Wave on Business

In todays world, organizations are becoming more and more dependent on collaboration with external partners.
Organizations are now by nature globally minded, and are actively working across the globe with knowledge workers in terms of outsourcing or simply collaborating with experts that are not available in-house or in the local region of the company.

The need for participation in many processes is rising and the tools used to facilitate participation need to fit the purpose well, if collaboration must be successful.
The first step is for the organization to actually realize the need to support collaboration and perceive it as being a good idea. When the organization has accepted that it needs to collaborate, it will act more dynamically and much faster than before, because of the power of tapping the resources of outside people and teams.

Finding the right tool for the collaborative process is the next crucial step. If the organization fails to adapt the tools because the tools don’t fit the purpose, the collaborative process will become a source of frustration and thus collaboration will be ruled out as a means of getting things done.

We believe Wave fits the task of collaborating with both internal and external collaborators at the same time very nicely.
But what are the other options for collaboration with todays technology and how well do they fit the purpose?

Lets take a look at a specific scenario where a team needs to agree on a document for a sales presentation and walk through the process of applying different means of communication.

Emails. Can be sent to all participants. They can then reply to the sender, some of the participants or all of them, with their comments. If many people are involved it will be a complex task to make sure that they only comment on the newest version.Long email threads are also hard to follow – especially if you are not included in the communication from the beginning.

If the team decides to use a document attached to the email it will just become more difficult to manage. Moreover, if change tracking is used within the Word document this adds another layer of versioning complexity and eventually the email participants will give up on keeping track of changes.

Newsgroups or forums can also be used. By using newsgroups is it possible to have threaded conversation, and people can comment on each others additions or corrections to the presenation. It will still be difficult find the most current version, and see who had made which correction. Forums are “just” webenabled newgroups, they might have some extra features but the concept is still the same.

Physical meetings are a great place to work together on a project and for agreeing on a subject.
The social aspect of meeting physically really enhances the collaborative effort and eliminates many pitfalls in the communication.
It will be difficult for the team to work on the document at the same time, and it is not possible to work on creating a large document collectively.
Meeting minutes are important for capturing the thoughts and the details of the meeting process, but they are often not sent right after the meeting is over, so people don’t know which tasks they have been assigned before the minutes arrive some time after the meeting.
Also, getting people to actually meet for a physical meeting can be very hard – especially in large organizations.

Online meetings are like physical meetings. You just don’t have the socializing and transport. Instead you might have sound problems, with people having bad microphones. You still cannot write on the same document. Using Wikis people can collaborate on creating a document. In a multiorganizational environment, a hosted or external facing wiki should be used. The problem is when you are collaborating in different pages, you need to subscribe to the changes via RSS, this might be dificult for non savy ID users. And how do you ensure that the team only see the one page they are working on.

Teleconferences can be used, but people won’t have the ability to see the document. Instant messaging or IRC will not work. The team will just creating a lot of seperate comments, which should be integrated into the document. If they have a busy chat it could be difficult to see what they are commenting on.

Wave as the ideal tool for collaboration

Why is Wave better suited for this purpose then?

One person starts the discussion and adds the participants he/she wants to add. Participants can then edit the document at the same time and add and change content – they can also make comments to whole paragraphs or just sub paragraphs with inline replies. It is possible to have discussions about certain passages of the document, which could then be concluded with a change in the original document. Afterward the discussions are easily removed, but during the creation of the document, every participant can see the relevant comments right next to the information the comments belong to.

New Waves can be spun off if needed, thus creating copies of some content in a Wave elsewhere to work on separately. It is also possible to have the private conversations, which will allow users to discuss isolated areas without involving all the participants. So two technicians could discuss some technical matters without involving the sales people participating as well, this could reduce the noise ration in the communication.

When a document is finished in Wave it could be exported to another format such as PDF using the extension features of Wave – this creates a snapshot of the document for external use, but the information used to create the document stays in Wave along with the comments and versioning information.

This blog entry was written using Google Wave with two authors situated in different parts of the country, collaborating on the task of writing, spell checking and commenting about the contents. This could have been done in this blog (WordpPress) directly, but we would then switch between working on the contents, saving drafts and revising these in turns.

Instead we chose the Wave way where we could simultaneously edit the content, comment on it and – at the end – simply copy the contents to the blog for layout and publishing.

Update:

Others are looking at similar use cases:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/09/google-wave-collaborative-journalism.html