Freeform Collaboration Comes to Corporate Systems a Decade Late
Office collaboration software.
It sounds so simple. But the kind of freeform collaboration I assumed would spring up to make the best use of the first Macs and PCs has been elusive.
Corporate networks allowed the sharing of e-mails and files, but software that let groups fiddle with how they shared information always seemed to get held back by the software installed by the IT shop.
Lotus Notes was supposed to be the ultimate interaction and collaboration tool - perfect for project management and open communication. And if you had a Lotus Notes developer on staff, I’m sure that was partly true.
I have hope, though. When I see IBM developing an IBM Mashup Starter Kit for corporate use in 2008, I think maybe corporate teams may finally be able to play the way their startup cousins have been doing since the Web 2.0 era began.
It’s a decade later than I thought that sort of do-it-yourself data daisy-chaining would be common in offices, but it’s nice to see, nonetheless.
Companies got so focused on controlling information infrastructures that they forgot to leave room for innovation. IT managers told us that the early days of pushing spreadsheets and simple databases to their limits would be replaced by smart corporate systems that would standardize IT development and drive innovations company-wide.
That may have worked for office suites, contact management software and intranet publishing tools, but what many teams needed was a simple way to play with information at the project level in ways that couldn’t be anticipated by IT and spat out as a company-wide collaboration tool the following year.
Allowing mashups of corporate and external information will require more technical know-how at the project level. It will call for less command and control rigidity by the network folks. And there are many instances where it will be a freeform waste of time and effort.
But it could also finally put innovative tools in the hands of the project teams, where they should have been all along.
Maybe the day will come when you don’t have to jump off the corporate LAN to run the kind of programs you need to do your job.
That’s what I thought the 1990s would look like. Instead, we watched as Microsoft Office went from functional to bloated.
Viva la Web 2.0 revolution. Information sharing and communication takes another step out of the Control Age and into the Just Do It Age.
Tags: innovation, teams, mashups, web2.0, office, projects, collaboration, tools, communications, business
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Communication Skills, New Media, Social Media, Work
0 opinions for Freeform Collaboration Comes to Corporate Systems a Decade Late
No one has left a comment yet. You know what this means, right? You could be first!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: