Jazzed About Work

To fire up your collaboration, jump over your firewall. Over the past few years, successful organizations have begun to work with other organizations -- legal firms, accounting firms, Web-design firms, logistics companies -- in a very big, very strategic way. As a result, people are communicating more than ever before with colleagues who are on the other side of a corporate firewall. The trouble is, the firewall is totally foreign to how we work.

Here's what I mean. When I collaborate with someone from another company, what happens? Clearly, he and I are separated: He's behind his company's firewall, and I'm behind the Groove firewall. Do we ask our respective IT people to create an extranet portal for us? Of course not. That would take too long, and we would use the portal for only a few days. So what do we do? We just pick up the phone, or send an email, or meet face-to-face -- and each of those things circumvents the corporate firewall.

Most of the collaborative tools that we as an industry have built -- Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Web technologies -- deal with interactions that occur either within an enterprise or beyond an enterprise, either inside a firewall or outside a firewall. Yet the more we try to integrate outside organizations into our core processes and practices, the more the corporate firewall becomes a barrier to interaction. Sure, we need to safeguard communications -- but we also need to clear the way for ad hoc, dynamic collaboration. Otherwise, we'll continue to see most workplace communication occur via phone, fax, and email.

Make the medium serve the message. It's almost impossible to determine which comes first -- technology or the need for technology. But for me, the starting point is always human need: You can't build a technology without first thinking about how people might use it. Early on, at least, the development process is not about technology; it's about sociology.

With Groove, I started out by analyzing how we interact when we work together. I came up with a matrix of 20 different dimensions of interpersonal communication, and then I asked myself, Which of those dimensions don't require Notes, or Exchange, or the Web?

For example, I might need to communicate an emotion. The most effective way for me to do that is to connect my voice with your ears: I pick up the phone, and I yell at you. Or I might need to communicate something visual. In that case, I'll make a picture, mark it up, and then fax it to you. Or I might need to communicate with someone who's in a different time zone. That calls for something that lets me store and forward messages. So I'll choose a medium, such as email or voice mail, that matches the temporal qualities of what I'm trying to do.

Both Lotus Notes and the Web operate only in one or two dimensions. They deliver documents or Web pages in an asynchronous fashion -- and that's it. The challenge is to build technology that matches the full variety of human interactions. Sometimes we use the phone, sometimes we use the fax, sometimes we use email. But how can we bring all of that together?

Power to the people -- and to the PCs. There's one myth about the Net that really concerns me: that "Internet" equals "Web." Thank goodness for Napster, because it's awoken us to the fact that there's more to the Net than just the Web. The Internet is like an electrical outlet or a phone jack: It's a means of getting bits from me to you. The Web is one use of the Net, and it's a great use. But there are a lot of other uses -- email, instant messaging, Napster, Groove -- and some of them haven't even been discovered yet.

Two years ago, [Oracle CEO] Larry Ellison's version of Net computing might have become a reality. The Ellison vision -- link everyone together through a centralized, server-based network -- is arguably the right one for computing within an enterprise. But it ignores the "personal" part of personal computing. After all, one job of an enterprise is to make people really productive. So there should be two parallel worlds: one that's built around centralized systems, and one that's built around direct, peer-to-peer systems.

Central intermediaries are great, but only if we can identify the value that they bring to the party. If I have a very high-value transaction or communication, why would I want to go through a central intermediary that could delay or distort that message? I just want to get the message from me to you in the most direct way possible.

People couldn't care less about the technology that this stuff is built on. What they respond to is the empowerment message -- the notion that tools like Napster and Groove eliminate the boundaries of time and place; that those tools create direct, dynamic connections between people; that, ultimately, this technology buys them independence.