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.
