers are overloaded by "Too Much Information"(TMI) and we all struggle daily just to sort through it. After all the sorting few of us time left to actually process all the information and effectively act on it. The result is that much of the information we do manage to process can lose it's context before it can be leveraged. Without context, information cannot be effectively assessed and incorporated into some productive action. 

What makes this problem especially acute is many of us now work "remotely" in a "satellite offices" or fully independently in "virtual offices" (VO). In more and more industries a growing population of workers are now classified as "Virtual Office workers" with no official, company-owned office to go to every day to do their work. Virtual office workers often initially like the flexibility and reduced commuting time of "VO". But there significant drawbacks to VO.  VO workers lose the benefit of co-located co-workers that they can conveniently collaborate with to help process and act on the business information tsunami. 

In this post I explore one possible technology idea/solution for this face-to-face collaboration problem. The solution is aimed at recapturing what I call the "unplanned productivity" or "emergent productivity" effect that comes from office workers being able to draw on the knowledge and expertise of co-located co-workers. To get started let me explain a little more what do I mean by "Emergent Productivity.

In the past almost everyone went to an office to work with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of coworkers all in the same building, or complex of buildings.  In that settings you and your coworkers would be would be regularly "running into each other in the halls". It was taken for granted that you were always going to be having both planned and unplanned, face-to-face meetings with your coworkers "at the office". It's been widely known for a long time that the most effective and productive meetings were very often those that were not preplanned. These chance, informal hallway meetings were in many cases the most productive minutes in our whole day. They would often result in punctuated leaps in insight or progress due to the unstructured format of the meetings.

We have all experienced this "hallway effect" in the past and for the most part we took for granted how beneficial those meetings were. This is "Emergent Productivity". Simply put it's "Teamwork". But with the explosion of globalization and distributed teams this kind of "Emergent Productivity" is now almost an extinct animal. How do we recapture this effect without rolling back the clock and re-populating all those empty office buildings we all see with the "Space Available" signs in the windows?

A Solution(?): The "Emergent productivity" solution I'm thinking of is something I call "Enterprise Chat Roulette". This solution would be a business-focused solution based on the popular, though controversial, consumer/personal internet service called "Chat Roulette". Chat Roulette is a free website for people who can, on their personal time, get connected randomly with other Chat Roulette users for webcam-based conversations. At any point either user may leave the current chat, by closing the current session. In doing that another random connection is started. As you might imagine, because of the lack of oversight, transparency and rules, there can be a wide variation in the "quality" and type of interactions that are enabled by this solution.

The idea for "Enterprise Chat Roulette"(ECR) is to take the same basic "Chat Roulette" concept and add in transparency, oversight and rules and apply it in a business collaboration context. The rules for ECR would be designed so each ECR solution could be leveraged in an professional, enterprise setting. Properly designed I believe ECR solutions could be used to recreate some of the benefits I discussed above that come out of unplanned face-to-face interactions in the workplace.

The main class of ECR solutions I'm thinking of would be used by businesses to automatically and intelligently connect distributed team members into semi-randomly generated audio/video/whiteboard chat sessions. These sessions would happen at semi-random times throughout the day of each worker. There could be no set agenda planned for these chats, or the system might have very broad topics set for a given chat session. This could simulate and stimulate a completely off the cuff and ad-hoc, face-to-face conversation of the type we used to experience when we all worked together in office buildings. It's perhaps a "non-PC" way to put this but it would be something of an "e-Harmony Speed Collaboration" service for co-workers who are not co-located.

The possibilities here are extensive. For example: The system might be designed to automatically schedule a certain amount of time for every team-member on their daily calendar as "virtual hallway" time. The users would sign in to the "ECR-bridge" and then be connected by the system to one or more co-workers via multimedia session. Before a session starts the system might display to each participant some basic data on the person(s) you are going to be connected to including initially name, role, etc. It could capture how many times you had spoken in the past and a summary of topics discussed on those past ECR conversations.

The system would also then provide some context on what the person or persons are working on in their role for the team. The two or more people brought together on the ECR chat would enter the chat sessions and start talking and/or typing about work topics of interest. Discussions on general personal topics would likely be welcome and even encouraged as part of the team building process. ECR sessions could even be scheduled at lunch/dinner/breakfast times of day if the team members are in timezones where meal times line up. In those cases participants could actually have a "virtual meal" together while chatting. For example you may have one person eating breakfast and another dinner if they are 10 hours apart. The chat sessions could be set for a variety of lengths depending on the desired collaboration and could be extended by certain amounts by mutual agreement if participants have a lot to discuss.

This really is an online, automated version of the practice some businesses had in the past of doing "quad/trio lunches". These were lunches that were planned by randomly picking 3 or 4 coworkers in a large office to go to lunch together. The choices would be made randomly from a pool of workers in an office that signed up for the program. This would give coworkers who aren't normally "lunch friends" a reason to go share a meal and get to know each other better. The goal was to build strong coworker relationships and thereby build a stronger and more productive team.

I believe that ECR collaboration solutions like these could be designed and implemented to recapture some of this same value using modern collaboration technologies. What do you think? Could you see yourself signing up with your virtual coworkers in an ECR pool that would automatically and intelligently help you build and maintain work and even work/personal relationships across  continents, cultures and timezones?

