Joe Lamantia.com

IBM recently announced the next ver­sion of Lotus Notes will sup­port Open­Doc­u­ment For­mat as a native file for­mat (as reported in IBM Bets Big On Open Source In Next Release Of Lotus Notes). This shift to an open file for­mat is — as the major­ity of the cov­er­age of IBM’s announce­ment cor­rectly inter­prets it to be — a direct chal­lenge to the dom­i­nance of the Office suite of pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, a class of prod­ucts in which Microsoft has long relied on pro­pri­etary file for­mats as a cor­ner­stone of it’s mar­ket con­trol strat­egy. Mak­ing the chal­lenge explicit, the next ver­sion of Lotus Notes will also include “…built-in word pro­cess­ing, spread­sheet, and pre­sen­ta­tion graph­ics soft­ware”.
Since Microsoft relies on the inte­gra­tion of Share­Point and the Office suite as a pil­lar of it’s col­lab­o­ra­tion plans (in Gates out­lines Share­Point strat­egy, ham­mers IBM, John Fontana of Net­work World quotes Bill Gates as say­ing, “The key point is that Share­Point is becom­ing the key plat­form for col­lab­o­ra­tion of all types… When peo­ple look back on what we are doing with Office [2007] here, the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary ele­ment will be what we are doing with Share­Point.”), IBM’s shift to Open­Doc­u­ment For­mat is also a strate­gic move in the larger cat­e­gory of enter­prise col­lab­o­ra­tion, itself a sub­set of the emerg­ing com­pre­hen­sive infor­ma­tion work­ing envi­ron­ments For­rester Research calls the infor­ma­tion work­place.
An End to Impe­ri­al­ism
I’ve sug­gested already that the con­cep­tual con­struct labeled ‘col­lab­o­ra­tion’ is at heart another instance of enter­prise soft­ware and solu­tion ven­dor mar­ket­ing rhetoric designed to mask real­ity — it’s sim­ply not pos­si­ble to change estab­lished cul­tural, orga­ni­za­tional, per­cep­tual, or philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ings of what work is and how it should be done with an approach cen­tered on tech­nol­ogy — in a quasi-utopian haze.
IBM’s adop­tion of Open­Doc­u­ment doesn’t change this pic­ture of the col­lab­o­ra­tion land­scape. Instead, it indi­cates a larger shift; dawn­ing recog­ni­tion and acknowl­edg­ment that mono­cul­tures are no longer viable, or valid, or broadly accept­able in the enter­prise arena.
The cre­ation and preser­va­tion of mono­cul­tures (recently in the news asso­ci­ated with Microsoft thanks to Dan Greer and oth­ers’ pre­science) is one of the salient char­ac­ter­is­tics of the old approach to enter­prise soft­ware solu­tions. It is espe­cially vis­i­ble in those enter­prise solu­tions whose intended role within a port­fo­lio of prod­uct and ser­vice offer­ings is to serve as a con­sis­tent rev­enue source, strate­gic bul­wark against com­pe­ti­tion, and cost shift­ing mech­a­nism whereby clients paid for the devel­op­ment of new prod­ucts and ser­vices, often under the guise of main­te­nance, patches, upgrades, etc.
Broadly, the old approach to enter­prise solu­tions was an impe­r­ial model, with aspects of colo­nial­ism, that pur­sued a mil­i­tary style take and hold growth pat­tern.
Wikipedia offers the fol­low­ing intro­duc­tion to impe­ri­al­ism:
“Impe­ri­al­ism is a pol­icy of extend­ing con­trol or author­ity over for­eign enti­ties as a means of acqui­si­tion and/or main­te­nance of empires. This is either through direct ter­ri­to­r­ial con­quest or set­tle­ment, or through indi­rect meth­ods of exert­ing con­trol on the pol­i­tics and/or econ­omy of other coun­tries. The term is often used to describe the pol­icy of a country’s dom­i­nance over dis­tant lands, regard­less of whether the coun­try con­sid­ers itself part of the empire.“
In the realm of soft­ware impe­ri­al­ism, the cus­tomer orga­ni­za­tion buy­ing and installing an enter­prise soft­ware pack­age was seen as a form of ter­ri­tory to be occu­pied or con­trolled by one or more hos­tile, rival­rous soft­ware and ser­vices ven­dors seek­ing to extract con­tin­u­ing rev­enues from their occu­pied pos­ses­sions; rev­enues in the form of main­te­nance, sup­port, cus­tomiza­tion, admin­is­tra­tion, or other sorts of solu­tion upkeep and exten­sion expenses.
Empires exerted con­trol for­mally through a vari­ety of polit­i­cal and eco­nomic mech­a­nisms, and infor­mally through influ­ence over polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and cul­tural spheres. Wikipedia’s entry for “empire” offers some instruc­tive par­al­lels to the enter­prise solu­tion model:
“First, in an empire there must be a Core and a Periph­ery. The empire’s struc­ture relates the core élite to the periph­eral élite in a mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial fash­ion. Such as rela­tion­ship can be estab­lished through any num­ber of means, be they aggres­sive, coer­cise, or con­sen­sual. And while there is a ver­ti­cal rela­tion­ship between the core and periph­ery, there is a lack of sub­stan­tive rela­tions between periph­ery and periph­ery. This rela­tion­ship he describes as an incom­plete wheel: there are hubs and spokes, but no rim.“
The rela­tion­ship of inter­con­nected elites is easy to see in the pat­tern of incented sales and buy­ing deci­sions; “Need tick­ets to that exclu­sive event? No prob­lem, we’ll get them for you right away…“
But it’s the idea of dis­con­nected hubs and spokes that is key to under­stand­ing the cor­re­spon­dence between the old enter­prise model and impe­ri­al­ism. How often do indi­vid­ual client solu­tions (per­haps for dif­fer­ent depart­ments or busi­ness units) inter­act with each other? How often do instances of the same solu­tion for dif­fer­ent clients allow effec­tive inter­ac­tion between dif­fer­ent clients of the same ven­dor? How often do dif­fer­ent prod­ucts nom­i­nally part of ‘inte­grated’ solu­tion sets that were in actu­al­ity assem­bled by aggre­gat­ing the offer­ings of acquired com­pa­nies suc­cess­fully inter­act?
Again, with­out over­load­ing the anal­ogy, there are clear par­al­lels between the degrees of empire and the life­cy­cle of enter­prise solu­tions and ven­dors.
“Motyl also posits vary­ing degrees of empire: For­mal, Infor­mal, and Hege­monic. In a for­mal impe­r­ial rela­tion­ship, the core can appoint and dis­miss periph­eral elites, obvi­ate any exter­nal agenda or poli­cies, and directly con­trol the inter­nal agenda and poli­cies.“
As a con­sul­tant, I’ve seen aggres­sive soft­ware and ser­vices ven­dors directly drive busi­ness direc­tion, strat­egy, invest­ment, and process change deci­sions all too often. Orga­ni­za­tions lack­ing vision, effec­tive lead­er­ship, or those enter­ing com­pla­cency or suf­fer­ing decline look to ven­dors for lead­er­ship by proxy, allow­ing or ask­ing ven­dors to apply their own inap­pro­pri­ate frames of ref­er­ence and per­spec­tives to under­stand and choose courses of action in sit­u­a­tions out­side the vendor’s proper domain.
“In an infor­mal impe­r­ial rela­tion­ship, the core has influ­ence but not con­trol over appoint­ing and dis­miss­ing periph­eral elites, direct con­trol over the exter­nal agenda and poli­cies, and influ­ence over the inter­nal agenda and poli­cies.“
This infor­mal rela­tion­ship is the posi­tion of the entrenched ven­dor that pro­vides ‘per­spec­tive’ on many sit­u­a­tions out­side their proper domain. Ven­dors seek­ing to increase their ter­ri­tory within client orga­ni­za­tions often pur­sue growth via this method. Alter­na­tively, ven­dors will con­trol the envi­ron­ment in which cus­tomers and other ser­vice providers make deci­sions, as in the “open API” approach wherein the enter­prise exposes a por­tion of it’s archi­tec­ture, code base, or other plat­form, but main­tains exclu­sive con­trol over the API with­out any bind­ing com­mit­ments.
Wikipedia con­tin­ues:
“Finally, in a hege­monic rela­tion­ship, the core has no con­trol over appoint­ing or dis­miss­ing periph­eral elites, con­trol over the exter­nal agenda, influ­ence over exter­nal poli­cies, and no con­trol over the inter­nal agenda or poli­cies.“
This is the stage that the exist­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tions seem to be enter­ing, as wit­nessed by IBM’s announce­ment, and Microsoft’s fail­ure to date to advance the OpenXML stan­dard to full legit­i­macy.
The Pass­ing of Imperium
In essence, the old enter­prise approach exem­pli­fied the closed sys­tem, one that was sus­tained by the author­ity and cred­i­bil­ity of the orig­i­nat­ing ven­dor in the face of other com­pet­ing closed sys­tems. Fun­da­men­tally, soft­ware empires and impe­ri­al­ism are pred­i­cated on the valid­ity of closed sys­tems. What hap­pens when open sys­tems become the pre­ferred model?
“Empire ends when sig­nif­i­cant periph­eral inter­ac­tion begins, not nec­es­sar­ily when the core ceases its dom­i­na­tion of the periph­eries. The core-periphery rela­tion­ship can be as strong or weak as pos­si­ble and remain an empire as long as there is only insignif­i­cant inter­ac­tion between periph­ery and periph­ery.“
Open­Doc­u­ment is designed to allow exactly the sort of periph­ery to periph­ery inter­ac­tion that closed archi­tec­tures pro­hib­ited. IBM’s shift to Open­Doc­u­ment shows aware­ness that old style closed impe­r­ial enter­prise sys­tems are no longer viable. In this, they are fol­low­ing the chang­ing rhetoric of those such as Larry Can­nell from collaborationloop.com, who offers a strongly pro-open sys­tem view in A Vision For Col­lab­o­ra­tive Tech­nolo­gies:
“I believe open­ness breeds inno­va­tion, and there are many parts of the col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nol­ogy mar­ket that need a big injec­tion of inno­va­tion. While ven­dors con­tinue push­ing inte­gra­tion as their pri­mary value propo­si­tion for closed sys­tems, the astute com­peti­tor will embrace open­ness and pro­vide inno­va­tion within an ecosys­tem of col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies based on open stan­dards. Today we have a plethora of email sys­tems which nearly every­one con­nected to the Inter­net is capa­ble of using. We need com­pa­ra­ble open and sim­ple choices for other col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies; whether it is col­lab­o­ra­tive work­spaces or online com­mu­ni­ties. It will not be until we have sim­ple open stan­dards that fos­ter famil­iar­ity and easy inter­con­nec­tiv­ity that will we see wide­spread use and explo­sive inno­va­tion.“
Can­nell is care­ful here to take a pos­i­tive and forward-looking line regard­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, but his view of closed sys­tems is clearly neg­a­tive. And the implied con­se­quence of a closed sys­tem is lack of inno­va­tion, one of the key signs of orga­ni­za­tions in decline.
Didn’t I start out by say­ing that we should be wary of the mar­ket­ing rhetoric sur­round­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion? Yes, pre­cisely because the major­ity of the rhetoric com­ing from enter­prise ven­dors still exem­pli­fies the closed sys­tem, impe­ri­al­ist enter­prise ethos.
How­ever, in the case of IBM, it’s clear that they’ve antic­i­pated the con­se­quences of ignor­ing the envi­ron­men­tal shift to open sys­tems that is at hand, and reacted accord­ingly, at least as regards the core doc­u­ment stan­dard under­ly­ing Lotus Notes (which is still awful, BTW, just in case any­one mis­in­ter­prets this arti­cle to mean I think oth­er­wise…). The rela­tion­ship of Notes to Work­place seems largely unknown at this point, and still sub­ject to bit­ter infight­ing, in another great par­al­lel to the impe­r­ial model. Microsoft, as the other major col­lab­o­ra­tion ven­dor, may be able to stem the tide against open sys­tems in the short term, but will even­tu­ally have to respond.
My thoughts on the cur­rent form of enter­prise solu­tions as a class / indus­try / way of solv­ing busi­ness prob­lems remain unal­tered — in fact I think that IBM’s move sup­ports many of the pre­dic­tions I made ear­lier this year, fol­low­ing ear­lier treat­ments by oth­ers writ­ing on the same subjects.

Col­lab­o­ra­tion is the lat­est ral­ly­ing cry of soft­ware ven­dors hop­ing to embed new gen­er­a­tions of enter­prise class tools and user expe­ri­ences into the fab­ric of the mod­ern work­place. Microsoft, IBM, and other firms expect that con­trol or lead­er­ship in the mar­ket for col­lab­o­ra­tion, whether by own­ing the archi­tec­ture, sys­tems, or other solu­tion com­po­nents, will be lucra­tive. A recent Rad­i­cati Group study (qual­ity uncon­firmed…) of the mar­ket size for enter­prise col­lab­o­ra­tion offered an esti­mate of $1.6 bil­lion now, grow­ing 10% annu­ally to $2.3 bil­lion in 2010.
Beyond the sub­stan­tial money to be made cre­at­ing, sell­ing, installing, and ser­vic­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tions lies the strate­gic advan­tage of mar­ket def­i­n­i­tion. The vendor(s) that own(s) the col­lab­o­ra­tion space expect(s) to become an inte­gral to the knowl­edge economy’s sup­port­ing envi­ron­ment in the same way that Ford and Gen­eral Motors became essen­tial to the sub­ur­ban­ized con­sumer archi­tec­tures of the post WWII era by serv­ing simul­ta­ne­ously as employ­ers, man­u­fac­tur­ers, cul­tural mar­keters, cap­i­tal reser­voirs, and auto­mo­bile sell­ers. Col­lab­o­ra­tion ven­dors know that achiev­ing any level of indis­pen­si­bil­ity will enhance their longevity by mak­ing them a neces­sity within the knowl­edge econ­omy.
It’s worth tak­ing a moment to call atten­tion to the impli­ca­tions: by defin­ing the user expe­ri­ences and tech­no­log­i­cal build­ing blocks brought together to real­ize col­lab­o­ra­tion in large enter­prises, these ven­dors will directly shape our basic con­cepts and under­stand­ing (our men­tal mod­els and cog­ni­tive frames) of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Once embed­ded, these archi­tec­tures, sys­tems, and busi­ness processes, and the social struc­tures and con­cep­tual mod­els cre­ated in response, will in large part define the (infor­ma­tion) work­ing envi­ron­ments of the future.
And yes, this is exactly what these ven­dors aspire to achieve; the Microsoft Share­point Prod­ucts and Tech­nolo­gies Devel­op­ment Team blog, offers:
“Share­Point Prod­ucts and Tech­nolo­gies have become a key part of our strat­egy for deliv­er­ing a com­plete work­ing envi­ron­ment for infor­ma­tion work­ers, where they can col­lab­o­rate together, share infor­ma­tion with oth­ers, and find infor­ma­tion and peo­ple that can help them solve their busi­ness prob­lems.“
[From SHAREPOINT’S ROLE IN MICROSOFT’S COLLABORATION STRATEGY.]
And IBM’s mar­ket­ing is not pitched and deliv­ered in a man­ner as sweep­ing, but the impli­ca­tions are sim­i­lar, as in the overview IBM® Work­place™: Sim­ply a bet­ter way]:
“IBM Work­place™ Solu­tions are role-based frame­works to help cus­tomers apply IBM Work­place tech­nolo­gies faster and more pro­duc­tively… These solu­tions are designed to pro­vide ‘short-cuts’ for cre­at­ing a high per­for­mance role-based work envi­ron­ment, help­ing to accel­er­ate time-to-value.“
The Mod­els for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and rela­tion­ships built into our tools are very pow­er­ful, and often employed in other spheres of life. How many times have you started writ­ing a birth­day card for a friend, and found your­self instinc­tively com­pos­ing a set of bul­let points list­ing this person’s chief virtues, notable char­ac­ter traits, and the most impor­tant / amus­ing moments of your friend­ship. The creep­ing ubiq­uity of the rhetor­i­cal style of Pow­er­point (Tufte’s essay here) is just one exam­ple of the tremen­dous social impact of a habit­u­ated model of com­mu­nica­tive prac­tices that’s run amok.
What does the future hold, in terms of enter­prise ven­dor con­trol over every­day work­ing expe­ri­ences? I’ve writ­ten before on the idea that the days of the mono­lithic enter­prise sys­tems are num­bered, mak­ing the point along the way that these behe­moths are the result of a top-down, one-size-for-all approach. I think the same is true of the cur­rent approach to col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tions and work­ing envi­ron­ments. And so I was happy to see Andrew McAfee of Har­vard Busi­ness School make sev­eral strong points about how enter­prise col­lab­o­ra­tion efforts will real­ize greater suc­cess by *reduc­ing* the amount of struc­ture imposed on their major ele­ments — roles, work­flows, arti­facts, and rela­tion­ships — in advance of actual use.
McAfee sees con­sid­er­able ben­e­fit in new approaches to enter­prise IT invest­ment and man­age­ment that reduce the top-down and imposed nature of enter­prise envi­ron­ments and solu­tions, in favor of emer­gent struc­tures cre­ated by the peo­ple who must work suc­cess­fully within them. McAfee advo­cates allow­ing staff to cre­ate the iden­ti­ties, struc­tures and pat­terns that will orga­nize and gov­ern their col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ments as nec­es­sary, in an emer­gent fash­ion, instead of fix­ing these aspects long before users begin to col­lab­o­rate.
McAfee says:
“When I look at a lot of cor­po­rate col­lab­o­ra­tion tech­nolo­gies after spend­ing time at Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Blog­ger I am struck by how reg­i­mented, inflex­i­ble, and lim­ited the cor­po­rate stuff seems, because it does some or all of the following:

• Gives users iden­ti­ties before they start using the tech­nol­ogy. These iden­ti­ties assign them cer­tain roles, priv­i­leges, and access rights, and exclude them from oth­ers. These iden­ti­ties almost always also place them within the exist­ing orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture and for­mal cor­po­rate hierarchy.
• Con­tains few truly blank pages. Instead, it has lots of templates–for meet­ings, for project track­ing, for doc­u­ments and reports, etc.
• Has tons of explicit or implicit work­flow– seqences [sic] of tasks that must be exe­cuted in order.

How much of this struc­ture is nec­es­sary? How much is valu­able? Well, the clear suc­cess sto­ries of Web 2.0 demon­strate that for at least some types of com­mu­nity and col­lab­o­ra­tion, none of it is.“
The crit­i­cal ques­tion is then “what types of com­mu­nity and col­lab­o­ra­tion require which approaches to cre­at­ing struc­ture, and when?” As any­one who’s used a poorly or overly struc­tured col­lab­o­ra­tion (or other enter­prise) tool knows, the result­ing envi­ron­ment is often anal­o­gous to a feu­dal soci­ety designed and man­aged by crypto-technical over­lords; one in which most users feel as if they are serfs bound to the land for in per­pe­tu­ity in order to sup­port the leisure-time and war-making indul­gences of a small class of share­hold­ing nobil­ity.
Answer­ing these ques­tions with con­fi­dence based on expe­ri­ence will likely take time in the range of years, and require numer­ous failed exper­i­ments. There’s a larger con­text to take into account: the strug­gle of enter­prise soft­ware ven­dors to extend their reach and longevity by dom­i­nat­ing the lan­guage of col­lab­o­ra­tion and the range of offer­ings is one part of a much broader effort by soci­ety to under­stand dra­matic shifts in our ways of work­ing, and the social struc­tures that are both dri­ven by and shape these new ways of work­ing. And so there are sev­eral impor­tant ideas and ques­tions under­ly­ing McAfee’s assess­ment that social sys­tem design­ers should under­stand.
One of the most impor­tant is that the notion of “col­lab­o­ra­tion” is con­cep­tual short­hand for how you work, who you work with, and what you do. In other words, it’s a dis­til­la­tion of your pro­fes­sional iden­tity. Your role in a col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment defines who you are within that envi­ron­ment.
More impor­tantly, from the per­spec­tive of growth and devel­op­ment, your sys­tem assigned role deter­mines who you can *become*. Knowl­edge work­ers are val­ued for their skills, expe­ri­ence, pro­fes­sional net­works, pub­lic rep­u­ta­tions, and many other fluid, con­text depen­dent attrib­utes. And so lock­ing down their iden­ti­ties in advance strips them of a sub­stan­tial pro­por­tion of their cur­rent value, and simul­ta­ne­ously reduces their abil­ity to adapt, inno­vate, and respond to envi­ron­men­tal changes by shift­ing their think­ing or prac­tices. In plain terms, deter­min­ing their iden­ti­ties in advance pre­cludes the cre­ation of future value.
Another impor­tant under­ly­ing idea is the impor­tance of prop­erly under­stand­ing the value and util­ity of dif­fer­ing approaches to sys­tem­ati­za­tion in dif­fer­ing con­texts. McAfee’s assess­ment of the unhealthy con­se­quences of impos­ing too much struc­ture in advance is use­ful for social sys­tem design­ers (such as infor­ma­tion archi­tects and knowl­edge man­agers), because it makes the out­comes of implicit design strate­gies and assump­tions clear and tan­gi­ble, in terms of the neg­a­tive effects on the even­tual users of the col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment. For com­plex and evolv­ing group set­tings like the mod­ern enter­prise, cre­at­ing too much struc­ture in advance points to a mis­placed under­stand­ing of the value and role of design and archi­tec­ture.
Fun­da­men­tally, it indi­cates an over­es­ti­ma­tion of the value of the activ­ity of sys­tem­atiz­ing (design­ing) col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ments to high lev­els of detail, and with­out recog­ni­tion for evo­lu­tion­ary dynam­ics. The design or struc­ture of any col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment — of any social sys­tem — is only valu­able for how well it encour­ages rela­tion­ships and activ­ity which advance the goals of the orga­ni­za­tion and it’s mem­bers. The value of a designer in the effort to cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­nity lies in the abil­ity to cre­ate designs that lead to effec­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion, not in the num­ber or speci­ficity of the designs they pro­duce, and espe­cially not in the arti­facts cre­ated dur­ing design — the tem­plates, work­flows, roles, and other McAfee men­tioned above. To sim­plify the dif­fer­ent views of what’s appro­pri­ate into two arti­fi­cially seg­mented camps, the [older] view that results in the pre­ma­ture cre­ation of too much struc­ture val­i­dates the design of things / arti­facts / sta­tic assem­blies, whereas the newer view valu­ing min­i­mal and emer­gent struc­tures acknowl­edges the greater effi­cacy of design­ing dynamic sys­tems / flows / frame­works.
