Collaborative Thinking

A Quick Peak At Cisco Quad: Collaboration + Social + Unified Communications

Below is a video demonstration of some of Quad's main features.

Cisco is also integrating its Show and Share video technology into Quad, so users can quickly and easily post video. And there are APIs for integrating functionality via widgets. Cisco talked about integrating Salesforce, or project management. All of this will extend to the iPhone and the iPad, and, naturally, Cisco's Cius when it ships (this is the Cisco tablet).

via www.informationweek.com

If you're curious about Cisco Quad (re: what is it, how does it work, what can it integrate with, and what the user experience is like), watch the above video and read the entire story at Information Week. Anther good overview article can be found on TMCnet blogs: "Cisco Quad Points To Communications Future"

Immersive Collaboration: "Design We Can All Live With"

Very interesting to watch - and showcases the impact immersive collaborative experiences can have on transforming design practices. We tend to be stuck in the document-centric, workspace-centric notion of collaboration - but as the video illustrates - people are at the center of collaboration re: interaction, story-telling, relationship-building - building a shared context of a situation and ways to resolve it.

The video also shows the need for us to think much more broadly about the role networked devices (tablets, smart phones, pervasive video and telepresence) can have in delivering rich user experiences - we tend think of these technologies as being outside the realm of "collaboration". Increasingly, that line of thinking will really limit our ability to improve how people communicate and share information.

I love the argument made that an ethnographic approach was essential in achieving deep insight into their patient-centric design approach.

Source: Creating a patient-centered future for health care

Cisco Community Central: Enterprise Social Software : Don't Think Profile, Think Identity

When organizations discuss the business value of social networking, the conversation invariably includes a discussion on employee profiles. Strategists, sponsors, champions, and management teams often (not always but frequently) make the assumption that employees will create and maintain their own profiles. These profiles will include rich information not captured elsewhere in corporate systems. Rich employee profile data that is broadly accessible by co-workers will enable the organization to improve its ability to locate experts, discovery new sources of talent, connect people across the globe working on similar business activities, and enable better community-building. While these benefits are all possible, I consistently find that profiles are a common adoption hurdle faced by project teams across virtually all industry sectors.

 

I think part of the reason for profiles becoming an adoption barrier is that we are forgetting the identity aspects of profiles and how employees want themselves to be represented and viewed by others. Think about it. When a worker is hired, assigned an employee number, assigned to a cost center, assigned a labor grade, assigned to a particular department, and assigned specific roles to perform. In essence, the employer ascribes the identity of an employee to them. From an enterprise perspective, the employee has no identity other than the one the organization has defined for that individual. When the organization suddenly one day asks its workforce to create their own profiles, employees can be taken aback.

via www.myciscocommunity.com

My first blog post over on the Cisco community site for enterprise social software (registration required):