The Way to Smarter Collaboration

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From the title of this session (which if I read it would take too much time), I would expect that you are looking for ways to use collaboration to increase productivity and reduce costs in your companies. So in the time provided, we’re going to point you in the direction of where you should be looking…some of which you may not have yet considered.

As an exercise, if we were to think about our “senses”…I’d like to ask you “How many senses do we have? And what are they?” The crowd will likely list the 5 main ones (sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch) and maybe the “spooky” 6th sense. If you get others, be supportive of their thinking. Most crowds will list the 5 main ones, which by the way are associated with a physical element…sight with eyes, smell with nose, etc.

What about our sense of balance? What would like be like if we lost this sense? We’d all look like police videos of sobriety tests. But the sense of balance is less associated with any one physical element. Granted inner ear problems can really throw you off, but it’s very much a combination of a number of elements. So what does this have to do with collaboration and cost savings?

Where are the places one would normally consider in this search?

Disk storage is often a big target. Saving space on spinning disks is associated with physical hardware. And while spinning disks is not as significant as managed disks (some of you hardware techies know the difference)…they are both rapidly changing environments. The picture shown here of a “floppy disk” was purposeful. Think of the changes in recent years in storage. Important considerations, but you’ve probably already thought of this.

Ahhh…physical storage. Another consideration that you can actually put your hands on. Having been in this industry for many years, I’ve seen many information management systems base their entire ROI on the removal of file cabinets and the release and reuse of floor space. It’s likely you’ve already considered this and are possibly already acting on this issue as well.

Anyone looking for savings is probably going to send some time getting to know their finance person. You’ll look at budgets and expense ledgers. You will be able to identify the groups spending the big dollars on IT, facilities, travel and consumables. And these are good indicators. For instance, excessive travel budgets are often a good place to begin looking for better and more cost effective ways to do business. We have web conferencing services that have proven to have significant impact on airfare and hotel expenses. Great place to look…but even using the travel example, we’ve only considered the physical expenses….there’s more…something like the “sense of balance” we may have overlooked or underestimated.

It’s all about time…. There are concepts like “time to market” and “production time” which are critical, but we’re going to focus on something else. Given our previous travel example…what about the lost time in transit? What if the meeting is abbreviated or cancelled because of a scheduling mistake with one of the principal attendees? What if you get to the meeting and find you are only needed for 30 minutes within the framework of a 3 hour meeting. These are time related costs…and the alleviation or minimization of these risks can be significant. So it’s something you probably often consider.

People time. Your time. We only have about 30 minutes to cover this material. And its 30 minutes you’re investing, because you’ll never get it back and you can’t reuse it for something else later. If you’ve not rushed for the exits by now, allow me to proceed and respect your time and hopefully offer you some value for your investment.

I’m going to share with you 3 areas where good collaboration skills and techniques can offer significant benefits…primarily in the saving of people time…which I contest is your most valuable and often most underestimated asset. Show me someone with “time on their hands” and I’ll show you someone who is either independently wealthy or living “under management’s radar”…because what I hear most these days is “we have to do more with less” and “we don’t have enough hours in the day”. So let’s look at the first area to consider.

Have you ever considered how much time (remember money) is wasted in your organization because of inaccurate information? Like many, you may immediately begin thinking of some big corporate faux pas where outdated information lead to a catastrophe…like an obsolete shut down procedure being used at a nuclear power plant. While these are news worthy, there are bigger culprits happening on a daily basis.

