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Collaborating with technology

Although consumerization makes top-down authoritarian controls less effective, it does not remove the need for some means of ensuring appropriate behavior. But peer group pressure is likely to be more effective in regulating behavior than any memo describing new rules, policies, or goals.

Peer groups are not part of the formal organizations that issue rules. They are part of the informal social networks that can be even more important than formal structures for getting work done. Networks mean collaboration, and there are plenty of tools available to help people be more effective in working together. Collaboration takes more than technology, however.

Some IT organizations have tried to foster lateral collaboration by a top-down distribution of tools. A number of companies have spent a great deal of money on tools, but then trained their employees only on the mechanics of their operation, not the appropriateness of their usage. As a consequence, few firms got full value from their investment. This is a familiar pattern with collaborative technologies. People who are in networks can use such tools to work better, but tools cannot make people create or join networks.

At the same time that corporations are struggling with how to teach collaborative skills to globally dispersed employees, many of these same employees are learning those skills on their own, outside the office.

Massively multiplayer online role playing games such as Dark Age of Camelot have hundreds of thousands of subscribers who play in teams or tribes. The World of Warcraft has just announced that it has topped 2 million users. Computer gaming has become such a big business that in 2004 sales of computer games exceeded $10 billion, overtaking the box office receipts of first-run movies.

These are games that require groups of individuals, frequently from different continents, to work together to achieve a goal — not because someone ordered them to do it, but because they want to do it. This technology is a long way from being ready for business use, but it is training a new generation in an unprecedented kind of collaboration. Will the technology be there when they enter the business world?

What are they saying about you?

Even people who are already in the business world do plenty of communicating outside the office. Employees and customers are connected through the Web in a way that wasn’t true even a few years ago. What this means for companies is that the security of obscurity is gone. The ready availability of free discussion Web sites and blogs makes it possible for every company to be the topic of global discussion. And online discussion of a complaint against a company will live on long after the complaint has been satisfactorily addressed.

To see how widely a company is being discussed, go to Google and search on “‘company name’ blog.” Most organizations will find thousands of hits.

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