ECM – Page 10 – Column 2

ECM vs. wiki

I recently ran up against the question of when to use a content/document management system and when to use a wiki for content inside an organization. I had some thoughts of my own on the subject, my customer had some other thoughts, I went out the Twitterverse for advice, and had an interesting dinner discussion at home to see what others had to say. The results were interesting.

I ended up having a phone call with David Bressler, and thanks to Theo Priestley I shared some tweets with Chris Bennetts-Cash and Andrew Smith, after which Andrew wrote a blog post that summed it up as follows:

Use a wiki for pure content that requires no level of security and maximum levels of accessibility. Use a document management / ECM system for everything else.

Although I come from a more traditional ECM environment, I tend towards a definition coming from the other direction, although likely with a similar effect: use wikis for all internal content by default, unless specific factors dictate the use of ECM. If you think about it, much internal content follows some basic patterns:

It’s created by more than one author
It must be accessible to a wide audience inside the company, but is not required outside the company
It requires frequent updating, but doesn’t need approval or versioning for editing

There’s a ton of content sitting out there right now on companies’ shared network drives that follow exactly that pattern: documents and spreadsheets that are regularly updated by multiple authors for things such as project status, departmental administration, meeting agendas and even collaborative design documents. Some of that content needs to have the edit permissions restricted to a smaller group, but still follows the same general characteristics, such as procedures and support documents.

There are, of course, many types of content that does need the more industrial-strength management capabilities of an ECM system, and here’s the list that I came up with:

It originates with or is sent to external parties, since I’m considering only internal enterprise wikis here
It only exists logically as a “document”, e.g., in PDF form (this is usually something that originates external to the organization, so would be covered by the previous point anyway)
It’s in a format other than plain text where the wiki can’t easily support the creation of that sort of content, e.g., drawings or spreadsheets
It requires a precisely-formatted print-ready version
It requires versioning, particularly where milestone versions of documents are created for approval
It requires fine-grained security control.
It requires records management and/or retention management, typically for audit or governance purposes

I fully expect some of this second list to start to emerge as wiki functionality over the near term, and although it’s not clear that ECM and wikis will ever merge as a concept (much less within a single product platform), there’s going to start to be a lot more overlap. There’s also hybrid concepts, such as having a wiki page link to a document in an ECM system so that collaborative discussion can take place on the wiki, then changes made through the strict ECM environment; or situations where content starts collaboratively in a wiki, then needs to be converted to a document and stored in ECM when it reaches a certain point where ECM functionality is required. Lots of grey areas, in any case.

If you’re using both ECM and wikis internally, I suggest that you start with the default position of everything going into wikis, then work back from there using the second checklist to figure out what needs to go into ECM instead. Just please don’t leave it out there on the shared drives, because unless you have enterprise search, no one is ever going to find those documents when they need them.

IBM FileNet P8 BPM V4.5

I’ve had a couple of briefings on the 4.5 release of IBM/FileNet P8 BPM, which was released in November but is likely just starting to hit customer sites so I thought that it would be good timing for a review post. As a point of disclosure, I worked for FileNet in 2000-1 and have worked with their BPM software extensively in two of my own companies including my current consulting practice, but I don’t do any work for IBM, only for their customers. That means that I am probably more familiar with their system than with any other BPMS, but they are not compensating me in any way for this post (they don’t even cover analyst/bloggers expenses to attend their user conferences, so I don’t) nor do they have any editorial control, which means that I will likely manage to say something to annoy IBM management here, as I usually do.

I’ve blogged in the past about the IBM-FileNet acquisition, specifically my comments at the time that the acquisition was announced, at an analyst briefing just after that, then a follow-up last June comparing it to the Oracle-BEA acquisition: in brief, I noted the transition in product positioning from that of a full BPMS product to document-centric BPMS so as not to compete with WebSphere Process Server. I still think that both IBM and its customers would have been better served by ripping BPM out of the P8 product line and adding it to WebSphere to round out the human-facing capabilities, producing a single BPMS product at IBM. Instead, if a customer wants both human-centric functionality and services orchestration, IBM will be in there selling them two products – each with their own modeling, execution and monitoring environments – rather than one, which is going to be a bit of a hard sell in this economy. They’re working to bring some of that together, but fundamentally it’s still two products to do what many other vendors do with one. There are a few point of integration now — the WebSphere modeler can export FileNet-compliant XPDL, and the WebSphere monitoring tools can monitor the FileNet process engine – and they’ll be doing a bit more cosmetic integration to make it more palatable, but there’s no plan for a unified execution engine. Strangely, the recent Gartner report on BPMS doesn’t both to distinguish them: it bases its analysis on the combination of WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition and FileNet Active Content Edition, which is a bit bogus (in my opinion).

