The collaboration revolution is coming here!

Online collaboration will change the global economy, influencing the information revolution like the assembly line did the industrial revolution. Fortunately, online collaboration allows you to work from a Starbucks instead of a hot, dirty, factory… Dave Witzel explains what this transformation will mean for business.

The introduction of the assembly line transformed auto manufacturing in the early 20th century and then rippled through the 2nd industrial revolution dramatically increasing the productivity of labor, increasing demand for unskilled labor, and changing the very nature of work. Thanks to advances in online collaboration, we will see comparable changes in production by knowledge workers, a large and growing segment of the work force, as well as shifts in the kinds of skills valued in these workers and fundamental changes in the character of their work.

Changes in the global economy have driven a dramatic increase in the value and number of “knowledge workers”. Thomas Davenport, writing for the Harvard Business School Press says “It’s already apparent that the firms with the highest degree and quality of knowledge work tend to be the fastest-growing and most profitable.” He says that up to half the US workforce is now made up of knowledge workers. Peter Drucker argued, as far back as 1998, that “The productivity of knowledge and knowledge workers will not be the only competitive factor in the world economy. It is, however, likely to become the decisive factor...”

The modern economy is driving demand for more productive knowledge workers with its emphasis on producing thoughts instead of producing things; increasing international competition; and growing global markets. At the same time, high value workers are demanding greater flexibility in lifestyle, work schedule, and location. In response we see important shifts in the way that knowledge workers both work and work together. Ubiquity of internet access, combined with increasingly sophisticated yet easy-to-use applications, and an increasingly adept user base are enabling a transformation in the way we organize work using online collaboration.

The ability for organizations to understand these forces, adapt their culture and operations, leverage technology, and unleash distributed teams, will greatly influence their success in the coming revolution. Research by Frost & Sullivan is already showing the impact of collaboration, concluding “We found that global organizations that collaborate better perform better… On quantitative measures, such as profitability and sales growth, collaboration is a key driver of success.”

Why collaboration? There are a number of drivers inspiring adoption of new ways to organize knowledge labor. Foremost is huge demand. The modern economy is increasingly producing thoughts instead of things; value is captured in bits and bytes instead of boxes. Complicating this change is that the long-term value of the knowledge represented by these bytes is dropping as the rate of change in society and production of new knowledge rises. John Brown and John Hagel III in The McKinsey Quarterly explain that during times of rapid change “… the lifetime value of knowledge shrinks rapidly because it becomes obsolete more quickly. Now the game is using it to connect more rapidly and effectively with others in the creation of new knowledge.”

We’ve seen changes in the character of the knowledge workforce represented by realities like off-shoring of software development, increasing presence and importance of family time for people in senior positions, and generational changes in career expectations. Knowledge workers may now work flexible schedules, telecommute, work from the road, or be based in other countries. They are demanding more flexibility in the hours they work, the places they live, more variety in the responsibilities they have, and more options in their business relationships.

How the economy is responding. During the last generation the internet has moved from a scientific curiosity to a central tool for business and communications. A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that 73% of adults in the US are online. This is up from 66% a year earlier. More indicative of the advance of the collaboration revolution is that almost half of users have now contributed content to the internet and the number will continue to rise. Not coincidentally, demand for more productive knowledge workers is coming at a time when many new tools to support them are becoming mature.

These tools for collaboration include:

• instant messaging – which not only allows direct contact with other internet users, but can signal their presence, allowing other users to know if they are online and available no matter where they are located;
• work spaces – like Forum One’s ProjectSpaces tool, allow distributed teams to share documents, calendars, task lists, email archives, databases, and more;
• very cheap international voice communications as the telephone moves online via voice over IP (VOIP) services like Skype and Vonage;
• audio, video, and media conferencing which allows many people to meet virtually and actively participate from anywhere;
• self-publishing tools like blogs give many more people a voice, allowing them to promote and distribute thoughts, opinions, and ideas cheaply, quickly, and widely;
• collaborative content and database tools that allow distributed users to create, change, critique, and organize information without geographic or time zone constraints. Tools like wikis, photo archives, and link sharing allow ideas and knowledge to be produced, refined and then shared rapidly;
• collaborative office tools like shared documents and spreadsheets that allow multiple people to work simultaneously and track their work history; and
• mobile tools including more powerful notebook computers and PDAs supported by widespread wireless networks and increasingly adept websites mean that people are online more often and in more settings.

