The Culture of Collaboration

Breaking Corporate Rules to Collaborate

What happens when team members want to collaborate, but command-and-control approaches and internal competition prevail in culture and processes? New research indicates team members are starting to “spoof the system” by flouting organizational guidelines and creating work-arounds so they can collaborate. The global study conducted by InsightExpress and funded by Cisco surveyed more than two thousand end users and a thousand information technology decision makers from ten countries. The study found that 52 percent of organizations prohibit the use of social media applications and 50 percent of end users admit to ignoring company policies at least once a week. “End users have started to take things into their own hands,” says Alan Cohen, Cisco’s vice president of enterprise solutions.

 

The study found that users most willing to break company policies are those in the United Kingdom and France. Respondents in China were least likely to violate corporate rules. Still, the survey found that companies in China and India had significantly higher adoption rates of collaborative tools than companies in the United States or the United Kingdom. This is likely because companies in these growing economies are relatively new, and therefore their infrastructures are by no means set in stone.

 

Ironically, the study found that 77 percent of IT decision makers plan to increase spending on collaboration tools this year, while team members say corporate policies are constraining collaboration. Investing in collaborative tools makes little sense if an organization lacks the culture and processes to support the tools. The result is a schizophrenic organization in which some team members break rules, others operate by the book, and most team members get confused by mixed messages. Considering the study results, a prime opportunity exists for leaders to think and act collaboratively and for organizations to adopt collaborative culture.

 

Cisco will gladly sell you any and all of its more than 60 collaboration products. But buying these products or those of any other collaboration tools vendor will produce limited results unless your organization makes a fundamental commitment to collaboration. This shift includes moving away from command-and-control, internally-competitive culture and processes and replacing the pass-along, serial approach to work and decision-making with spontaneous, real-time models. I address this in the introduction to The Culture of Collaboration book.

 

Intercompany Collaboration: Focus on Culture and Processes

 

On another note…outmoded culture and processes can curb collaboration and compromise value—whether we’re talking about within a company or “outside the firewall.”  As vendors and standards groups resolve intercompany collaboration technology issues, there’s a temptation to conclude that intercompany collaboration is “good to go.”

 

About three weeks ago, I participated in a discussion via TelePresence with Cisco senior vice presidents Tony Bates and Barry O’Sullivan. The company was discussing details of its new Intercompany Media Engine, which extends unified communications among companies. So, a supplier can easily view the availability or “presence status” of a customer, connect via instant messaging, and easily escalate the interaction to a voice call, web conference, or telepresence. You can view video of a demo call here. Meantime, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working on an open standard for telepresence and unified communications so that people can interact regardless of technology vendor. This has particular relevance for business partners with different installed telepresence brands. Ultimately, the challenge for intercompany collaborators goes well beyond the technology. Organizations must focus on adopting collaborative culture and processes and integrating them across organizational boundaries.

Telepresence Enhancing Travel?

Videoconferencing and telepresence vendors have traditionally marketed their products as a replacement for travel. This is shortsighted in that real value creation comes from integrating real-time video into business processes. Using telepresence so that people can come together spontaneously and design an airplane or develop animation or create a 24-hour healthcare delivery service produces far greater value than travel savings.

 

Considering the obsession with marketing real-time video as a travel replacement, you might think hotels would be lukewarm about videoconferencing and telepresence. But there was nothing tepid about Mary Casey and Bob Hermany’s view of Cisco TelePresence as they announced on Tuesday Starwood’s roll out of public TelePresence rooms. The first two Starwood properties to offer TelePresence are the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, Australia and the W Chicago. You can view the announcement video here. Incidentally, Mary is Starwood’s vice president of global corporate sales and Bob is Starwood’s senior vice president of operations.

 

Starwood will also install Cisco TelePresence at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, the Westin Los Angeles Airport and the Sheraton Centre Toronto during 2010. Later, the hotel chain will adopt TelePresence at properties in San Francisco, Dallas, Brussels and Frankfurt, among others. In my October 15, 2008 post, I wrote that Cisco and its partner, Tata Communications, were introducing public TelePresence rooms and that the first hotel chain to participate was the Taj Hotels.