That being said, the current positioning of FileNet P8 BPM is around “agile ECM”, with active content being a key differentiator. Active content, in the FileNet world, is the ability to capture content events (such as creation and versioning) and trigger activities in response, either launching new process instances in BPM, or making external calls. If you’re proficient with the FileNet BPM design tools, that means that you can create a new process, link it via a workflow subscription to the events occurring on a class of content, and have that process automatically trigger when that event occurs for a document in that class. In my world of back-office transaction processing, where there is still a lot of paper, this could be the creation of a process instance in response to a new scanned document being added to the content repository, all without writing a line of code.

There’s more to their agile message than active content, however: IBM is also bundling in a new set of BPM widgets and the IBM (Lotus) Mashup Center to allow for the much easier creation of user interfaces. This has always been a problem in the past: although the Process Designer will auto-generate a user interface for each step that allows for view and update of the parameters exposed at that step, it’s not very pretty. The options were to use the FileNet e-forms product – which required some technical fiddling to integrate – or create custom interfaces using some other development tools. Although the widgets don’t provide a fully-customizable forms interface, they do provide a way to put together configurable user screens that work well for prototyping and for some lighter-weight/tactical production applications.

I liked what I saw with the widgets, despite the limitations, since I think that it’s a move in the right direction. They use the iWidget specification, which is an open standard created by IBM and used natively in the Mashup Center, and there’s also a wrapper to turn an iWidget widget into a JSR-168 compliant portlet, with the cross-widget wiring exposed, for use in other environments such as the WebSphere portal product. The BPM widgets are built using the new REST services that wrap around the process engine Java API; you can also call the REST services directly from other application development environments. Although the widgets are referred to as “ECM widgets” in the IBM documentation, they all (with the exception of a document viewer widget) provide BPM functionality. There’s a lot more that I saw about the widgets; I might do a separate post just on that for those who are evaluating this product.

Some partners are also creating widgets for the mashup framework; I can see this as a key way for partners to add value through providing interoperable components rather than monolithic applications, and I would hope to see some of these emerging for free as companies try out this new technology.

There’s no requirement for all-or-nothing with the mashups, either: each step in the process can invoke a different UI from a different source, so that one step might have a custom application, another an e-form and another a mashup. As far as the process is concerned, that’s just what is invoked at the step to manage the user interaction, not an integral part of the process.

One issue is that WebSphere Business Space will replace Mashup Center as the mashup environment included with P8 BPM, although it’s not clear what degree of functional overlap there is, or when to use one versus the other. The Mashup Center appears to be positioned as being for prototyping and tactical situational applications, whereas Business Space is more of an enterprise portal, but it’s not clear that you couldn’t build an enterprise-strength application using the Mashup Center (unless you’re afraid that IT will laugh at you for using the words “mashup” and “enterprise” in the same sentence). Business Space supports the ECM widgets, but would require a few “minor functional changes” (IBM’s words) to get things working.

On the process modeling side, the Process Designer now has two modes: diagram mode for business analysts, and design mode for technical analysts, with user access rights determining which that a specific user can access. In diagram mode, the user draws the process map, adds the description and instructions at each step, and a description for each route between steps. Design mode is the full “classic” view, with all parameters visible, where a developer can take the description entered by the business analyst and map that into parameters, rules, assignments, deadlines and web services calls. However, the Designer still is not BPMN compliant: if you want BPMN, you can do it in Visio with a BPMN template that they provide, then import the results into the Designer, but it’s a one-way trip. They do plan to leverage some of what’s been done with BPMN in the WebSphere process modeler to bring that into the P8 BPM designer, but there’s nothing concrete to talk about yet.

There’s also some new user roles functionality built in to the designer (and runtime, obviously) that is based on the Business Process Framework, an add-on product to BPM used for creating case management processes. I suspect that we’ll see more of the useful bits of BPF integrated into the core BPM product in the coming releases, to the point where it won’t exist as a separate product, although no one at IBM said that.

Simulation is now web-based and integrated within the process designer, rather than being a separate application: one of the tabs in the design view of a process is Simulation, which allows durations for steps and weights (%) for routes to be entered. Configuration and administration is also now done within the process designer rather than in a separate configuration console.

