At the moment in my team, we have lots of means of group communication: Documentum eRooms, Sharepoint, Drupal blogs, email, group meetings etc. Its true, one size doesn't fit all, and this is one of the reason we have such an arsenal of tools. The problem is, everyone in the team has their favorite tools for doing communicating. I prefer a combination of Drupal and email, but a lot of my colleagues love eRoom (which I really hate!!), and some just like to talk to face to face. This is fine and I truly believe that we should be able to choose the tools that suit us and they we think/work, however we have reached a situation where people have stopped communicating effectively because no one can agree on how we should do it.
The problem is that each of these applications publishes its data to different (often siloed) location, so whilst I might prefer to use Drupal - someone else might want to use eRoom, so everyone has to look in two separate places. Obviously RSS provides a solution to this, all people have to do is subscribe to the various communication feeds in the group and they get all the information delivered to them. This is great, but the problem is that the communications are still siloed. The key to online communication is that it becomes a conversation - currently if I want to comment on someone's post, I still to go to several places to do it.
So far the only technology that is even close to dealing with this is fav.or.it (http://fav.or.it/). They have produced an RSS reader that combines commenting with post retrieval - taking aggregation to the next level and maybe making keeping up with online communication platform independent?
3 comments:
That is a very good tool to use. It is amazing how many vices are necessary to get the job done. What would you think if your employer said that they were doing away with all of these different tools and putting one in place; sharepoint or eRoom, for example, since they need only only support one platform? If you look at most large companies, most anyone will tell you that they have slews of KMS or CMS systems, but each excel at a specific function; wikis too. Many of these are legacy systems left over after a merger or acquisition and leave a fragmented trail. A tool to deal with this, like fav.or.it can be very valuable. I may need to push it in my org.
I agree, a lot of these tools are legacy applications that are stil used by groups of people that feel that it meets their needs, whereas newer tools which may address the needs of other users. From an IT point of view this is a maintance and support nightmare - but from my point of view it just exemplifies the point that one size doesn't fit all - and people like to have the choice to use thier favourite tool. From an information management point of view the artificial siloing of information as a result of this is also a challenge which is where I can forsee fav.or.it and tools like it making real impact.
Sadly fav.or.it is still in private beta and I haven't had a chance to see if it really does what it says on the tin - but I will be sure to publish my thoughts when I find out, and I would to hear you thoughts on it if you manage to get anymore info!!
We are getting ready to look into this as well and I will let you know how it rolls. We have the perfect infrastructure for this and hope it can be utilized.
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