Have you ever had what we call “version anxiety”? You know the feeling that you get when you find a file on your PC that you need to read or review. Perhaps it’s information that you are going to use as a basis for a big decision….maybe not on the scale of nuclear fusion, but it may be job altering. How much time a day do you think is wasted in your company looking for the most recent version of a file? We all get emails with attachments. We sometimes leave them attached to the mail item, store them away in our email folders and come back to them when needed. But when you do, especially if you weren’t the author, can you be sure it hasn’t changed? Here’s one I hate…and you may relate to this. You’re away for a period of time, let’s say a couple of days and you’ve not looked at your email. It backs up. So when you get back in, you start through your inbox. Maybe you start at the earliest and work your way to the most recent. You find an “important” email that says something like this “Attached is a spreadsheet with the latest figures. We need to send these to the prospect. Please review.” Attached is a 2Mb spreadsheet. You diligently spend hours pouring through every pivot table and chart and form your response and hit ‘send’…Ahh… job well done. Now you get back to your email and further up you find a following email that reads “Prospect doesn’t need the figures. We’ve closed the deal without them.” How much was your time worth? It’s not a matter of salary divided by hours times task. It’s deeper than that. Any maybe this is an extreme case, but how many times a day do you wonder if you have the most recent copy of some document. And maybe you do a search through your files on your PC looking to see if maybe you stored a more recent copy somewhere. Or maybe you spend time trying to figure out some file naming scheme that can help identify Report_January_2009_Q1_Rev_5.6_Sally.doc

Using Lotus Quickr, you can have a team or personal place where you store your files with complete version control and history. Our integration with desktop applications makes these places easily accessible from your common authoring and email applications. This example shows the Quickr sidebar within Lotus Notes. For anyone using an inferior email product, you might like to know we also offer this same integration with Outlook. The point to make here is that using Quickr, you can store files in these places, and simply drag and drop them into emails. This results in a “link” to the document. The recipient will simply click on the link to gain access to the file. Now if we think back to the obvious “senses” of disk storage, this certainly will have a significant impact on email quotas and network usage. The “time” factor here is that I can be assured that if I decide to change the file immediately after sending this email, I won’t have to remember to resend. Or if I’m the recipient, I can be assured this is the latest file…no matter how much I’ve delayed reading my mail. Likewise, if I were to attach a file to an email and hit ‘send’, Quickr can actually prompt you to consider storing the file in a Quickr place and sending a link instead. And if you decide to do so, a simple click of an “OK” button, will cause Quickr to take the file, put it in a Quickr place and replace it with a link in the email. Which saves you time. We’ve looked at “accurate information”, let’s look at the next area.

Information is more readily accessible to everyone, regardless of skill or specialty. Not that long ago, the majority of people on the planet were illiterate….largely due to the lack of availability of written information. Those who could read, had access to texts and were held in high esteem and recognized as keepers of knowledge. The Gutenberg press and moveable type revolutionized the technology of printing, but more importantly ushered in a more literate and articulate population.

Not long ago, the act of being “published” stood for at least a little bit of credibility. Someone, usually other than the author themselves, thought the work to be “worthy” of spreading to a larger audience…be it for education or entertainment. There used to be a saying: “The power of the press belongs to those who own one”. With the advent of desktop publishing and now widespread internet access, anyone with a computing device (notice I didn’t limit it to a PC), an authoring application and internet access can publish their ideas and view to the entire planet. I think everyone is entitled to their opinion. But it’s good to know their credentials before you take too much stock in what they have to say. I could publish this presentation, which is full of my ideas. But knowing that I’ve been in this industry for over 25 years, designing, developing, and implementing these types of systems, might hopefully add a bit of credence to my message. But if I were to author a lengthy paper on “International Law and It’s Impact on Today’s Economy”, it would not only be a waste of my time, but certainly a waste of anyone else’s time who might stumble across it and begin reading it. If you’re like me, you’ve done the “search” and found a number of “hits”. And you know it’s like the little kid searching through the pile of horse manure saying “I know there is a pony in here somewhere”. (Note: any presenter not comfortable with this analogy, please omit or replace with one of your own)

With Lotus Connections, you have easy access to a person’s credentials. For instance, from a Quickr place, I can search for and find content…documents. They also list the author. Connections is integrated with Quickr (and other applications) so that I can click on the Author’s name and gain access to their “business card” and subsequent “profile”. I can see their contact information, who they report to, what activities they are involved in, what interests they have, what they blog about, what information they find interesting and have “dogeared” and commented on. It’s like looking into the back cover of a book to see who the author is and what is their experience…all before you spend your valuable time investing in reading the material. This difference…between “available content” and “credible content” is what I believe to be one of the most valuable components of any company’s information agenda. We do a lot with the obvious senses of “search” and “access” and we need to consider the more important sense of “credibility”. Now for our third and last area…

Instantaneous answers. How quickly can you get answers to the questions that constantly arise? Questions that if you could get an immediate answer, you’d be freed to go onto the next item in your queue. So are you getting the most of “your” bandwidth?