The overly spe­cific and rigid design of many col­lab­o­ra­tion sys­tem com­po­nents com­ing from the older design view­point in fact says much about how large, com­plex enter­prises choose to inter­pret their own char­ac­ters, and cre­ate tools accord­ingly. Too often, a desire to achieve total­ity lies at the heart of this approach.
Of course, most total­i­ties only make sense — exhibit coher­ence — when viewed from within, and when using the lan­guage and con­cepts of the total­ity itself. The result is that attempts to achieve total­ity of design for many com­plex con­texts (like col­lab­o­ra­tion within enter­prises large or small) rep­re­sent a self-defeating approach. That the approach is self-defeating is gen­er­ally ignored, because the pur­suit of total­ity is a self-serving exer­cise in power val­i­da­tion, that ben­e­fits power hold­ers by con­sum­ing resources poten­tially used for other pur­poses, for exam­ple, to under­mine their power.
With the chimera of total­ity set in proper con­text, it’s pos­si­ble to see how col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ments — at least in their most poorly con­ceived man­i­fes­ta­tions — will resem­ble vir­tual retreads of Tay­lorism, wherein the real accom­plish­ment is to jus­tify the effort and expense involved in cre­at­ing the sys­tem by point­ing at an exces­sive quan­tity of pre­de­ter­mined struc­ture await­ing habi­ta­tion and use by dis­en­fran­chised staff.
At present, I see two diver­gent and com­pet­ing trends in the realm of enter­prise solu­tions and user expe­ri­ences. The first trend is toward homo­gene­ity of the work­ing envi­ron­ment with large amounts of struc­ture imposed in advance, exem­pli­fied by com­pre­hen­sive col­lab­o­ra­tion suites and archi­tec­tures such as MSOf­fice / Share­point, or IBM’s Work­place.
The sec­ond trend is toward het­ero­gene­ity in the struc­tures inform­ing the work­ing envi­ron­ment, vis­i­ble as vari­able pat­terns and locuses of col­lab­o­ra­tion estab­lished by fluid groups that rely on adhoc assort­ment of tools from dif­fer­ent sources (Base­Camp, GMail, social book­mark­ing ser­vices, RSS syn­di­ca­tion of social media struc­tures, com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice, busi­ness ser­vices from ASP providers, open source appli­ca­tions, etc.).
But this itself is a short term view, when sit­u­a­tion within a longer term con­text is nec­es­sary. It is com­mon for sys­tems or envi­ron­ments of all sizes and com­plex­i­ties to oscil­late cycli­cally from greater to lesser degrees of struc­ture, along a con­tin­uüm rang­ing from homo­ge­neous to het­ero­ge­neous. In the short term view then, the quest for total­ity equates to homo­gene­ity, or even efforts at dom­i­na­tion. In the long term view, how­ever, the quest for total­ity could indi­cate an imma­ture ecosys­tem that is not diverse, but may become so in time.
Apply­ing two (poten­tial) lessons from ecol­ogy — the value of diver­sity as an enhancer of over­all resilience in sys­tems, and the ten­dency of mono­cul­tures to exhibit high fragility — to McAfee’s points on emer­gence, as well as the con­tin­uüm view of shift­ing degress of homo­gene­ity, should tell us that col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tion design­ers would be wise to do three things:

1. Adopt the new design view­point and focus on design­ing struc­tures that allow col­lab­o­ra­tors to cre­ate value
2. Spec­ify as lit­tle struc­ture of any kind in advance as possible
3. Antic­i­pate the emer­gence of new archi­tec­tural ele­ments, and allow for their incor­po­ra­tion under the guid­ance of the com­mu­nity of collaborators

The end result should be an enter­prise approach to col­lab­o­ra­tion that empha­sizes the design of infra­struc­ture for com­mu­ni­ties that cre­ate their own struc­tures. Big ven­dors be wary of this enlight­ened point of view, unless you’re will­ing to respond in kind.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to James Robert­son and StepTwo Designs for releas­ing an updated ver­sion of the Intranet Review Toolkit, just before this year’s IA sum­mit in lovely Van­cou­ver (oblig­a­tory flickr link).
