The Connected Web

Driven by the spread of the Web and advances in Web capabilities over the past ten years, a new way of working in distributed teams has become commonplace for a broad range of project-based activities. In media and advertising, software development, construction, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing product design and financial services, it's now routine to bring together individuals that work in different locations and timezones to collaborate closely on complex tasks.

This is stuff people used to do together in a single, open-plan office, and it's been necessary to evolve completely new habits and processes to make it work. A blog post by Max Klein yesterday spells out how unsatisfactory some of that evolution has been:

"I am involved in about five different web based businesses ... Each business has a different set of collaborators (people who work with me on them, partners, employees, freelancers) ... I collaborated by email. When something needed to be done, I would send out an email. When I discovered something new I would send out an email ... we would also send designs and screenshots by email — needless to say, things would get lost — hardly anything would get done on time, and the most common reply I would get back is that they missed the particular instruction in the mass of emails I would send. To compound my trouble, we were collaborating across multiple time zones — UK, US Pacific Time, Indian time and Singapore time. Emails would arrive in the night and it is depressing to wake up to 35 new emails from different people."

Pause for a moment and consider how impossible that scenario would have seemed to anyone in business just a decade ago (how improbable it likely seems to many business people even today). A single person co-ordinating five different businesses? Across five timezones that span from GMT +8 to GMT -8? All being run on the Web without anyone ever picking up a phone (except to make a Skype call)? How is that realistically possible?

As Klein's posting reveals, it wasn't working too well: "I was in a period I like to refer to as the age of chaos and anger." He goes on to explain how he happened to start using Google Wave and suddenly discovered that it solved many of those earlier problems. He concludes with a list of the ways Google Wave has changed his working experience and I reproduce it here because it's a fascinating insight into the issues faced by people whom the Web has brought together into these close-knit distributed teams that have to figure out new ways of working together:

• "My stress level is way lower


• "Conversations are now organised in topics, and no longer flat


• "Fights have become more constructive


• "Working across multiple time zones is no longer a problem


• "I can share screenshots, design documents with multiple and different people with ease


• "I have a single control panel to manage all my conversation with everyone I am working with


• "Before Google Wave, I felt like I was working very much and getting very little done. After google wave, I feel I am doing little work, but I am making more and more money every month


• "I feel in control of my business — with my iPhone I can access the heart of my business anytime and anywhere."

Several of the items on this list would make little sense to anyone still working in a 20th-century style of office environment ('What does he mean, "fights", can't people just sit down together and work out their differences face to face?'). They are only now beginning to be recognized as commonplace patterns that emerge in this new, online working environment, and thus new tools are coming to market that help resolve them — and which will compound the differences from earlier ways of working. Not just Google Wave, by the way. There are many online collaboration platforms out there that provide far better support for distributed teams than trying to survive with email and Skype, and this blog will be covering many of them over the coming year.