For business rules, ILOG (a recent IBM acquisition) is being integrated into the WebSphere suite; since it provides a web services interface, it can easily be called at a step in a BPM process for adding business rules more complex than can be handled by the built-in expression engine in BPM.

The BAM product integrated into the P8 BPM product line is also now IBM: originally it was Celequest, which was acquired by Cognos, which was in turn acquired by IBM; the branding on the last set of product slides that I saw is “Cognos Now”.

IBM is starting to push Lotus Forms with BPM, although it is not yet integrated to the same degree as FileNet eForms, which can replace the user interface at a step in a process. I can’t believe that IBM will maintain two e-forms products in the long run, but they can’t really cut off FileNet eForms until they complete that integration.

Overall, FileNet’s legacy of content and process together has grown into fully-featured document-centric BPM capability. Unfortunately, they positioned themselves as pure-play BPMS just long enough to get some customers on that bandwagon, leaving those customers with some uncomfortable migration decisions in their future.

BPM Think Tank Day 3: Colin Teubner

Colin Teubner of Forrester gave us a lunchtime presentation, hence my notes were on paper and it’s taken a bit of time to transcribe them. However, I’m on a roll to get all my Think Tank coverage wrapped up today so that I can take 4 days off for the holiday weekend.

Colin’s talk was on issues, challenges and trends in BPM, and the general opinion around my lunch table is that it was a bit lightweight, although a reasonable summary of the current state of affairs. I certainly don’t envy him the task of speaking over the clanking of cutlery and buzz of other conversations as people eat their lunch.

He sees that a maturing of tools and practitioners is pulling more tool types into BPM, particularly a convergence of BPM and BI, and a convergence of content management, collaboration and human-centric BPM. Seeing as how we’ve only just managed to pry content management and human-centric BPM apart, I’m not sure the latter is good news. As he pointed out, BPM is more than modelling and automation, although a lot of projects (and products) get stuck there and don’t do the monitor/manage/optimize parts very well.

He returned to the discussion on BI and BPM that came out of the previous day’s roundtable that he led:

BI on a process
BI triggering a process
BI affecting a process (e.g., event)
BI inside a process decision
BI inside a human task assignment (inform rather than automate decision)
BI to help humans with process work
BI to predict the future of process work

BI is positioned as making data actionable. Data-driven BI is bereft of process, and focussed on reports and presentation. Process-centric BI (mainly from BPM vendors) has awareness of BPM and the processes; there may be a tie-in with BPRI although there’s no standard linkage between process models and runtime data that could be consumed by a 3rd party BI product. No BI vendors are doing real BPM-aware BI yet.

He then discussed collaboration and information, showing that BPM is typically only used for the structured part of processes. Interestingly, he just redivided the BPM marketplace into ad hoc/collaborative, production and integration workflow, which is where we were 7 years ago before this all got lumped together as BPM. The future of BPM is a 360-degree view of business processes; the main barrier to that now is that there’s no collaboration in BPM products and no process management in collaboration products. Some BPM vendors are starting to pull in collaborative functions, such as discussion threads, process wikis, email notifications, embedded analytics, dynamic task support, and portal integration.

A few wrapup points on what all this means:

BPM vendors must partner to integrate with other functions, such as content management
Standards are essential to driving the integration partnerships
End users need to think about process, collaboration and ECM together, not as separate issues

Enterprise 2.0: Derek Burney

We heard from IBM, so it’s inevitable that we’re going to hear from Microsoft too: namely, Derek Burney, GM of the SharePoint Platform and Tools group. More stuff on how we’re in a new world of work, how technology is changing how and where we interact, but he also touches on the issues of the need to retain and share knowledge as the baby boomers start to retire, and what the incoming MySpace generation is going to demand in terms of functionality on enterprise platforms.

He covers the idea of a busines productivity infrastructure consisting of unified communications, business intelligence, ECM, collaboration (including wikis and blogs) and enterprise search — amazingly, that’s exactly what SharePoint offers 😉 He mentions BPM peripherally as it relates to content approval, but doesn’t cite it explicitly. He does mention “workflow” but that’s really Microsoft’s view of workflow, which is more web service orchestration than what I think of as workflow.

He discusses all the people who might be involved in some way in your organization — employees, partners, customers, and non-affiliated community — and how to better allow collaboration between, not just within, these groups. He directly addressed the concern that many IT (and business) managers have about bringing blogs and wikis inside the corporation, namely a loss of productivity, by showing an example from within Microsoft of how wikis can actually improve productivity, but I think that the Razorfish intranet example that I saw at a recent conference is much more compelling.

