Virtual Proximity
One of the topics that I have found increasingly interesting is what will happen to all of the different types of collaboration products on the market? And what are they all used for?
Today, there exists a wealth of communication and collaboration solutions. Individual users can use email, blogs, wikis IM, chat, newsgroups, etc., etc. Additionally, there are "team sites", such as portals that offer various ways to exchange information between teams. Then there are products like Groove (or what Groove used to be before being acquired by Microsoft). And don’t forget live meetings, conferencing, white boarding, and other types of multi-media collaboration.
With all of these products, you would think that people would be really efficient at communicating. Yet, according to our customers it is still very difficult to create the concept of "virtual proximity" amongst groups of teams that are not able to physically sit next to each other all day long. Why is that? Is it possible that this results from tools that are a) too difficult to use and b) not dynamic enough to make them worth using?
Consider a portal. Companies spent millions of dollars implementing portals in the late 90′s and early 2000′s. These intranets were meant to be the ultimate place for people to store information, keep up to date on company info, etc. Yet in many cases these portals are either overpopulated with information or are too un-interesting and static for people to continue to use.
If you classify portals as "static", then at the other end of the spectrum would be something dynamic or instant, like IM. As most people who use IM know, it is a very powerful way to communicate given its integrated with presence. However, IM in many cases can be too dynamic, or even too real-time. Anybody who has over 50 active people on their contact list knows what I am talking about. Users in this case will quickly become overwhelmed by too many conversation windows on their desktop. In addition to becoming overwhelmed, users will quickly realize that they are not able to leverage the power of teams of people working together since IM conversations are usually 1-to-1.
Is there something in between? What about the concept of organizing teams of people into groups that are based on the workflows of their companies? And then, what about allowing those teams to communicate either in real-time or asynchronously, depending on the need? If you wrap that together with persistent conversations and documents, you have Persistent Group Messaging (PGM).
Based on watching Parlano’s customers and their use of MindAlign, PGM is a natural way to organize teams. This concept is easy to understand, easy to use, and dynamic enough to keep people’s attention. Plus, it is an extremely effective way to communicate. But, once people are utilizing a group-based communication tool, ultimately these teams will need more. For example, a team may need to escalate their conversation from a text-based conversation into one that is higher fidelity. Or maybe they would like to jointly edit a document that was posted into the chat room. This is where the concept of unified communications comes in.
In short, unified communications is about aggregating all useful collaborations into a solution that is pervasive and extremely usable. A Persistent Group Messaging solution is the perfect place to do this. Once teams of people are organized around persistent, topic-based communications, this medium quickly becomes the launch point for all other modes of communication. Users can launch live meetings, video conferences, and document editing sessions. Or, when they reach a conclusion about a topic they can document the conclusion in the group’s wiki. Ultimately, the PGM solution is the way to organize these teams of people. The result may be that we finally realize the concept of "virtual proximity" that so many desire.