 

During a TelePresence call linking several global locations, Sean Hunt, a Starwood executive who manages the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney positioned Australia’s first public TelePresence room as both a travel benefit and alternative. “The problem is we’re isolated from the rest of the world, so this is a great alternative to long-haul travel.” The point is that rather than replace travel, TelePresence lets somebody outside Australia who may never have taken the flight get face-to-face with colleagues and partners.

Aside from marketing and public relations advantages, there are potentially tangible benefits for hotels that adopt TelePresence. Besides renting rooms at rates that can approach $500 a day, hotels can charge $500 an hour for TelePresence. That’s the rate at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney. Australian dollars, of course.

Managing Workflow through the Virtual Worlds of Qwaq Forums

Some businesspeople are spending most of their day in 3D, immersive environments known as virtual worlds. This development emerged during a wide-ranging discussion last week with Greg Nuyens, CEO of Qwaq, which provides tools to create virtual worlds or “forums” optimized for business users.

 

Greg, whose company is today releasing version 2.0 of Qwaq Forums at the 3D Learning, Training and Collaboration conference (3D TLC)  in Washington, D.C., observed that there are three types of Qwaq users. The first group spends about two thirds of the day in Qwaq and likely uses the software’s IP audio capability for most voice calls. The second group jumps in and out of the forums throughout the day, leaving the virtual “lobby” up all day long.  The third group uses Qwaq periodically through a browser, which is a new capability included in version 2.0.

 

Qwaq combines the real-time collaboration functionality of web conferencing with the 3D immersive experience of virtual worlds. For background on Qwaq, see my March 13, 2007 post and my September 21, 2007 post.  Clearly, the Qwaq development team has invested significant time and thought into integrating the tool into enterprise workflow.  The version 2.0 interface is more geared to workplace collaboration with greater ability to move easily and gracefully around the virtual workplace-- from the lobby to meeting rooms to cubicles to offices to auditoriums to command centers and around campuses. Meantime, users can share documents, slides, MPEG4 video, browsers, whiteboards, and other applications. Also, Qwaq supports real-time, interactive Webcam video and recording/capture of virtual meetings.

 

Qwaq customers announced today include Chevron and the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center, two of the roughly one hundred enterprise customers that Qwaq has reportedly garnered.  The Navy is using Qwaq as part of its virtual Combat Systems Center to remotely train submarine operators. The software running in the Center’s Qwaq Forum is the same software running on the weapons console. So the boundaries between real and virtual are clearly fading.

 

According to Greg, Qwaq’s goals include “bridging distance to make meetings in forums more efficient than in the same room.” As I noted in my book, The Culture of Collaboration, as collaborative tools get more advanced, the next frontier is making same-room collaboration as effective as collaborating at a distance.

Telepresence and Formality

Cisco’s use of TelePresence last Monday to announce its Unified Computing System sparked an interesting reaction on the New York Times Bits blog. The Times republished the blog post in today’s print edition.

 

The post by Ashlee Vance takes aim at Cisco for the “scripted” feel of the 14-site TelePresence session for reporters and analysts. You can read the story here. Some reporters who showed up at Cisco headquarters for a news conference were apparently frustrated that Cisco CEO John Chambers was in another suite upstairs rather than in the same room with the media. Vance also writes that the question-and-answer session that followed the two-hour event also felt scripted in that Cisco apparently muted microphones and prevented follow-up questions.

 

OK. It’s time for a discussion of formality and telepresence. First, let’s separate the event from the technology. I did not attend the event, so I can’t comment about its execution. However, I did participate in a launch event and news conference last October for Cisco’s public TelePresence suites. You can read about it in my October 15, 2008 post.

 

Like last Monday’s Cisco event, executives at the October 15, 2008 event were in a separate TelePresence suite from reporters and analysts who were in the same building. This worked well, because the local group was relatively small, and each participant had a seat at the TelePresence table. Also, the approach was particularly appropriate in that the subject of the event was TelePresence itself. During the event, which linked about six sites, I had no problem asking follow up questions and engaging in an extended dialogue with Cisco senior leaders.

 

In contrast, holding a 14-site news conference like the one last Monday certainly can increase logistical issues and reduce the question time per reporter. The benefit, though, of using TelePresence for the event is that it significantly increased media participation globally, so that a reporter in Asia could gain the same access as a Silicon Valley-based reporter for The New York Times—access to Cisco CEO John Chambers and other participating CEO’s including Paul Otellini of Intel, Joe Tucci of EMC, Paul Maritz of VMware, and Bill Green of Accenture.  

 

Despite increased access for geographically-dispersed journalists, there was clearly a disconnect between Cisco and at least some reporters who showed up at Cisco headquarters expecting a same-room news conference. Here lies the problem. Some reporters may have felt that Cisco was insensitive to their needs, and these reporters failed to grasp the benefits and potential of TelePresence. Consider the potential power of this tool…people coming together regardless of level, role or region and interacting in an immersive virtual environment that approximates across-the-table, same-room interaction. Some reporters missed this, in part because of formality.

 

This disconnect highlights the need to ensure that the use of telepresence mirrors in-person interaction and preserves in-person etiquette.  Reporters on deadline get restless and frustrated if they must wait two hours before asking questions, and they always want the option to ask follow-up questions. Otherwise, they feel controlled at best and muzzled at worst.

  

It would be unfortunate, though, if New York Times readers confused any concerns about event execution with the technology itself. The greatest potential for telepresence and TelePresence (the spelling with capital letters is Cisco’s brand of the technology) is for informal, spontaneous interactions. Currently, telepresence is used primarily for scheduled meetings and events. The most collaborative organizations use real-time, interactive video for on-the-fly encounters. I profile some of these organizations and describe specific ways companies can create value through informal, spontaneous interactions in my current book, The Culture of Collaboration.

 

Since the publication of my first book, Personal Videoconferencing (1996), my team and I have been conducting research on—among other aspects of collaboration— using visual communications for spontaneous, informal interactions. Recently, I formalized this research effort by establishing The Culture of CollaborationÒ Institute. My future books and derivatives will leverage the Institute’s research. If your organization is interested in supporting our work, let me know.

 

Organizational culture, environment and business processes are key to enabling spontaneity and informality. Tools including telepresence—used effectively—are critical enablers in extending and enhancing an informal, spontaneous culture. I highlighted the role of informality in collaboration during an interview with CNBC’s Donnie Deutsch on the “Collaboration Now” primetime special. You can view a video clip here.

 

Telepresence is a key element in collaborative enterprises and will soon become available at much lower price points for consumer use. Without informal, spontaneous uses of the tool, vendors run the risk that people will view telepresence as a tool only for formal, scheduled events and meetings. The real value of telepresence is enabling on-the-fly encounters, sort of a virtual water cooler.

Architectural Collaboration and the California Academy of Sciences

As I gazed at the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper and other amazingly-clear star formations last Thursday evening, there was no distraction from city lights or from the fog that often defines San Francisco.

I was sitting in the world’s largest digital planetarium, which uses real-time data from NASA plus immersive video technology. The NASA data accurately represents the current night sky, and the immersive video technology makes visitors feel like they’re travelling through space.

 

The star-studded evening program was a departure from the usual daytime planet presentation in honor not only of Charles Darwin’s 200^th birthday last Thursday evening, but also of the launch of NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences. NightLife is a weekly Thursday evening event featuring bars, food plus all of the Academy exhibits. 

 

I walked, Lagunitas India Pale Ale in hand, through the recently-reopened museum and marveled at the four-story glass rainforest with its colorful poison frogs and Borneo bats and the graceful movement of jellyfish in the Steinhart aquarium, which includes thirty-eight thousand animals. Aside from official certifications that the Academy is the “greenest” museum on the planet, I found the museum’s “Living Roof” stunning and unique.   The 197-thousand foot roof features seven hills containing many native plant species. The concept was to blend the building’s environment with that of Golden Gate Park and to reduce the Academy’s energy needs by creating oxygen, capturing rainwater and avoiding the heat-trapping disadvantages of tar-and-asphalt roofs.

 

After a decade of planning and $500 million in expenses, the Academy reopened last fall to much fanfare.

At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an interesting story by John Cote that described how the Academy’s board of directors chose an architectural team for the project. By July of 1999, the board had reportedly narrowed its search to five finalists. According to the story, a British architect arrived with five associates, two trays of slides and detailed mockups of two specific designs. He spoke for an hour and a half.

 

When it was Italian architect Renzo Piano’s turn, he began by rearranging the room chairs in a circle. He then used a blank pad to sketch as he listened to board members describe the importance of nature, biodiversity, and naturalistic forms. Ultimately, Piano and his team got the job because of his collaborative approach. Rather than simply presenting options to the board, Piano engaged and involved his client. The result reflects broad input and the collaborative sessions between architect and client.

 

Too often in organizations, people make decisions in a vacuum. Those decisions are handed down to people who must implement them. This causes a chasm between the decision makers and the decision implementers and many others who are impacted by decisions. Then there’s a lot of talk like “They want us to ….” Or “they’ve decided that we’re supposed to….” So, an “us and them” mentality develops and sucks the motivation, innovation and value out of an organization.

 

In contrast, collaborative organizations make decisions by involving and engaging people across levels, functions, business units and regions. When people have a stake in decisions, “us and them” dissolves. I’ve written in The Culture of Collaboration book and in this blog about the interplay of culture, environment and tools in sparking collaboration. In his initial session with the Academy’s board, Renzo Piano used all three. He changed the culture by involving the board in the conceptual process. He redesigned the environment by rearranging the rooms chairs in a circle. And he used a blank sketch pad as a collaborative tool.

 

It’s a reminder—one that we stress in The Culture of CollaborationÒ Workshop—that collaborative culture can begin with a team gathering or a spontaneous exchange. In the case of the California Academy of Sciences, the result is an extraordinarily functional and “green” architectural masterpiece.

Virtual Events Becoming Economic Necessity

Companies in many industries are slashing conference, trade show and sales meeting budgets and replacing traditional events with virtual ones. Publishing is one such industry. According to a story in last Monday’s New York Times, Macmillan will hold two out of three of its 2009 sales conferences virtually via web conferencing. This contrasts sharply with the sales and marketing meeting Macmillan held at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego last month during which participants participated in wine tastings and got massages. 

 

However, it takes more than adopting tools for virtual events to become a collaborative organization. For many companies, true collaboration requires a wholesale shift. Exigent circumstances can raise consciousness for the shift even in otherwise intransigent cultures. Exigent circumstances include industry realignments, disruptive technology, new competition, and economic downturns.

Facing market challenges in the current recession, many companies are getting a wake up call. 

 

Sparked by reduced budgets, many companies are accelerating their adoption or use of real-time collaborative tools to transform their events and meetings into virtual encounters. These tools include virtual worlds, telepresence, web conferencing and videoconferencing.

 

The right tool choice depends on situations and cultures. For external events such as trade shows and job fairs, it’s necessary to create an experience that will draw people to a brand. To recreate that experience virtually, the 3D immersive quality of virtual worlds like Second Life or Qwaq makes sense. Qwaq is geared to business users and combines an immersive experience with web conferencing functionality. So users can work together while sharing applications in a virtual auditorium or conference room. CNN recently ran an interesting story on virtual trade shows. You can view the story here.

 

For leadership retreats, strategy sessions and board meetings, detecting subtleties such as eye movement is critical. Therefore, telepresence fits the bill, because of its quality visual experience and the feeling that participants are sharing the same space.  To replace a data-driven sales meeting, web conferencing makes sense because the focus is on the slides or spreadsheet more than people. For a cross-functional meeting that includes, say, sales and marketing people, relationship time is necessary before plunging into data. In that case, telepresence or videoconferencing is appropriate.

 

For Macmillan and other organizations, creating value through collaboration requires more than holding two out of three sales conferences virtually. So, perhaps Macmillan is considering adopting collaboration more broadly. It’s time to move beyond sporadic, scheduled use of collaborative tools. Value-driven organizations are integrating collaborative practices and tools into work styles and collaborative culture into organizational DNA.