The presentation dragged a bit towards the end: I was losing the thread as the slides blurred past, and the guy beside me appeared to nod off. I would like to review his slides if they’re available online; I think that there’s a great deal of good information in there, I just need to dig it out.

Enterprise 2.0: Ambuj Goyal

Ambuj Goyal of IBM gave the next keynote on the changes that they’re seeing in organizations, and how this is informing their Enterprise 2.0 directions. Like any established software vendor would do, he started his history lesson around 12 years ago, where presumably vendors like IBM actually invented Enterprise 2.0 but just didn’t think to call it that. All kidding aside, Lotus Notes was a groundbreaking collaboration tool in its time — long before IBM bought Lotus — and likely helped to drive the demand for the ability to collaborate.

He looks at how changes in technology (lighter weight infrastructure and simpler programming models), economics (new business designs that address the long tail) and community (capturing the wisdom of the masses) combine to form Web 2.0, then dug into IBM’s Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 product offerings.

WebSphere Portal as a mashup platform, with all it’s AJAX-y goodness.
WebSphere Commerce,which is an online shopping platform; after several minutes of trying to get a video showing WebSphere Commerce working — what I feel to be the ultimate cop-out in a presentation — one of Goyal’s colleagues hopped up on stage and narrated the now-silent video.
Web Interface for Content Management. It’s been a few years since I sat down in front of IBM’s Content Manager’s web interface, and I really hope that it’s improved since then, or they’re really stretching it to even mention Web 2.0 and the old CM web interface in the same breath. What ECM really needs is user-generated tagging, which I don’t think that they’re doing yet. Of course, there’s still the outstanding issue of what they’re doing with the FileNet ECM, which I heard was going to become the standard content platform offered by IBM, and likely would have a completely difference web interface.
Info 2.0, which appears to include feed management, tagging and mashups within enterprise-strength security and scalability behind it. This is an early view of products that are coming out later this year, including QEDWiki for creating mashups, which I saw at Mashup Camp last year; unfortunately, we were subjected to another canned video after several technical glitches, but still no audio so we had another live voice-over for the video. Why not just show us a demo? I assume that it may also include some repackaged version of Dogear, their internal enterprise social booking tool; this has been an obvious application for productization, although my suggestion of this to all my IBM friends seemed to fall on deaf ears in the past year.
Lotus Connections — is this a reinvented version of Notes? Goyal refers it to a brand-new product, but I’m not sure why it is trying to leverage the not-very-chi-chi Lotus brand. Apparently, it includes blogging, profiles, bookmarks (maybe this is were Dogear will show up) and ad hoc collaboration.

Unfortunately, IBM seems to be doing its usual trick of having several products that sit over the same space (usually to provide legacy support of existing installations) without a good distinction between them. I’d love to see a roadmap of how all this fits together: which products are intended to provide an upgrade path for legacy products, and which are intended for new installations.

I completely understand that vendors are given space on the speaking platform in exchange for buying big booths at the trade show, but I really rely on the vendors to provide something of value rather than just a cataloguing of their own products. They gain so much more by demonstrating a deep understanding of the concepts and a vision of the future.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman, another friend of mine from the TorCamp community, led a discussion on language translation and the impact on the sort of interacting with the global community due to the premise of wikinomics. Although it’s easy (and arrogant) for those of us who are native English speakers to just ignore other languages and pretend that everyone speaks English, the fact is that if you’re message isn’t well-understood, you’ll end up losing business or creating inefficiencies within your organization. At this point, translation services is a $10B business worldwide, and growing.

He gave some examples of evaluating the context and content to determine whether it needs to be translated, and the degree of care that needs to be taken, before going through the different options for translating your business materials.

One option is to crowdsource your documentation: have your user community write the manual for you. This requires a passionate user base, and can be unpredictable in terms of timing and coverage, as well as of inconsistent quality.

Another option is machine translation, but as you’ll know if you’ve ever used Google Translation, the quality can be total crap with low-end solutions. There are high-quality (and higher-priced) professional systems, but these require extensive training and still require review of the output.

Another option is to use internal resources, namely your own staff, who presumably understand your products and services, but who are now diverted from their usual job which tends to create a high cost of lost opportunity. Since these are not professional translators, the quality can also be questionable.

