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A theme of my postings this Autumn has been how to work more efficiently - in particular, how to collaborate more efficiently. For example, I described last month how the business world is waking up to the problems caused by email (see Inbox Zero). However, it is not really fair to blame email per se - for two reasons.

First, the problem is wider than messaging. People may finally be realising the business problems caused by email-related issues such as:

• Groaning inboxes
• Failure to group messages naturally by content
• Discussions that fizzle out
• Discussions that fragment among different colleagues
• Discussions that lose their purpose entirely
• ...

However, even these issues are only part of a general problem: the inability to structure high value human work. Other symptoms that are only indirectly related to email (or messaging generally) include:

• Documents scattered all over your file system
• No way of returning to a previous version of a document
• No way of knowing what version of a document your colleagues are using
• Actions that cannot be tracked
• Actions for which you are not sure if anyone has even taken responsibility
• Doing work without knowing what value anyone is getting from it
• ...

The general problem is that people doing high value work may have a great deal of skill and experience; they may be able to get on well with their colleagues; they may be motivated and committed. But this is not enough. Without an understanding of how to work, all these inputs are often put to less than optimal use. This is a polite way of describing things - many people routinely feel as if they are banging their head against a brick wall when trying to get things done in an organizational context.

This brings us to the second reason why it is not fair to blame email per se: the problem is not fundamentally one of technology. The root of the problem is that people go about their business, and their employer's business, without having any useful way of structuring their activities. The means currently on offer are either not supportive enough (for example, time management techniques and calendar software) or too restrictive (workflow and BPM, even in its current evolution towards integration with office systems). None of these offer a robust framework in which the individual can understand who they are working with, on what, when things must be done, and why it is all happening in the first place. Since all these things change every day, it is all the more vital to provide the individual with a way of seeing the wood for the trees.

This way of seeing is not a set of diary appointments or task sequences - it is a network of goals, responsibilities and commitments. For more information, see the Human Interaction Management Web site.

TAKE AWAY

The desktop of the 21st century will not contain menu items and icons pointing to programs that you have installed - rather, it will contain active collaborations that you are engaged in. You will not explore files in folders - you will explore documents that represent your involvement in a process. You will not keep one list of contacts in Outlook and another in Skype - you will just have a list of colleagues, identified by name rather than messaging address.

The workflow and BPM community is unlikely to make this happen, since it represents a seismic shift in approach:

• Away from monolithic server-side applications and towards lightweight peer-to-peer computing
• Away from task sequences and towards human interactions
• Away from the IT department and towards the business person.

The desktops of the future are as likely to come from the games community as the enterprise integration world!

In the meantime, the reference implementation for the desktop of the 21st century is the free HumanEdj software. If you would like a sneak peek at the future, the new version is just out in beta.

Posted by keithhb in Management |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us