 

In this downturn, the smart money is rethinking how we do business, reconsidering command-and-control approaches, and moving collaboration to the front burner. This will help organizations survive short term and thrive long term.

 

 

Cisco, Tata and Taj Hotels Bringing Telepresence to Smaller Companies and the Public

As I walked into Cisco’s new public telepresence suites yesterday at the WebEx tower in Santa Clara, California, I was greeted by a video receptionist. “Hi, may I help you?,” the receptionist said. I immediately sensed professional intimacy, because of the quality of the visual experience. “I’m here for a Cisco telepresence session,” I explained. The receptionist then invited me to help myself to the catered breakfast in the outer lobby. I then grabbed a cup of milky, cardamom-spiced Indian coffee, which hinted at the global nature of what was about to happen.

 

Down the corridor were several public telepresence rooms of different sizes. Cisco people including Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of the emerging technology group, were in one room with Peter Quinlan, director of telepresence managed services for Tata Communications. I was in another room with the research director of The Culture of CollaborationÒ Institute plus a few journalists and analysts.

 

Joining from his home in Bangalore, India was Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s chief globalization officer, presumably conducting his last meeting of the day at 11:00 p.m. Bangalore time. In London, Vinod Kumar, chief operating officer of Tata Communications, and his colleagues participated. From Boston, Taj Boston Hotel General Manager David Gibbons joined us from the Taj’s new telepresence public room. From New York, an industry analyst was also connected.  So, our group spanned the globe—six connections in four time zones. However, we felt almost as if we were sitting across the table from each other.

 

Cisco and its partners are challenging the notion that telepresence is an exclusive tool for Fortune 500 executives. “We have found that the largest users of telepresence are the mid-management level in our organization,” says Kumar of Tata Communications, a subsidiary of the $62.5 billion Tata Group. If you’ve been to India, you know that the Tata name is everywhere—on motor vehicles, industrial equipment, and even tea. In recent years,Tata has become a global company.

 

Tata is a highly-strategic relationship for Cisco in that besides its communications business, the Mumbai, India-based conglomerate has holdings in engineering and building, services, chemicals and consumer products. Taj Hotels, a Tata company, is providing public telepresence rooms in Boston, London, Bangalore, Mumbai and other cities throughout India. “Small and medium-sized businesses will be the greatest users,” predicted Gibbons of the Taj Boston Hotel. There will be a hundred public TelePresence (note that Cisco capitalizes the “P” in its trademarked product name) suites globally by late 2009, according to Cisco. Hourly fees currently range from $299 for a 1-2 participant room to $899 for an 18-participant room.

 

Unlike office buildings that typically close nights, weekends and holidays, hotels are open 24/7 every day of the year and provide perhaps the best opportunity to maximize a global business environment through pay-per-use telepresence. It’s a holiday in your city, but you need to connect intimately with colleagues in another region where it’s a regular work day? Hotel-based telepresence addresses that issue.

 

Significant from a technical perspective, Cisco and Tata are providing secure, encrypted conversation through any company’s firewall. “This has not been possible before with any technology,” noted Marthin De Beer of Cisco. Tata Communications delivers converged voice, video and data over Internet protocol (IP). Tata’s strategy is to get companies used to telepresence through public rooms and work on migrating some companies to invest in their own telepresence rooms.

Cisco says it has integrated 300 telepresence systems into its own operations globally. Some senior leaders including De Beer have their own systems, and Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s chief globalization officer, joined yesterday’s telepresence session from his home office in Bangalore, India.

 

While much has been made about videoconferencing and telepresence reducing long-distance travel, these tools can also reduce local travel and commuting. De Beer noted that he saves an hour per day by using telepresence instead of driving to meetings on and around Cisco’s campus. As telepresence becomes more widespread, people will gain the opportunity to work globally while reconnecting with their physical—as opposed to virtual—communities. Telepresence will also allow for better work/life balance and potentially take social responsibility to the next level.