Professional translators are the final option, and best for high-quality, consistent translation. They can use tools to store translated phrases so that there’s a translation memory of a document; when a document changes, only the changed portions required re-translation. The downside, of course, is that this is very expensive, and the initial translations can be time-consuming especially if you have a lot of specialized terminology that the translator needs to learn.

There are a number of hybrid approaches that combine these options; all of them will combine people, process and technology in some proportion, and the ultimate choice will depend on both the content and the context.

Ryan listed a number of other points to consider:

Synchronization between versions, including maintaining dependency relationships
Location and access to content repository
Workflow and time sensitivity of translation, including proofing/review cycle

He had some thoughts on what’s happening between translation systems and content management systems, particularly for large websites that must be maintained in multiple languages. In the past (and likely still a lot currently), a content management system would just spit out a document to be translated, then accept it back in afterwards, without any real sense of how the translated content should be handled. Wikis, of course, are even worse since it’s less mature responsibility and there’s not, in most wikis platforms, any considerations for maintain multi-language versions of a wiki.

Ryan’s company, Clay Tablet, has created a piece of middleware that sits between the different types of translation systems and the content management systems, whether the translation is being done by a machine translation system or a company that provides human translation services.

That’s the end of the formal sessions of Enterprise 2.0 Camp; it’s 2pm and we’re decamping, so to speak, to the bar across the road for lunch and a continuation of the conversations.

Enterprise 2.0 Camp: John Bruce

Our second breakfast speaker was John Bruce, CEO of iUpload, which is apparently going to undergo a name change in a few weeks. He was previously with the Documentum group within EMC, although not (I think) with Documentum before the acquisition. iUpload creates enterprise social software, that is, a platform for blogs, wikis and other social networking channels for use within an enterprise. They offer only a hosted SaaS solution rather than something that can be installed within the firewall, which might be a bit of a barrier for some enterprises who still don’t get that SaaS can be just as secure and have the same degree of uptime as their own data centre. He made some great points about all the things that you need to think about when implementing social networking applications within the enterprise: workflow, permissions, control, metrics, integration, security, compliance, identity management, versioning, reporting.

He also discussed this in the context of a common Web 2.0 content engine; not a surprising approach for someone coming from an ECM environment, and I’m sure that we’ll be starting to see many of these social networking tools creeping into mainstream ECM offerings before long. In that view, issues like security, user administration, integration and metrics are consolidated in the common engine, and blogs and wikis are just distribution mechanisms for the content.

There was a question from the audience on what metrics exist for measuring the benefits of enterprise social networking applications; Bruce had one example of a hotel chain CEO’s blog where they tracked clickthroughs from the CEO’s blog post on a particular hotel to the specific hotel online booking form through to an actual booking, although he admitted that many enterprise social networking applications are implemented because it’s an executive’s pet project. Given what I saw in the Avenue A|Razorfish intranet wiki project last week, there’s lots of places where a hard ROI could definitely be established in terms of cost savings of wikis over standard web page publishing.

Anthony Williams joined back in for the Q&A, and had an interesting comment on the organizational impacts of social networking in the enterprise: he sees boomers as the senior management in organizations today, and gen X as the middle management who are actively resisting all of this new-fangled Web 2.0 stuff that the net gen is trying to bring in because it threatens their burgeoning fiefdoms. There is justice, after all.

Shared Insights: Two-Day Wrap-Up

Apparently there was no wrap-up session yesterday, so the last session today wrapped up the past two days. Colin White, who has been running this conference for 8 years, was joined by three of his regular presenters: Shawn Shell of Consejo, Tony Byrne of CMS Watch, and Zach Wahl of Project Performance. The discussion was pretty open; I’ll try to attribute to the correct person as I document it.

In looking at what has changed at the conference recently, White found that 2/3 of attendees were building external-facing rather than internal-facing, which he feels to be influenced by Web 2.0. Shell found the audience to be more technical and tactical, and very focussed on building portals to connect with customers and employees. Byrne commented on how layered that portals are becoming, sometimes with several portal products being used simultaneously, and how the sheer diversity of integration technologies is making a more complex portal ecosystem. He feels that many organizations are out-growing some of the lightweight tools provided by portals, such as document management, and thinks that traditional portal vendors are having problems figuring out how to do Web 2.0 in their products. Wahl mentioned a higher caliber audience (by which it appears that he means “more technical”, however frightening the implications of that statement), and sees that the outward-facing portals that are being developed provide a stronger tie-in to ROI.