What are some of the other scenarios you can think of for using this ECR concept to help you, your team and your company more productive? 

Looking forward to your ideas and comments.

Contextual Collaboration. (Part 2 in a Series) What Are Businesses Searching For?

(This is part 2 in the "Contextual Collaboration" series. Read Part 1 here.)

The Question: As business leaders we are constantly being asked to generate more value from the teams we lead. One promising way to do that is to engender a culture of productive collaboration. The challenge is how to make that happen. What are business leaders perceiving to be the key elements of great collaboration? This is the question I want to address today.

The Background: After the recession’s focus on trimming down the costs all business have had to become very lean on resources. All business leaders are being asked to get more done with their reduced workforces.  The traditional approach to getting work done of "ramping up staff" and "sending the over the top" is no longer an option. Today's leaders have to find non-linear solutions that generate high productivity with small teams. This recession is forcing businesses to rediscover the non-linear leverage of productive teaming and collaboration.

To investigate this question I began researching what businesses are looking for in collaboration technologies and solutions.  My jump off point for this investigation was to look at what people were searching for related to "business collaboration". Using Google's ad-words keyword suggestion tool I was able to identify the key themes people are searching. Here is what popped out as the top 25 most searched for keyword phrases related to "business collaboration": 

Business Collaboration

	A	B	C	D
1	Keywords	Advertiser Competition	Local Search Volume: December	Global Monthly Search Volume
2	technology	1	13600000	16600000
3	open source	1	1500000	4090000
4	logistics	1	2240000	3350000
5	innovation	1	1220000	2240000
6	supply chain	1	1220000	1500000
7	document management	1	368000	1220000
8	procurement	1	823000	1000000
9	workflow	1	450000	823000
10	team building	1	368000	823000
11	challenges	0.93	823000	823000
12	teamwork	1	301000	673000
13	content management	1	450000	673000
14	conferencing	1	550000	673000
15	collaboration	1	550000	673000
16	best practices	1	550000	550000
17	supply chain management	1	301000	450000
18	project management software	1	368000	450000
19	collaborative	0.93	368000	450000
20	business process	1	301000	450000
21	portals	1	201000	368000
22	knowledge management	1	201000	368000
23	value chain	0.93	60500	201000
24	web conferencing	1	90500	135000
25	groupware	1	90500	135000
26	collaborate	0.86	74000	110000
27	wikis	0.93	40500	74000
28	enterprise content management	1	33100	40500
29	collaboration software	1	33100	33100
30	sharepoint wiki	0.8	12100	27100

The highest ranking areas (Blue) show key areas where people are looking for better collaboration technologies with the keyword "Technology" right at the top. Everyone is looking for the "technology silver bullet".  Right after "technology" are "open source", "SW development", "logistics",  and "innovation".

Next in the rankings we find the tools, methods and practices people believe will help to achieve better collaboration. Bundling closely related searches and ranking by search volume the key pain points are as follows.

1) Work Flow and Business process

2) Document and Content Management,

3) Team work and team building,

4) Conferencing

5) Collaboration

6) Knowledge Management

7) Portals, Wiki’s

8) Groupware

The thing that immediately jumps out of this data for me is it looks like businesses are struggling with managing information and workflow in team contexts and are searching for solutions specific to team environments. I believe much of this is a result of a ramp up in use of highly distributed teams and the deep cuts in staff size.

In the past a lot of information would get processed and problems solved by having face to face interactions in a common office location where communication fidelity was high. Even more important than face-to-face planned meetings it was the random "chance" meetings that are now fully lost and had something to do with a big part of business productivity. These chance meetings often were the most important meetings that allowed work teams and individuals to address issues before they even emerged as problems. Now we have globally distributed teams spanning continents and cultures and all that sorting through info that was done in these face to face encounters has been lost. It's clear businesses are struggling with teaming and process topics in the workplace. They are looking hard for technology to solve these productivity problems for them in the context of the new "globally distributed workplace".

Is the only solution a return to the days of large office buildings full of hundreds or thousands of centrally located workers? I don't think so. I think globally distributed and "virtual" workforces can work. But we need some new types of collaboration solutions for the enterprise worker and also some new "best practices" in using the collaboration technologies we already have. I'm convinced the teaming benefits of regular chance encounters, and the organic productivity those encounters delivered, can be recaptured.

In this series on Contextual Collaboration I started by talking about how "context" is critical for businesses and individuals in managing the information overload problem. In this post I looked at the specific areas in which businesses are suffering from a lack of collaboration productivity. The next step is to start looking at specific approaches to implementing collaboration using context as the key tool for delivering truly productive collaboration with small and/distributed teams?

What's your take on this topic? Do the collaboration technologies you have at your fingertips today actually address the problems you face? Or do they perhaps even make them worse? How do you think we can "think differently" about how we design, deploy, use and support collaboration technologies so we can "resolve" this age old problem? Is "context" the key" Will it turn loosely bound, distributed teams into powerhouses of productivity?

Add your comments and continue this discussion.