Ver­sion 1.1 of the Intranet Review Toolkit includes a heuris­tics sum­mary designed for quick use; it’s based on a con­densed ver­sion of the com­plete set of heuris­tics you may remem­ber I offered a while back. StepTwo was kind enough to credit my mod­est con­tri­bu­tion to the over­all effort.
Other addi­tions include a col­lab­o­ra­tion / com­mu­nity of use des­ti­na­tion site http://www.intranetreviewtoolkit.org.

It’s only Feb­ru­ary, but I can already tell that I’m going to say “Share­Point is *not* an intranet!” many, many, many times in 2006…

Prov­ing that a well-developed sense of humor is required for suc­cess in prod­uct design — espe­cially for Lotus Notes — Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next ver­sion of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny com­ment in reply to my sug­ges­tion that the Notes Design team offer cus­tomers a choice of unpleas­ant but related user expe­ri­ence themes. She used this as the occa­sion to invite all mem­bers of the com­mu­nity of Notes to users to reg­is­ter as vol­un­teers for usabil­ity test­ing.
I’ve made three post­ings to date specif­i­cally dis­cussing the Notes user expe­ri­ence: Lotus Notes User Expe­ri­ence = Dis­ease, Men­tal Mod­els, Resilience, and Lotus Notes, and Bet­ter UI Tops Notes Users’ Wish Lists. I’m not sure which of these prompted Mary Beth to reach out, but I’m glad she did, because doing so is smart busi­ness on two lev­els. At the first level, Mary Beth plainly under­stands that while vocal crit­ics may seem daunt­ing to user expe­ri­ence design­ers, prod­uct man­agers, and busi­ness own­ers, engag­ing these crit­ics in fact presents design teams with oppor­tu­ni­ties to build strong con­nec­tions to users and gather valu­able feed­back at the same time. What bet­ter way is there to show the strate­gic value of user research?
I learned this at first hand while work­ing on a redesign of the flag­ship web pres­ence of a large soft­ware firm sev­eral years ago. Some of the most insight­ful and use­ful feed­back on the strengths and weak­nesses of the user expe­ri­ences I was respon­si­ble for came from ‘dis­grun­tled’ cus­tomers. The user research I was doing on site struc­tures, nav­i­ga­tion paths, and user goals estab­lished a chan­nel that allowed unhappy (and happy) cus­tomers to com­mu­ni­cate about a broad range of their expe­ri­ences with PTC prod­ucts and ser­vices in a more com­plete way than by sim­ply buy­ing a com­pet­ing prod­uct, or renew­ing an exist­ing soft­ware license.
Based on these and other expe­ri­ences build­ing user research pro­grams, I sug­gest that prod­uct man­agers, user research leads, and user expe­ri­ence design­ers first col­lab­o­rate to define a user research strat­egy, and then define and cre­ate a sim­ple but effec­tive user research infra­struc­ture (like reg­is­tra­tion gate­ways to vol­un­teer data­bases, com­mu­nity / pro­gram iden­ti­fiers and incen­tives, con­tact man­age­ment tools, spe­cific per­sonas that tech­ni­cal and cus­tomer sup­port teams can learn to rec­og­nize and recruit at all stages of the cus­tomer life­cy­cle, etc.) that will sup­port the cre­ation of chan­nels to users through­out the design cycle.
At the sec­ond level, it allows the Notes team to directly explore col­lab­o­ra­tion meth­ods, prod­ucts, and tech­nolo­gies related to the very com­pet­i­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion suite / inte­grated elec­tronic work­space / office pro­duc­tiv­ity mar­kets in which IBM, Microsoft, and sev­eral other giant firms are look­ing to secure dom­i­nant posi­tions in the new cul­ture of col­lab­o­ra­tion. [Note: I’ve posted a few times on Microsoft prod­ucts as well — Back­wards Goals: MS Office Results Ori­ented UI, and Microsoft’s Phi­los­o­phy On Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture.]
Mem­bers of the com­mu­nity of Lotus Notes users can reg­is­ter as vol­un­teers for usabil­ity tests dur­ing the design of the next ver­sion of Notes at this URL: https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usentry.nsf/register?openform.

Update: Version 1.1 of the Intranet Review Toolkit is avail­able as of 03/20/2006, and now includes a sum­mary spread­sheet.
Thanks go to James Robert­son for very gen­tly remind­ing me that the licens­ing arrange­ments for the Intranet Review Toolkit pre­clude repub­lish­ing it as a sum­ma­rized form, such as the spread­sheet I posted ear­lier today. In my enthu­si­asm to share a tool with the rest of the com­mu­nity, I didn’t work through the full licens­ing impli­ca­tions…
Accord­ingly, I’ll be remov­ing the spread­sheet from harms way imme­di­ately, while hop­ing it’s pos­si­ble to make it avail­able in a more legally accept­able form.