They then moved on to audience questions, and I can’t attribute the responses to any of the four participants.

Q: How are organizations using blogs?

Attend the Razorfish session tomorrow for a case study. [I did]
It’s still a “cautious” activity for organizations, and is often still a top-down corporate communications “fake blog” from C-level executives rather than true blogs.
Blogs are useful for technical organizations [I scratched my head over that one, although I admit that one of the most successful organizations that I’ve seen using blogs internally is IBM]
Many people inside corporations “don’t have anything to say that’s universally consumable”. [This statement made me cringe; it totally misses the point of blogs]
A corporate ethos of content sharing can provide the right environment for blogging.

My conclusion: half of the 4 speakers don’t get blogging.

Q: How much of Web 2.0 is hype versus reality for the enterprise?

A: “There’s some organizations for which this isn’t going to work”. [The speaker quite erroneously equated Web 2.0 in the enterprise with publishing corporate content on the public internet]

Q: What are the future directions in PCC?

There’s an increasing diversity of products rather than consolidation in the market, leading to more competition.
Major vendors, such as Oracle and BEA, are leapfrogging technologies to meet new standards and stay competitive.
The dynamism in PCC right now is in the add-ons, such as BPM, rather than the underlying portal technology. [This resulted in a specific discussion about how BEA’s BPM is driving portal sales, although I’m not sure that’s true]
Portal vendors are moving into the add-on market to take more of the enterprise pie.

There was also a discussion about getting started with search and taxonomy: for example, using the Google search appliance as a starter for search/taxonomy, and the need for a simple start to taxonomy in particular. We finished with a brief discussion about the perceived dilemma of SharePoint proliferation: is it out of control or a necessary state of departmental document collaboration?

Shared Insights PCC: Taxonomy Deployment and Governance

Seth Earley gave a presentation on taxonomy governance; he’s obviously a Very Important Taxonomist, and made sure that we knew it by having his flunky deliver his Starbucks Cafe Americano to him during the presentation instead of just grabbing a coffee from the service provided by the conference right outside the room. Yes, I’m cranky, I just flew 5 hours to get here and don’t have a lot of patience for a prima donna who wastes my time during the presentation talking about how he needs his 4 shots of espresso. Grrr.

Earley appears to be an anti-folksonomist: he believes that tags should be part of a controlled vocabulary, and that folksonomies are really only appropriate for identifying candidate terms, that is, terms recommended for admission to the change management process that would promote a tag into the formal taxonomy. The implication is that users aren’t qualified to define new tags/terms, but that it requires a “tagging expert”. Presumably like him.

Shared Insights PCC: Picking the right tool: e-mail, IM, post or publish

I arrived in Las Vegas late this morning for my presentation tomorrow morning, just in time for lunch at the conference. Sometimes, timing is everything.

For the first afternoon breakout session, I sat in on Craig Roth of the Burton Group discussing how to pick between modes of communication and collaboration. His main premise is that we often use the wrong tools for communication and collaboration — where e-mail is likely the most widely used and the worst — and he presents a chart for figuring out which method to use for which types of interactions.

This chart, and using it, formed the bulk of the presentation, and it was pretty interesting. Basically, it has four quadrants, with divisions by “communication” and “collaboration” on one axis, and “asynchronous” and “synchronous” on the other axis. For example, synchronous communication channels includes IM, telephony and audio/video chat; asynchronous communication channels include e-mail, RSS feeds and alerts; synchronous collaboration channels include web conferencing and whiteboarding; and asynchronous collaboration channels include wikis and discussion forums. It sounds a bit complicated, but it’s actually quite elegant and obvious when you see it.

He then overlays a decision flowchart on the 4-quadrant chart to show how you decide which quadrant that you should be in, then which tools in that quadrant to use. For example, the initial decision is “purpose of interaction”, where “telling” puts you into the communication half, and “collaborating on goal” puts you into collaboration. Once you’re in the communication half, the next decision is “when are responses expected”; either “now” or “today” puts you into the synchronous communication quadrant, with different channels for each of those two responses, whereas “over time” puts you into asynchronous communication. There’s a number of tools and channels that he doesn’t include here, which he still considers to be under the radar; surprisingly, workflow is included in that group, although it’s not clear what he means by that or why it’s under anyone’s radar.

In general, his quadrant chart could be a pretty useful tool, although I find some of the distinctions by content type to be a bit fuzzy. He has some great recommendations on battling dysfunctional behaviours and getting people to use some of the new tools as well.