The vision - Part II

So it was a nice vision - connecting people to people and leveraging their collective knowledge to help you work smarter. But there were some challenges. One around technology and the other around processes (for you can have the best technology in the world but if no one used it effectively ...).

Regarding the technology issue we feIt that there was already lots of good collaboration technology out there so we didn't want Ensemble to be in the business of writing collaboration software. But what was missing was a way to start linking all these technologies created by different companies together to create a connected, user-centric experience. This is especially important for companies who may already be using some collaboration technologies and are looking to enhance, not replace, what they have.

One thing I liked from my years at SmartForce was the eLearning industry model of assembling courses from content objects. It was powerful in that it allowed you to take content created by different people and link it together in a linear fashion. The result was a variety of solutions that allowed you to easily create content and courses in a scalable and repeatable way.

But for collaboration there was no such scalable and repeatable process. Anyone who has tried to add collaboration realizes that it is not an easy task. To help fill the gap companies emerged that offer collaboration suites but then you are stuck using their proprietary technologies. We wanted something that would be much more flexible to tie together all these technologies and able to take advantage of new technologies as they emerged.

So we built a Collaboration Management Framework. It can encapsulate existing third party collaboration technologies into 'collaboration objects' that you can then assemble together create dynamic collaboration workspaces. Think of it as a hosted gateway to these other technologies.

So this allows for some interesting stuff to happen:
(1) the collaboration objects can share the same end user interface even though the underlying technologies may come from different vendors
(2) you can create collaboration workspaces by selecting the objects you want. For example:
[chat room] + [discussion group] + [knowledge base] + [global search]
(3) you can also create collaboration workflows that link objects together. For example click on Chat and the flow could be:
- "please type in your question" (question object)
- the question text string is used to search the related knowledgebase and present possible answers (knowledgebase object)
- if you didn't find your answer proceed into the chat (chat object)
- at the end of the chat the transcript is emailed to you and added to your collaboration record (email object)
- the person at the other end of the chat has the option of going back into the knowledgebase and updating it with the resulting refined question/answer pair so that next time the user will find the answer faster.
(4) collaboration objects can be reused so instead of creating a new discussion group you may want to reuse an existing one (like Technical Support discussion group).




Of course it took Mike LeBlanc's team almost two years to build the framework (making collaboration simple is a complex task [smile]).

So that helped to solve the technology challenge. The other issue was more of a people issue, i.e. the need to develop processes to help people interact much more effectively than is currently possible. This fundamentally revolved around the issue of adding context to collaboration. The context is critical especially when delivering collaboration on a large scale:
- who is the user?
- where did he come from?
- how did he enter?

This is more than simple personalization ("Hello Ben"), this is about creating a collaboration workspace that dynamically changes according to all facets of the person.
- who is the user?
To place interactions into context you need to know his name, when he joined, what is his peer rating, how many interactions has he been involved with etc. Supplemental information to help you weigh his comments. Think about eBay - what makes you trust the guy on the other end of an auction? His eBay profile certainly helps.
- where did he come from?
If I come in from a link in a course versus clicking on Community on my company's intranet I should be shown different collaboration options. Maybe one has a Live Help chat and the other doesn't.
- how did he enter?
Ben@Office is different than Ben@Home - I'm still Ben but my ability to interact are defined by my access device. My office computer may have a faster Internet connection but my computer at home has a videoconferencing camera. My workspace needs to adapt accordingly.

So we also created a set of global services within the framework that sits on top of the workspace:
- presence awareness
- environment detection
- rating and ranking
etc.
The global services were designed to be independent of the underlying collaboration objects and are used to enhance and extend their functionality (as not all technologies have these functions and if they do they are all implemented differently).

So hopefully this gives you a glimpse as to what Ensemble is creating. Now that you have our background however in future posts I will be focusing on changes in the collaboration industry and pointing out trends that I think are important to creating effective collaboration experiences!

The vision - Part I

When I started my first company, scholars.com, in 1995 I became convinced that the Internet was more than just a delivery medium; that it was possible to connect people together in ways not previously possible. To me that's the power of the Internet.

With scholars.com it was about connecting learners to mentors (subject matter experts) 24x7 through online courses. This introduced me to the power of connecting people together though in this case it was to get a technically correct answer. But CBT Systems, the world's largest eLearning company, liked it enough to buy my company.

But during my subsequent years at CBT Systems/SmartForce/SkillSoft I realized that the world was getting more complex with a lot more shades of gray. There was no longer just one right answer to a question, there were often several answers from several sources:
- how does my company do it? (talk to employees)
- How do others do it? (talk to peers for best practices)
- What is the technically correct way of doing it? (talk to experts)

And unlike 1995, when there wasn't a lot of content or people on the Internet, today there is too much. It's like going into a library where all the books have no titles and no one is wearing name tags (why do you think Google was created?). No context. And of course what have companies focused on over the last several years? Connecting people to content (web pages, articles, courses etc)! In all the excitement around the technology we have forgotten about the people and the knowledge they already possess.

So I started Ensemble Collaboration with the goal of finding a better way of connecting people to one another and use their collective knowledge to help people work smarter. Very quickly I surrounded myself with people far smarter than I (Mike LeBlanc and my wife Sasha) who took it to a whole other level and started to bring it to life.

Inspired by how eBay convinces strangers to buy stuff from one another (trust and security) and how Amazon.com became a great source of book reviews (peer rating and ranking) we likewise wanted to create a 'gated knowledge Internet'. A place where I could get answers and not have to reinvent the wheel (I'm a firm believer that in today's connected world 80% of the answer I am looking for probably already exists and the remaining 20% will likely come from collaboration for some personalized mentoring).

So we had to create a soution to hide the back-end complexity of collaboration from the users, speed up the administrative task of creating/maintaining collaboration and improve the quality of the interactions. In short just like Google helps you find the right content we wanted something to help you find the right people.

(see the next post on how we did it)