Apolo­gies to James and the rest of the Toolkit team for any unin­tended harm from my oversight.

In the overview of the new “results ori­ented” UI planned for MS Office 12, our friends in Red­mond offer:
“The over­rid­ing design goal for the new UI is to deliver a user inter­face that enables users to be more suc­cess­ful find­ing and using the advanced fea­tures of Microsoft Office. An addi­tional impor­tant design goal was to pre­serve an unclut­tered work­space that reduces dis­trac­tion for users so that they can spend more time and energy focused on their work.“
Let me get that straight. Your first goal is to make it eas­ier for me to find and use advanced fea­tures that the vast major­ity of peo­ple employ rarely if ever, and didn’t need in the first place?
And some­thing else that was also impor­tant — but not as impor­tant as access to all those shiny advanced fea­tures — was to make the work­space unclut­tered and allow me to focus on my work?
Isn’t that… backwards?

Lotus Notes has one of the most unpleas­ant and unwel­com­ing User Expe­ri­ences this side of a medium-security prison where the war­den has aspi­ra­tions towards inte­rior design and art instruc­tion. One of the most painful aspects of the Notes expe­ri­ence is the default set­tings for font size and color in the email win­dow. The default font size (for Macs) is on the order of 7 point type, and the default color for unread mes­sages is — iron­i­cally — red. The com­bi­na­tion yields a user expe­ri­ence that resem­bles a bad skin rash. I call it “angry red microNotes” dis­ease, and it looks like this:

Over­all, it has an unhealthy affect on one’s state of mind. The under­tones of hos­til­ity and resent­ment run­ning through­out are man­i­fold. And nat­u­rally, it is impos­si­ble to change the default font size and color for the email reader. This is fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion for my the­ory that Notes has yet to escape it’s roots as a thick client for series of uncon­nected data­bases.
After three weeks of suf­fer­ing from angry red microNotes, I real­ized I was lit­er­ally going blind from squint­ing at the tiny type, and went to Google for relief. I found niniX 1.7, a util­ity that allows Mac based Lotus Notes users the abil­ity to edit the binary for­mat Notes pref­er­ences file, and change the font size of the email client. I share it in the hopes that oth­ers may break the chains that blind them. This will only solve half the prob­lem — if some­one can fig­ure out how to change the default color for unread mes­sages to some­thing besides skin rash red, I will hap­pily share with the rest of the suf­fer­ing masses (and appar­ently there are on the order of 118 mil­lion of us out there).
But will it always be this (hor­ri­ble) way?
In Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches ‘Han­nover’ user expe­ri­ence Peter Bochner of SearchDomino.com says this of the next Notes release, “Notes has often been crit­i­cized for its some­what staid user inter­face. Accord­ing to IBM’s Bis­conti, in cre­at­ing Han­nover, IBM paid atten­tion “to not just the user inter­face, but the user expe­ri­ence.“
Okay… So does that mean I’ll have my choice of dis­eases as themes for the user expe­ri­ence of my col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment?
Accord­ing to Ken Bis­conti, IBM Lotus vice pres­i­dent of Work­place, por­tal and col­lab­o­ra­tion prod­ucts, “Through improve­ments such as con­tex­tual col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­port for com­pos­ite apps, we’ve gone above and beyond sim­ple UI enhance­ment”.
I think sim­ple UI enhance­ment is exactly what Ken and his team should focus on for the next sev­eral years, since they have so much oppor­tu­nity for improvement.

While look­ing around inside the Share­point doc­u­men­ta­tion, I found this tasty snip­pet that explains a great deal about the way Microsoft approaches infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, prob­a­bly design and archi­tec­ture:
“Cre­at­ing an effec­tive cat­e­gory struc­ture requires plan­ning and some under­stand­ing of how oth­ers might orga­nize the con­tent.“
Yes, that’s right — you only need SOME under­stand­ing of how oth­ers MIGHT orga­nize the con­tent. No need to get the right peo­ple, even — any­one off the street will do, as long as they are clearly a mem­ber of the group ‘oth­ers’, so maybe even the neighbor’s kid would be fine.
Besides, I’m sure the incon­ve­nience asso­ci­ated with try­ing to develop a decent infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture informed by knowl­edge of users’ men­tal mod­els would prob­a­bly get in the way of all that plan­ning that’s so impor­tant to the suc­cess of your por­tal project.