The Spectrum of Persistence

A few weeks ago we met with Jonathan Spira, of Basex Research, and we were talking about the spectrum of persistence in collaboration solutions.

On one side of the spectrum, information is completely ephemeral. This usually represents itself in the form of voice or IM conversations. These conversations sometimes offer business value, but other times they are used to figure out where to go to lunch today. In either case, once the conversation ends, the information is usually not useful or retrievable anymore.

Moving towards the center of the spetrum, information becomes more persistent, but not yet static. This is where you might find email. Emails are frequently filed away in your email client and/or email server. However, the information is not completely useful as it is often difficult to re-use this information and/or search through it. Additionally, it is up to the end user to filter and/or classify the information as it comes in, and therefore it is likely that the emails will simply be lost in folders in their email systems and will never be seen again.

Then, even more towards the persistent end is Persistent Group Messaging. PGM represents real-time, highly dynamic conversations and therefore may be considered ephemeral, or temporary. However, the key word is "persistent", which represents not just the storage and searchability of the data, but also the persistence of the conversations themselves. Just as workflows don’t end at the end of the day, conversations shouldn’t end either. Therefore, when I log in to my application tomorrow I would like to see the same conversations that I see when I logged out today. And, whenever I want to search for something that was said last week or last month, it should be easy to go to the topic (represented by a chat room) and search through the archives. For example, this is useful when maintaining consistency in customer communication.

From there, information becomes more persistent, and even static. People communicate through IM, Email, and Chat, and ultimately come to conclusions. These conclusions must be documented in some form. Sure, they can be stored in the place where the conversation happened. However, in some cases it is useful to quickly see the decisions. In this case it may be useful to log the conclusions into a Wiki or Blog, so that people can see the current state of the team’s thinking. However, if you need to re-think a decision, it can be useful to go back and view the conversation that led to the conclusion in order to understand the team’s thinking when the decision was made.

Finally, some information will ultimately need to end up in some form of published document. The information used to create the document may come directly from one of the conversations (IM, Email, Chat), or it may come from Wiki and/or Blog entries. Either way, it may take some time to get to the final doc. This is where document repositories and file sharing solutions become useful.

Last week we spoke to Mike Persaud from DrKW who shares this vision. For him, collaboration tools fit within a suite. All components of the suite are equally as valuable, and serve a specific purpose. But in the end, it is the power of search that ties it all together. Having the ability to search across all artifacts regardless of where they fall on the spectrum will truly open up information in an organization and allow it to be universally usable not just by the creator, but by others as well.

Black Cabs or Yellow Taxis

What a couple of weeks. 2 weeks week ago Parlano held its Customer Forum in New York and last week it was in London. While New York and London are similar in so many ways – both major metropolitan cities, both are as international as it gets – they are also very different. New York of course has its tall buildings and London has its buildings that are older than New York itself. New York seems to favor business casual dress while London (at least in the City of London) likes it’s pin-striped suits. London of course has its distinctive black cabs, which I love, and New York has its Yellow Taxis.

The similarities and differences of Parlano’s customer forums parallel those of the cities. Both Forums had 30 or so customers from various large financial institutions. For anyone who thinks Parlano isn’t the dominant PGM company in financial services, all you have to do is compare its customer list to any top list in banking and it will be obvious. Being in the room with these customers and listening to their feedback about how they currently use PGM and how they want to use it is powerful. I can’t wait to show the recordings to the product team.

Similarities also included large implementations which are driven by the business side of the banks. There were people representing Equities trading, FX, Derivatives, you name it. Also similar is the way adoption grows from the specific business groups. The first priority is to get it on the sales, traders, and researchers desks. From there it is the people supporting those core business groups. This includes IT, legal, HR. Ultimately the IT teams use it to manage aspects of their business other than simply supporting the business people, such as server uptime, implementation projects, etc. Soon they start asking us about very large implementations; in some cases site licenses.

Differences were seen in the effects of compliance on their rollouts. Clearly the EMEA markets, aside from Switzerland, are not yet as affected by compliance regulations as their American counterparts. But they know this is coming, and therefore they can learn a lot from the American experiences. Yet in many cases the European groups can accomplish things faster due to less stringent compliance regulations.

What was powerful is the similarity in the customer’s understanding of the power of federation. All large sell-side banks have multiple tiers of customers. The top tier will of course have a direct account team, with some type of dedicated access to their information through a direct sales person, researcher, etc. However tiers 2 and 3 may have less human interactions, such as access to account information via portals, etc. All organizations understand the power of being able to access these customer groups through federated IM, and more importantly, federated Group Messaging. They understand this through sharing information and ideas with other customers, and seeing how powerful this concept has been for our largest customer, who drives 10′s of millions of dollars annually through having direct access to a few thousand of their customers via chat. According to another customer who uses Persistent Group Messaging to communicate to customers today, at some point their customers ask their salespeople to stop calling and to chat them instead.

Whether the attendees were representing organizations from Russia, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, or the US, the result is the same: everyone has seen their businesses transformed by the increased visibility and more efficient collaboration offered through Persistent Group Messaging.

Going Mobile

While I was talking with some customers this week about our pending mobile client release, I was reminded of the importance of allowing people to go mobile with their communications solutions.

For some customers, this is as simple as an IT engineer having access to teams of people in the event of a system outage or planned implementation. For anyone in this role, think of the situations when you have been away from your teams during a major implementation, and how much you craved additional information about what was going on. Furthermore, think about how annoying it was to receive constant emails with large cc-lists, most of them containing information that was not relevant to your implementation.

For others, the situation is similar but possibly involves higher risk. For example, think of a deal team working on a large investment banking deal. In this case, people are usually all over the place. Some are on-site doing due-diligence. Others are in the home office crunching numbers, while still others are in flight off to visit customers. In either case, the entire team will demand constant connectivity with the team, on a secure basis. But, as in the IT example, the team will not want to be overwhelmed by a constant flow of large cc-list emails containing information that is not pertinent to them.

The theme is simple. Just as when people are sitting at their desks, they need to be constantly connected. However, email isn’t enough. Neither is IM. As with traditional communications, people will be overwhelmed by too much information, and they will need to do something to establish the "signal from the noise". This is exactly what a good Persistent Group Messaging solution will do: organize conversations by topics and notify you through filters and alerts about content that is relevant to you.

Personally, I can’t wait to have mobile PGM. We have been running our business on PGM, or chat, for years. But while on the road I have to resort to email (I have a mobile IM client but that is not enough), which drives my team crazy because of increased email flow. Soon enough I will actually be able to be productive again, and so will my team.