Posts Tagged 'collaboration'

Not Like “Being There”: the Surprising Trajectory of Video Conferencing

Posted on July 31st, 2021 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Video conferencing has a long history… much longer as a dream than as a reality; and it is interesting to examine how that dream has evolved. Teleconferencing by voice goes back to the nineteenth century: Jules Verne’s “The begum’s fortune”, written in 1879, describes a teleconference at the city council of his utopian “France-ville”: “I will immediately convene the Council!” , said doctor Sarrasin, and preceded his guests to his study. It was a simply furnished room, whose three walls were covered with bookshelves, while the fourth had, below some paintings and objets d’art, an array of numbered devices similar.. Read more

Why Employee Badge Design Matters to Your Company

Posted on August 8th, 2014 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

What defines the design of the employee badges in your company? Who cares, you say? YOU should, I reply. Very much so. Read on. How it’s usually done The employee badge is a standard feature of the hi-tech workplace (and other security-aware establishments). It is usually issued to new employees by the security department, since its main raison d’être is to enhance security by highlighting intruders. Until full biometrics take over, it is also frequently used to open doors to restricted areas, to feed the employee in the plant cafeteria, and to charge and track other activities. Form follows function,.. Read more

New Insight Article: How to Lead Effective Global Virtual Teams

Posted on August 7th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Global, distributed teams are the norm in many industries,  and most of their interactions are virtual and asynchronous. This does add potentially destructive complications, but since it is a given part of our reality, the question isn’t whether we like it, but rather how do we make virtual teams work well – just as well as local teams, or perhaps even better? This is a subject to which I devoted some years of my career at Intel, where I co-founded and led a team we called the Virtual Collaboration Research Team (VCRT), whose charter was to develop future collaboration tools.. Read more

The Thousand Faces of Email – 1. Email as a Documentation System

Posted on July 4th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Email: the beast with a thousand faces Believe it or not, when email was invented back in the sixties it was with a clear goal in mind: to allow people to mail “letters” – written communications – electronically. It was a one to one messaging system. Those were the days… Since then, email has assumed so many roles that its original purpose is almost secondary. Like a mythical shape-shifting beast, it has morphed into countless usage models, some useful and desirable, others harmful and even criminal. Even the basic paradigm of email – that of asynchronous, persistent message exchange –.. Read more

How Communicating Across Company Lines Can Help Your Career

Posted on January 28th, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Check out my guest post on the Leader Communicator blog: Why and How to Communicate Across Company Lines Have you tried to communicate with your peers in other organizations lately? In this post I consider the importance of doing so, as I’ve been doing throughout my career, and I discuss the barriers posed to this important practice by corporate culture and inertia; I then share some experience on how to overcome the barriers without coming into harm’s way. But go ahead and read it over at Leader Communicator blog!  

What’s in a Name? Name Diversity as a Factor in Global Collaboration

Posted on September 14th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Countless studies have been made of factors affecting Global Collaboration… but one factor seems absent from them. This is the cultural diversity of personal names. It’s as if this factor is a non-issue; which has always surprised me, because in my long career in a global corporation I’ve concluded that it definitely matters. Read on… Strange names leave you clueless in so many ways! If you work in a global corporation you are likely to be communicating routinely with remote team mates named, say, Ayelet Gilboa, Szendrey Erzsébet, John McDonald, SK Wong, Dögg Jónsdóttir, Phan Tấn Dũng and Pavel Andreyevich.. Read more

Ask your users!

Posted on April 30th, 2011 · Posted in Off-topic

Today I was writing my monthly Newsletter (this always seems to slide to the last day of the month 😉 ) and as I was re-reading it – I always do, aware of Murphy lurking in the shadows – I noted this passage, relating to choosing a video conferencing system: Talk to your IT people about your options; but remember that the key thing is user perception and willingness. You may want to raise the subject in a group or staff meeting, and identify what the best usage model would be in the context of their collaboration needs. Then work.. Read more

Atos Origin aiming to become email-free!

Posted on February 15th, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years. More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms. I’ve.. Read more

The collaboration-killing desk

Posted on September 7th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Collaboration is a crucial aspect of work in most hi-tech companies. Office cubicles, for better or worse, are also present in many of them. You’d think, therefore, that the latter would be designed to facilitate the former… No such luck, however. Consider the most common type of desk seen in the cube farms. Image courtesy GraceFamily, shared on flickr under CC license. The basic concept seems to make sense: the L-shaped desk, bridged at the angle by a diagonal area for the keyboard, allows one to sit facing the screen while having everything else – phone, file trays, drawers, and.. Read more

The demise of Google Wave

Posted on August 8th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

When Google announced Wave, that innovative Email / IM / Collaboration product, I’d found it very exciting. I was happy to see in it many concepts I’ve been awaiting for a long time, notably a very nicely done “threaded inbox” paradigm. Still, after playing with it a little I began to refer to it in my lectures on Information Overload as “The jury is still out on whether this will reduce the overload or increase it”. Well, the jury is back. A year later, Google announces it will phase out Wave. It just didn’t catch… It’s tempting to claim it.. Read more