Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Have you checked this out? Document Collaboration: http://nextpage.com/products/collaboration/index.htm

Give it a try and tell us what you think.

Thanks Santy. NextPage addresses one part of a much broader collaboration process. I want to discuss that “shared document editing” task within a bigger picture that incorporates meetings, project schedules, issue tracking, goal setting, allocation of responsibilities etc.

Matt.

Shanty,

"Collaboration", "data sharing" and other like-minded buzzwords are all the rage in enterprise data management circles in government right now. The real question, however, should be the "why" and "when", not the "how" (which thousands of software vendors assure us constantly they have the be-all, end-all solution for). 
Within DHS alone there are mandates stating (in a nutshell) "thall shall share data" amongst other govermnent entities. I'm sure many readers have heard the same from corporate leaders as well. The real trick will be defining what it is you are trying to accomplish (outcomes), who else (in either government or industry) is trying to do the same thing, and are your business processes, lexicons and terminologies similar enough that you will understand what it is you are trying to collaborate on?

-David

It’s unfortunate that David’s comment is virtually unreadable—if you paste it into a text editor you can see that he makes a great point. Without a clear idea of the goal of collaboration, the imposition of some “collaboration” software is unlikely to achieve much that’s of value.

Even when you do have a clear goal, however, it seems to me that you’d be very unlikely to find any software that fully supported the collaboration process. You find software for pieces of the process, but nothing that brings a unifying metaphor to the whole.

—Matt.

*wiki-gnome on duty!*

David penned thusly:

””Collaboration”, “data sharing” and other like-minded buzzwords are all the rage in enterprise data management circles in government right now. The real question, however, should be the “why” and “when”, not the “how” (which thousands of software vendors assure us constantly they have the be-all, end-all solution for).
Within DHS alone there are mandates stating (in a nutshell) “thall shall share data” amongst other govermnent entities. I’m sure many readers have heard the same from corporate leaders as well. The real trick will be defining what it is you are trying to accomplish (outcomes), who else (in either government or industry) is trying to do the same thing, and are your business processes, lexicons and terminologies similar enough that you will understand what it is you are trying to collaborate on?”

For myself: an absolutely stellar workshop on problem solving grouped together folk from different teams who were at equivalent levels on the org chart; most of the groups that didn’t get carried away with bitching about their superiors / subordinates aced the problems. It was truly remarkable. Like minded? Similarly pent up creativity? Hard to say … but anybody who’s experienced symbiotic collaboration wants more.

I have the basics of an article written on this. It is phrased as a proposition about what “Collaboration 2.0” should mean and some open questions about how IA/UX applies within that context. Would the editorial team like to look at this?

—Matt.