Social tools are not collaboration tools

With proliferation of social web, one big paradox has finally become apparent: social tools are not collaboration tools.

During my Master’s Degree in ‘Business Information Systems’ in 2003 at Royal Holloway College – University of London, we studied the topic of communication and covered various aspects of good and bad communication practices.

My end of year dissertation was entitled ‘Managing Virtual Teams in Entirely Virtual Environments‘ and I focused on trying to answer the question of how to manage people one has never met before by using interactive, web-based tools.

6 years on and various people are writing and talking about these technologies, now calling them ‘Enterprise 2.0′ and trying to push them onto corporations with little or no luck.

One of the main reasons why there is little or no luck in proliferation of social tools in corporate environment is because social tools are not collaboration tools.

Corporations require collaboration tools which help employees do their jobs faster, better and with less hassle, while, if at all possible narrowing down the amount of information which is generated, as more information usually means more clutter and eventual information overload.

Aspects of social tools

Social tools by and large help users generate content of various types.

Blogs, Twitter, Wikis and various other tools are there to enable quick and easy, but usually not very structured content.

Social tools also encourage ad-hoc content replication and sharing.

It’s a common place for a user to send their friend a link through FaceBook (usually to something not very productive or useful) and for people to talk about every day things through Blogs and Twitter.

Wikis are potentially great tools for ‘dumping’ information onto, but have proven not to be very social at all and any meaningful collaboration through a Wiki is virtually impossible.

The greatest aspect of Wikis, their ‘freedom to edit anything and everything’, proves to be their biggest enemy, as users to create totally messy, unstructured information resource which have little or no usability, leading to eventual certain death of any Wiki based resource.

This may well be one of the reasons why the whole of Wikipedia is basically edited by a group of not more than a 1000 regular, heavy-weight contributors, hence not representing ‘knowledge of the world’, but an extreme example of 80/20 principle in action.

Wikipedia is also maintained as a very well structured resource, making it essentially into a ‘CMS where every page can be edited’.

Aspects of collaboration tools

Social tools work very well in context where a number of people who know each other very well are loosely collaborating together on simple, well-known, social and unimportant matters.

Real life business environments are usually about ad-hok ‘teams’ (in reality these are groups, which is considerably different) of ‘experts’ who have never seen each other.

They usually have to immediately ‘hit the ground running’ working on complex systems which are hard to develop even through regular face to face collaboration.

If these projects are to be achieved, specific communication protocols and structured tools are required.

As a basic example think about doing simple accounts for a 5 man company.

Even this seemingly trivial task will not easily be done over a Wiki, Blog or anything ’social’.

It will, however, be done quite nicely over a structured accounting tool, designed for collaboration on the given topic, which in this case is the company accounts.

A collaboration leads a user towards some form of closure and task completion, sets a framework of operation and aims at stopping unnecessary content production in order to move users onto the next stages of the project or business development.

This is the reason why we have started seeing proliferation of tools such as BaseCamp and Xero and those tools being relatively liked by their respective users.

People do not socialise at work

How many times have you come across random people in an office saying to each other ‘let’s socialise’?

Well, this is what ’social tools’ are asking of people to do and it is only natural that ‘let’s not socialise’ approach is only amplified on-line, where users have to battle other various obstacles in achieving their tasks.

Corporate environments are usually also politically charged, making digital collaboration best if the focus is purely on the task.

People who do not know each other have not gone through the team building processes of forming, norming, storming and performing.

They have usually jumped straight into the ‘performing’ part and therefore only task oriented communication leads towards successful task closure, which in turn leads towards satisfaction and progress of the overall projects and business.

Any socialisation at work is usually minimal, accidental and there to while away the time between employees, or caused just out of sheer politeness within the given culture.

What’s the real future?

It is becoming clearer every day that tools such as FaceBook are used by most people as their ‘personal spaces’, where people do not even want to ’socialise’ with their work colleagues unless they get on well as friends at work – which are rare circumstances in most companies, especially the big ones.

Structured, collaborative tools which are designed to solve particular business purpose will see a big take up and are already arguably seeing it.

Various collaborative development tools such as Google Code and to even greater levels Assembla are a good example.

It will need to be possible to integrate these tools to work alongside other structured, collaborative business tools which will be solving another specific business problem.

Semantic web and modular approach will play crucial parts in this future along with the well structured system architectures which will enable easy data portability and reformatting.

Most business tools suffer from incredible usability issues, which is mostly caused by the fact that most businesses either completely disregard usability or try and retro fit it into their solutions at the very end of systems development processes (as opposed to at the very beginning and throughout the development processes).

With better usability engineering, utilisation of better, common standards and realisation that collaborative does not necessarily equal social, the world of digital business will successfully plunge into proper future where most employees will collaborate and not need to be co-located.

For now, we have ‘Enterprise 2.0′.

Written by Jason Grant, BSc, MSc on 22nd April 2009

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