You may say, “Telecom is at the speed of light. What can be faster?” Consider the busy signal, voice mail tag and the time spent tracking down someone. So you have what you think is just a quick question. You now…you could send them an email. Select return receipt to be sure they got it. Maybe even set a tickler in your calendar to remind you to follow up if you don’t get an answer. Then you can send them another email. What I find interesting is that both the phone and email are becoming “too cumbersome” and “too slow” for our next generation of workers. The following antidote is personal to me, however, I’m sure you can relate and replace with another equally powerful personal observation of the changing times. I have a son that’s away in college. If I want to reach him, I can try his phone, but often he doesn’t answer….not necessarily because it’s his dad calling, but because he may be involved in a project or in a lecture. Leaving a voice mail would be like throwing my time into a black hole. He checks his voice mail as frequently as he checks his email…which is very rarely. How does he and his generation communicate? With texting and instant messaging. In his words, email is “too slow”. In a recent survey of teens, out of the 7 ways listed to communicate, “in person” was 6th which was followed by “email” in last place. Their mode of communicating is becoming a large player in the corporate world.

Another lead in that is personal, please replace with your own situation. For instance, I serve in a Sales role, needing to reach out to a variety of people and get quick and accurate answers. Lotus Sametime has become very strategic to me. Let’s say a request for some information comes in through email. Either I know the person with the answer or I use Connections to find the right resource. Sametime immediately lets me know if they are accessible for an instant message, if they are in a meeting, and it can even let me know their location (home, local office, or another city). I can get immediate answers, respond to the original requestor and move on. Without it, it would be phone or email tag and a constant set of reminders. And if I know the person I need to contact, I set an alert so when they do come online, I’m notified so I can get my answer. I can even have multi-person chats as well as utilize Voice over IP to meet my communication needs. And Sametime is available on many popular mobile devices as well. So even when I’m out of the office, I’m not out of touch.

So, we’ve looked at the time savings available from using collaboration tools to gain access to accurate, credible and instantaneous information. I hope that you consider our time together a wise investment and have been challenged to look at some of what may have previously been “less recognized senses” within your company.

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Alex Levashki, Business Development at Overgas Ink., favorited this 1 hour ago
Tags smarter collaboration

The Way to Smarter Collaboration - Presentation Transcript

Connect & Collaborate
How many senses do u have?
What about sense of balance?
- A combination of…
Where might you look for increases in “productivity” & “cost savings”?
- disk storage
Where might you look for increases in “productivity” & “cost savings”?
- Physical storage & square footage
Where might you look for increases in “productivity” & “cost savings”?
- Excessive expenses
Where might you look for increases in “productivity” & “cost savings”?
It’s about time!
- Time related Costs
We have X minutes to invest when doing s.th.
- and you’ll never be able to recover the loss, so invest wisely
Good collaboration tools and skills
- can help you save time
How much time could be saved through?
- accurate information?
What If I had the latest version of a file?
- accurate information?
What If I used Lotus Quickr places and links
- accurate information!
How much time can we all save?
- credible resources?
Who wrote this presentation and why should you care?
- credible resources?
Finding “real” info in “real” place - Lotus Connections
- credible resources!
How much time could be saved through?
- instantaneous answers?
Email? Voicemail? Reminder? Follow-up?
- instantaneous answers?
Lotus Sametime Advanced and Standard to get most of it…
- instantaneous answers!
Is it time to change something in your work?