Quest for Seamless Collaboration – Enterprise 2.0

Struck by an Oatmeal Cartoon this week on what not to do with emails, http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email I thought I’d post my dream work based collaboration scenario. 

Being in online marketing, I’ll focus this around simple content creation and posting to the web. Now that I’ve written it, this seems like a simple task. And perhaps the rest of this post is overkill but here’s the steps I would love to see technology help me with. 

It’d be shaped a little like this:

1. You’d open up a new document to collaborate on in a central web based platform. 
2. Select a type of end document that you’re aiming to create – A collection of case studies for our UK site on Social ROI. 
3. This choice offers up a number of pre-set values and has a DUPLICATE LAST button, cause I do this every day! The wizard begins:
   1. Draft name
   2. Launch date _5 days time 
   3. Hard date – Yes/No
   4. Priority – low/med/high
   5. Legal need to review this – Yes/No
   6. Peer review – Yes/No
   7. The project is for – (select cost center) 
   8. Collaborators are – (colleague x, y) – its predictive based off the global org chart – and has a “usual crew” button
   9. From a central taxonomy – enter tags and keywords to describe this job. [Marketing, Case Studies, Nokia, Apple, Social ROI, Social Media, UK]
   10. It creates a unique ID and the record begins

From here the collaboration tool helps you with your document creation and behind the scenes. As a next phase, it recommends help in two ways.

From the tags supplied, the wizard provides

• A list of marketing materials your organisation has created in the past on topics and related topics, you can add them for collaborators to view. Request use, or just add to the case studies. Those that are already on the website, have rankings out of 10 for visitors, and conversions.     
• Templates are offered, appropriate to the content. 
• Related imagery, stored in high res is offered in order of license, then relevance, and by least used. 
• Anything you review, has a linkage recorded. Anything you ultimately use in entirety, is hard linked. 

Scouring your ultra fancy Active Directory come internal profiles store, and micro-blogging tool – the wizard recommends additional collaborators with snippets for reference:

• John, {Consultant} is …lead consultant with one of the clients mentioned.
• Paul, {Marketing Executive} is currently creating Asia Pacific case studies on the value of Social Media. 
• Ringo, {Boilermaker} used to work for FaceBook Analytics
• George, {Lawyer} has experience with Social Media Governance

Behind the scenes

For “cost synergies”, a number of connections are made to various facets of the company.

• Once the record is created, and the due date set, an alert is sent to all involved, that its in the pipeline.
• As a phase is completed, the document is passed on to the next associate.
• Your time is allocated as you work on these documents.
• The launch date is set in the content stream and logged in marketing calendars, in case something else is due to launch that day. 
• The project sponsor is alerted, and asked to give a simple final review of the job – (maintains constant feedback stream for appraisals) 

To round this out and provide the seamless collaboration.

• Associates have a customisable dashboard from which you can pipe an RSS feed of all widgets, or set custom Daily, weekly or task based email alerts. 
• So I’m imagining co-collaborators see 3 or 4 documents, and the days until launch for all. They also see their personal work-flow, and can prioritise accordingly. 
• They can set reminders for themselves, arrange review meetings, but never have status updates, as they KNOW where the doc is at. 
• Manager can see what there team are focusing on, and allocate time off accordingly, hire in temps, and analyse performance.
• As managers have information at their fingertips and are freed up from administration, they can focus on coaching and being mentors.  

Oh, and I forgot to mention the final document, is stored with its original taxonomy and tags as an XML based file. Ripe for converting into web content, piping to your iPad or web app, or feeding into a PDF template for printing. 

NOT, an 80MB email, with low res bitmap image attached, fax copied and scanned to PDF. With illegible scribble from three others who haven’t seen >  case-studies-for-UK-web-NA-draft-final-final-2-amended-V.80_JL2.doc   

🙂