Speak First, Then What? - Collaborative Technologies and Applications for Interactive Information Design - page 153

• geographic : Joe and Mary are co-located,

Bazzar and Mel sit in their own locations

• The Sacred Cow Conundrum : how dare

you measure me!

• functional : Joe works in marketing, Mary

in design, Bazzar in technology, and Mel is
the project leader

The “Tree Falling in the Forest” Trouble

• seniority : Joe is the most senior of the

bunch, Bazzar the youngest (he never
worked on a project like this before)

The “project vault”, as the content repository and
collaboration platform has become known as, now
has more than 500 documents. When the project
was started, the standard corporate structure
was installed, based on the functions. There are
separate folders for “Marketing”, “Design”,
“Technology”, “Project Management”, “Sales”
and the like. This greatly helped the team members
to know where to post their documents. Some of
them created sub directories inside their own.
Mary added folders for “Prototyping”, “External
Consultants”, and “Discards”. Joe structured his
folder after “Consumer Insights”, “Advertising”,
and “Projections”. Bazzar rarely uses the reposi-
tory, as he relies on the Concurrent Versioning
System that Technology has established. There
are no folders in his directory, and only a few
rather hefty documents. Mel has a folder struc-
ture that mimics the stage gates he has to lead
the project through: “Concept”, “Conversion”,
and “Execution”.

• language : Joe and Mary are native English

speakers, Bazzar and Mel are not

As “Lead Users”, these four have demanding
requirements.
There are demanding (and expensive) solutions
such as co-location, cross-functional organiza-
tions, coaching, and language training to resolve
these issues. These are typically not economically
feasible.An appropriately designed collaboration
system offers relief for some of these issues.

issues, Controversies, Problems

In working with real life collaboration application,
I came across several shortcomings. Below you
will find an overview of the issues discussed in
this text. This list does not claim completeness or
a specific focus on the formally most important
issues: Documents are spread all over these folders, some

containing even more sub-folders, as their owner
saw fit. Mary now adds a new design consultant,
Des, to the team, and instructs him to “go under-
stand the project by looking at the documents”.
After a day, Des returns to her in frustration. “I
cannot make heads or tails from this. What is im-
portant, what do I need to read?” So Mary starts
to look for herself, and is quickly overwhelmed.
Where did all this stuff come from? She asks Mel:
“Why are we using the repository thing when we
don't find anything in there? I am posting my stuff
like you asked us to do, but I cannot understand
what everybody else is doing.”

• The “Tree falling in the Forest” Trouble :
so much content, so little time
• The “Functional Fallacy” : structuring
content after functions
• The “Post Partum” Phenomenon : post
and forget
• The “Ignore the Ramblers” Idea : ignor-
ing commentators
• The “Measure what I do” Malaise : only
what is measured can be improved
• The “Pontification” Problem : when peo-
ple are too much involved

• The “Content Generation Divide”

Dysfunctionality : more than words