 

After the session, as I said goodbye to the video receptionist, I wondered whether receptionists in Mumbai, Manila and Montego Bay will soon be greeting visitors in corporate lobbies in Memphis, Modesto and Milwaukee. Well, Cisco’s Marthin De Beer, who is based at the company’s headquarters in California, has a video assistant who works from Texas and virtually greets visitors to his office. So, Cisco is clearly practicing what it’s preaching.

Spontaneous Telepresence and Cisco's Collaboration Advances

An overlooked aspect of Cisco’s announcement yesterday of its new collaboration portfolio is tighter integration between the company’s telepresence and unified communications product lines. Collaboration tools are far more valuable—both from the vendor and customer perspectives—as part of an integrated strategy rather than as stand-alone solutions.

 

So far, telepresence has been largely limited to scheduled sessions and has had little integration with unified communications. The real benefit of unified communications is that it enables spontaneous encounters. Unified communications leverages presence (not to be confused with telepresence). Presence lets colleagues find each other, view each other’s availability on “buddy” lists or corporate directories and connect spontaneously through instant messaging, voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing. It’s also possible to do 1-click escalation from one mode to another.

 

The capability to connect spontaneously is essential in supporting the cultural shift to real-time collaboration. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, the move towards collaborative business models is about shifting from the pass-along approach to work to “do it now together.” So as telepresence becomes integrated with unified communications, users will be able to escalate on the fly from IM, voice, and web conferencing to telepresence.

 

Cisco’s new TelePresence Expert on Demand integrates the immersive experience of telepresence with call handling features of unified communications. The product is optimized for business-to-consumer scenarios. A bank branch customer interested in a specialized loan investment or comprehensive relationship can connect instantly with the right expert (read salesperson) in a remote location. Patients at a regional medical clinic can gain access to specialist doctors. “The customer feels as if he or she is sitting across the desk from the expert,” notes Chris Thompson, senior director of marketing for Cisco’s unified communications group.

 

Using telepresence in this way is new and will provide many opportunities. However, the concept of expert on demand using video seems newer than it is. After a discussion last week with Chris Thompson about Cisco's upcoming announcement and uses for Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand, I flipped through a book I wrote that was published in 1996 called Personal Videoconferencing. The book describes a broad range of uses for videoconferencing including the expert-on-demand model that Cisco is now marketing for telepresence. Experts I wrote about ranged from financial specialists to doctors to educators. At the time, US Bank, Huntington Bancshares and Citibank were conducting pilot programs using video banking kiosks linking customers with financial product specialists.

 

Telemedicine typically uses real-time video communications to link doctors with patients, doctors with doctors, and other health professionals with doctors and patients. As part of extensive research into telemedicine I began conducting in the 1990’s, I spent time with telehome nurses who deliver expertise to patients via video. While telepresence is currently cost-prohibitive for most home use, the technology could be used in nursing homes and care centers. Here’s a link to a column I wrote in 1997 on telehome healthcare for Telemedicine Today magazine.

 

Telemedicine can extend medical specialties to underserved populations including rural areas, developing countries and prisons. Considering that a drawback of telemedicine is the sub-optimal virtual environment of standard videoconferencing, telepresence could significantly enhance the experience for both patients and doctors.

 

While researching telemedicine in 1999, I visited Pelican Bay State Prison, a maximum security facility which houses California’s most violent criminal offenders. Pelican Bay is in Crescent City, California, a rural community where there is a real shortage of doctors, particularly specialists. Because many of California’s prisons are in underserved areas, the California Department of Corrections began using telemedicine in the late 1990’s to link doctors with inmates. Gastroenterologists, psychiatrists and other specialists saw patients at prisons throughout California via video from a telemedicine services center in Sacramento. Primary care doctors were on site with the patients. Telepresence could have enhanced these consultations.

 

Cisco’s TelePresence Expert on Demand will enhance remote expert applications with a more immersive and natural experience. Also, the product is a major step towards integrating telepresence with unified communications. Cisco says that full integration of telepresence with unified communications for enterprise collaboration is in the works. That advance is essential, because telepresence will become more spontaneous and part of work flow.

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.”