The Culture of Collaboration

Virtual Worlds and Cisco's Evolving Culture

As organizations adopt virtual worlds, there is growing confusion about when telepresence or videoconferencing may fit the bill and when virtual worlds make more sense.

 

Virtual worlds such as Second Life and Qwaq Forums enable geographically-dispersed colleagues to collaborate in a shared, immersive 3D environment. Qwaq is particularly suited for business. For more on Qwaq, see my September 21, 2007 post. Typically, avatars represent each collaborator and there’s audio without interactive video.

 

At the American Society of Training and Development International Conference last month in San Diego, corporate managers packed a session on using virtual worlds in the enterprise. The buzz was that virtual worlds make more sense than videoconferencing in part because people are getting more accustomed to a gaming-type experience. That supposition is debatable, because tools must fit the situation and the culture. For a performance evaluation, virtual worlds would be a poor choice of tool. Telepresence would work, if a team member is a continent away and a face-to-face meeting is impossible.

 

On Friday, I had a broad discussion with Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.  Chris, a Canadian, joined Cisco 18 months ago after serving as vice president of marketing for Netopia, which became the broadband home unit of Motorola. Our discussion ranged from virtual worlds to collaborative culture, and the conversation flowed easily and informally perhaps because Chris was relaxed and enjoying the informality of his cottage on the lake outside Toronto.

 

“If it’s a casual relationship, video is less important,” Chris noted. Such a relationship might include tech support sessions, customer service calls, and some sales calls. In such cases, virtual worlds may offer better opportunities for branding than videoconferencing. Several years ago, there were many predictions that we would soon be using interactive video for customer service calls. This has yet to materialize in any meaningful way. However, if vendors begin thinking differently about telesales and customer service and start considering these transient relationships as opportunities to build relationships over time, interactive video may be useful.

 

Regarding culture…like many people who work for companies that are adopting collaborative cultures, Chris has had to adjust. He previously embraced the command-and-control approach. However, Cisco has moved away from a competitive, authoritarian culture and has adopted a more collaborative culture in which team members from many functions and regions participate in making decisions.

 

My sense is that Cisco has made this shift for at least two reasons:

 

1) Collaboration creates greater value

 

2) Cisco sells a range of collaborative tools including unified communications and telepresence.

These tools, as I’ve written about extensively, take hold far more effectively in collaborative cultures. So, Cisco clearly wants to set an example.

 

Chris and I also talked about the merging of real-time and asynchronous tools. Cisco is now launching WebEx Connect, which provides a collaborative space through which colleagues can connect in real time through web conferencing plus collaborate after the real-time session ends. Colleagues who may have missed a web conference can search the audio and listen to key parts of a web conference after the fact. Users can also post comments about web conferences.

Qwaq 2.0

I had a far-reaching discussion this morning with Greg Nuyens, CEO of Qwaq. When I first blogged about Qwaq on March 13 (you can read that post here), the start-up was, well, just starting up.

But on stage at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco yesterday, there was Greg Nuyens alongside Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner. Greg was demonstrating Qwaq Forums, which is hybrid real-time and asynchronous 3D collaboration for the enterprise. You can check out the video of Greg’s demo here (scroll down to Justin Rattner's September 20 keynote and launch the webcast. Greg's demo begins at around time stamp 21:00.)

Greg’s big news is that Intel, aside from being a user of Qwaq, is partnering with Qwaq. The two companies are integrating Intel’s Miramar technology, which discovers and defines relationships among desktop documents and other files, with Qwaq Forums. This will merge 2D enterprise applications into 3D collaborative work spaces.

Greg and I hashed out an easy explanation of what the integration means to users. I said “content management meets collaboration.” And Greg made it better with “collaborative content management.”

Qwaq Exits Stealth Mode with Immersive, Real-Time Collaboration

In a modest building next to a burrito shop in downtown Palo Alto, California, the next generation of collaboration is taking shape. When I stepped into the cramped offices of Qwaq last week, CEO Greg Nuyens greeted me immediately because there’s no receptionist yet. The company is running on seed money and is exploring options for the next round of financing—and Qwaq clearly has many options. Greg, VP of enterprise Remy Malan and I then headed for the makeshift conference room for a demo.

Greg and Remy sat at separate PC’s. On screen, they were each represented by avatars in a shared virtual 3D office environment. This virtual space displayed cubicles, walls, plants, pictures and the like. When Greg passed his mouse to me, I was able to drag and drop any document, spreadsheet, or any other file from the hard drive onto any part of the 3D virtual office environment. Remy and I could move around the office, travel through doors and hallways, meet in a virtual conference room and work in any application on a virtual white board. Or we could take our work to the virtual break room or the front lawn of the virtual building.

Unlike many web conferencing applications which are geared for presentations or passing the baton back-and-forth, Qwaq is optimized for true real-time, spontaneous collaboration. But Qwaq is a hybrid in that it also enables asynchronous collaboration. Unlike most traditional web conferencing which works only while a session is underway, Qwaq Forums is persistent. This means authorized users can access the virtual space any time. Team members in another time zone may wake up to find the results of real-time collaboration that occurred while they were sleeping.

Today Qwaq emerges from stealth mode. For months Qwaq has been fielding inquiries from savvy enterprise engineers and executives who have drawn conclusions about Qwaq’s development work based on the team. Computing pioneer Alan Kay is advising Qwaq. Kay’s work at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) contributed to the development of both the laptop computer and the overlapping windows interface. Also advising Qwaq is David Reed, former chief scientist of Lotus.

Qwaq’s team includes substantial talent in highly-scalable, distributed systems. Founder and CTO David Smith is a 3D pioneer and chief system architect of Croquet. CEO Greg Nuyens was the chief technologist at Inktomi and CEO of Instant802, backed by VC firms August Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Remy Malan, the vice president of enterprise, was the VP of marketing at AtWeb.

Qwaq is bringing the work of The Croquet Consortium to the enterprise. Croquet is an open source development environment for creating large-scale, networked 3D collaborative spaces. Qwaq allows resource and computation sharing among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and devices.

The most compelling aspect of Qwaq is that it creates new collaboration possibilities and methods.