System iNetwork

July 24, 2007

Let's Get Our Heads Together on "Collaboration"

The September issue of System iNEWS will include a product roundup on workflow applications for the System i. I won't steal the thunder of that article by revealing here what products are included, but compiling it made me think about the closely associated concept of collaboration and what it means. It's my belief that "collaboration" has become an overused term when applied to software. Maybe it's time we try to rescue ourselves from some confusion.

Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org ) defines collaboration as consisting of three primary venues: conversational (e.g., telephone, IM, e-mail), largely for purposes of discovery; transactional (e.g., commerce), exchanges that alter the participants' relationship; and collaborational interactions (e.g., document management), which alter a "collaboration entity," which could be development of an idea or creation of a design. (While I realize it's become fashionable to bash Wikipedia lately, most notoriously because of perceptions of bias in some politically related definitions on the part of some political purists, and I myself find a bit of fault with defining collaboration with that very term tacked on to other words, let's pass over those objections for now.) These three definitions cover a lot of ground but I think represent a majority consensus about general meanings of the word.

Similarly, there are many solutions that claim to be "collaborative" software in the System i market, and they range from Notes/Domino and Sametime, through eCommerce apps, to ERP and medical apps (for example) that provide collaborative features, to application development tools that cater to teams of programmers, and finally to imaging and content-management applications that let multiple users put their fingers in any collective pie, so to speak.

The problem is, as I explained to a colleague, if I write one paragraph in an MS Word document, send it to you, and you alter it, then we've "collaborated." But that doesn't make Word a collaboration application, does it? Not really. And although applications like e-mail, IM, and Sametime are important tools, they've become such generic forms of communication for all kinds of functions. So I wonder if it's completely fair anymore to call them collaborative, particularly when the communication may not be to any specific end at all.

I'm inclined to think collaborative really should only be used to refer to the third case in the Wikipedia definition, that of facilitating joint development of an idea or project. Or I suppose what you could call "projectware," and let the rest remain in a more general groupware category. That way, "collaborative applications" could be generally divided into two much more intelligible groups, namely collaborative development tools that let a programming team collectively build an application, and collaborative content tools that let end users build documents, presentations, and other concept-based entities. (Of course, finding a way to enforce this definition on an industry that loves to apply the latest buzz words to the widest possible assortment of features and products would be another story.) Both product types would need to include such necessary features as versioning, tracking who changed what, and failsafes against two people modifying the same part at the same time but only one of those changes being recorded, for example.

Or am I way out on a limb here? Do you think the concept of collaboration could use a bit of redefinition? Do we need to separate applications that enable mere communication with each other from software that helps us build something specific?

Posted by at July 24, 2007 1:54 PM