The Culture of Collaboration

Visual Collaboration and a Prosecution Dream Team

I had lunch the other day with J. Christopher Anderson, part of the prosecution “dream team” recently honored with a “home run hitters award” from the National District Attorney’s Association. The award stems from the efforts of Chris and his colleagues in the Lucas County Prosecutor’s Office in Ohio to solve a cold murder case.

The case involved the stabbing death in 1980 of a Toledo nun. Prosecutors persuaded a jury last year to convict Toledo priest Gerald Robinson of the murder. During the trial, witnesses testified that Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was stabbed 31 times, including nine wounds shaped like an inverted cross and made through an altar cloth.

Chris mentioned how he and his colleagues are using the SMART Board interactive whiteboard from SMART Technologies in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. SMART is particularly helpful in presenting scientific evidence-oriented cases such as the Gerald Robinson trial, because prosecutors can mix images, video and other digital files on the board and annotate the content to help juries understand their arguments. In one case, Chris says he used the SMART board to demonstrate through an animation how a bullet pierced a door.

Using interactive whiteboards helps collaborators achieve common goals. For prosecutors, the goal is a conviction. While using an interactive whiteboard at a trial is more presentation-oriented, prosecutors can also use such tools more collaboratively while developing trial strategy. And many other occupations can enhance goal achievement and collaboration through interactive whiteboards. For engineers, the goal might be designing a world-class skyscraper or developing a more effective integrated circuit. For businesspeople, the goal might be penetrating a new market.

When we talk about collaboration tools, we’re usually referring to tools that collaborators in different locations use. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I point out that as distance collaboration tools get better, our challenge is to collaborate as effectively in the same room as we do remotely. Interactive whiteboards address this issue. We can push content from our laptops to the boards, group write documents, work together on graphic design or presentations, and even edit videos together in the same room. The take-away is that collaboration should be as effective when we’re sharing the same physical space as it is when we’re geographically-dispersed.

Adobe Acrobat Connect for Collaboration

I’ve been collaborating with a colleague in Minneapolis on new materials for The Culture of Collaboration™ Workshop. To bridge the distance gap, we’ve been using collaborative tools. One of those tools is Adobe Acrobat Connect, a subscription-based, hosted web conferencing service. Acrobat Connect is the latest incarnation of the Macromedia Breeze product, which Adobe rebranded after acquiring Macromedia in 2005. Acrobat Connect uses Adobe Flash Player, installed on roughly 97% of web browsers.

The beauty of Acrobat Connect is its simplicity. The application launches with a single click from Microsoft Office or Adobe programs. Then you’re prompted to either share your screen immediately or send an email invitation to participants. The invitation includes a URL and an audio conference number with session code.

Web conferencing is becoming more collaborative. The tool has traditionally been used for one-to-many or few-to-many presentations and training. By collaborative, I mean everybody can participate by simultaneously working on a document, spreadsheet or other program instead of one person clicking through slides while other people watch. True collaboration through web conferencing levels hierarchy by making all participants equal contributors, regardless of titles.

In Acrobat Connect, the host can decide whether to share control of the session and let others annotate material. Sharing control is often a good idea, as noted above. For more on why, check out the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration in The Culture of Collaboration book.

While Acrobat Connect includes a shared whiteboard with annotation tools, my colleague and I have been using the highlighters and other mark-up tools in Microsoft Word as we collaborate on The Culture of Collaboration™ Workshop materials. Incidentally, if you have a webcam and want to add videoconferencing to Acrobat Connect, that’s a single click.

One thing to watch for…Adobe has made two recent acquisitions that should ultimately enable Acrobat Connect and other Adobe programs with IM and presence (for more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post). In January, Adobe acquired Antepo, an enterprise IM company and Amicima, a peer-to-peer networking company.

Venture Capital and Global Collaboration

Global collaboration is becoming a hot topic for venture capitalists whose US-based portfolio companies are expanding into China, India and other regions. I’m attending a gathering of venture capitalists this week, and the kick-off session was about how to expand winning companies globally.

One VC panelist commented that the biggest problem for portfolio companies expanding globally is time zones. He explained that the COO may be in Japan, the CEO in California and the CTO and engineering team in Israel. “It’s so difficult to keep the communication flow among the management team,” he noted. The moderator asked the VC if there were any special tools that help. His response was “getting up early and going to bed late.” Another VC insisted that a range of tools including videoconferencing could close the distance gap for his portfolio companies.

Paradoxically, distance can create value. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe how collaborative companies like Boeing, Toyota and BMW leverage time zones, collaborative culture and tools to compress product cycle time. Clearly, chopping many months off a car or airplane development program creates substantial value. In the book, I also discuss Boeing’s use of mirror zones (see my March 16 post).

Even early stage, venture-backed companies can turn time zone differences into assets. The key is for entrepreneurs (with guidance from VC’s) to integrate global collaboration into business models. Start-ups have an advantage over many later-stage enterprises, because they can bake collaborative culture into the company’s DNA right from the start.        

Microsoft Upgrades Web Conferencing

Web conferencing is becoming richer and more collaborative. Traditionally, the tool has been used for scheduled one-to-many events more than for spontaneous collaborative sessions. With the advent of presence (see my March 7 post), however, collaborators can easily escalate interaction from instant messaging to a web conference or videoconference.

Microsoft revealed this morning at its TechEd conference in Orlando some features of the new version of its Live Meeting web conferencing service available in the fall. The same functionality will also become available in Microsoft’s upcoming release of its Office Communications Server 2007 product, now in public beta. The idea is to make on-the-fly collaborative sessions and scheduled meetings more like face-to-face encounters. The service is geared towards five kinds of web conferences:

1) Spontaneous collaborative sessions

2) Scheduled collaborative meetings

3) Scheduled presentations

4) Large public events

5) Training.

Live Meeting will support videoconferencing through webcams and RoundTable, a 360-degree panoramic video camera developed by Microsoft Research.  The new release has an active speaker function that switches the web cam video from one speaker to another. The new version of Live Meeting works with traditional phones and voice over IP and also integrates rich media such as Windows Media and Adobe Flash.

What will ultimately transform collaborative sessions and meetings at a distance are searching and sifting functions, and Microsoft Research has done significant work in this area. The idea is that if you miss a meeting, you can quickly find relevant sections on demand. This release of Live Meeting includes the ability to record and search the audio and video based on the active speaker, the slide number and the elapsed time. But this is only the beginning.

Soon intelligent meeting systems will let us search based on audio key words and video events such as people entering and leaving the meeting. This functionality exploits 360-degree cameras like RoundTable. Ross Cutler and his colleagues at Microsoft Research developed RoundTable’s prototype and have written about distributed meeting systems. You can check out their work here and get an idea of the functionality on the horizon.

Microsoft Office RoundTable (image courtesy of Microsoft)