Collaboration is in the Eye of the Beholder
After reading the latest blog entry on meetstan.com, I was excited to attend a session at this week’s DoDIIS conference in Orlando on “DoDIIS Collaboration.” Since collaboration is one of the hottest buzzwords in both the commercial and government spaces, I figured I’d hear all about the great technologies that are enabling agencies in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community to share the information they’ve gathered.
I quickly learned that collaboration is in the eye of the beholder.
Instead of hearing about some super-secret collaboration platform or a Facebook-like application for intelligence analysts, the presenter spoke at length on which VOIP phones were available at each agency. He talked about rudimentary instant messenger systems. He informed the audience about which conference rooms had video phones.
Yet even with this fairly mundane technology, organizations are seeing huge benefits. Cisco Europe is claiming that it saved $100 million through its unified communications/collaboration program. According to the presenter, the savings came from a 20 percent decrease in travel across the continent. The Alabama Department of Transportation also realized savings through a similar program.
While this was not exactly the kind of cutting-edge collaboration technology that I had been expecting to hear about, it did get me thinking about search. Search technologies that incorporate Web 2.0 elements like tagging and annotating results and sharing searches are all about collaboration. Since search can affect 100 percent of your employees, the potential return on your search investment is significant.
Not only can your users find experts in the organization through search, but they can connect with them virtually – eliminating re-work and wasted effort.
I know from our own experience that some defense agencies use Web 2.0 collaboration capabilities such as social search. In fact a recent article titled ‘Twitter, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools revolutionize government business” cites agencies like the U.S. Air Force which uses such tools as search and tagging to improve communication and knowledge sharing.
And the best part? The worker doesn’t even have to still be employed. If someone retires, all of the content they’ve added to the system – from tags to ratings to shared searches – will remain in the search solution. That’s a huge boon for organizations like the U.S. government, which is facing a significant number of retirements in the next few years.
The potential payoff for search-enabled collaboration is huge – more productive employees, products brought to market faster and a happier, more engaged workforce.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to have a video phone (and a phaser and a transporter). But when it comes to real value from collaboration, search is the answer.
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