So what will change? How will the trend towards more collaboration online change our business and life? Here are a few directions to watch:

• Methods for rapid creation and refinement of new knowledge. For example, Brown and Hagel argue that “a typical large company can no longer rely solely on its own resources” and suggest that “open innovation” where “hundreds and even thousands of participants from diverse institutional settings collaborate to create new knowledge, to learn from on another, and to appropriate and build on one another’s work” will be essential. The ability to get “just in time” information will be facilitated by the increasing sophistication of social networks like Linked in that will help to efficiently identify people with specialized knowledge and experiences.
• More accessible and useful information. Not only are we rapidly creating and distributing knowledge, it is becoming more embedded in context and connected to other information. This context and connectedness is called “the semantic web” by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML and much of what we now know as the “world wide web”. As our knowledge becomes more connected with better context more people will be able to find it, understand it and use it. Google already uses the connections between websites to drive their powerful search engine. My colleague Kurt Voelker has invoked a “Moore’s Law” for knowledge where every six months we can expect connectedness, and the value, of knowledge to double.
• Distributed innovation. Tom Kelly from IDEO, suggests in his excellent book “The Ten Faces of Innovation”, that “the collaborator” is an integral role for innovation. He describes how IDEO “split its business into practices, deemphasizing geography and recognizing our global capabilities.” and goes on to explain that these teams require multiple lines of communications and that “E-mail is not enough. At IDEO, we build e-rooms, virtual spaces dedicated to projects carved out on the company’s digital network. Team members make and manipulate a project-specific Wiki. We also do Web-enabled meetings, where we are all looking at the same presentation or documents.”
• Improved decision-making approaches. Scott Armstrong, Professor at The Wharton School and a specialist in forecasting points out that “many studies show that the simple act of meeting face-to-face harms forecasting and decision-making.” Therefore, he concludes, “Managers need to be creative in finding ways to get people to share information while preventing them from meeting face-to-face. This will lead to better forecasts and better decisions than are currently being made in organizations. It will also save time and reduce travel costs.” Options for new decision-making approaches include wider use of voting or polling, more virtual and distributed teams, and new applications for “decision” markets where people demonstrate what they think by how they invest.
• Changes in the role of government. As the collaboration revolution takes hold we’ll see a tendency for the responsibility for production of social goods to move from the relatively inefficient realm of government (or the disinterested market) into new, decentralized, non-market mechanisms. Benkler from the Yale Law School, in his stimulating new book The Wealth of Networks says, “It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and market based production, than they ever have in modern democracies.”
• Changes in the composition of work groups. We will increasingly defeat time and space as we cross national and temporal boundaries. Teams will be made up of more kinds of people from more places with a variety of insights and skills. Decreasing costs of communications technology and increasing functionality will allow teams to work closely while distributed. Language differences will continue to pose a barrier. However changes in how decisions are made (from “discussion” to variations of aggregation, voting, and markets) combined with improved automated translation options will even begin to address this problem.
• Increasingly flexible work relationships. The ability to create and manage piece work, to implement micro-payments, and various forms of volunteer and cooperative licensing schemes will lead to a wide variety of productive relationships. Already we have seen mostly volunteer labor create one of the most complex operating systems in the world (Linux) and the world’s largest encyclopedia (Wikipedia). We should expect to seen more use of contractors, and part-time labor, as well as later retirements, and more independent workers. Amazon is already pushing the envelope on employment structure with its mechanical turk which pays people to “complete simple tasks that people do better than computers.”
  

How do we prepare? Change is underway and will accelerate. We can help prepare our businesses, volunteer organizations, and our own careers, by learning and adapting to the new opportunities. Here are a few concrete activities to consider:

• Use and understand the new tools. Are you using instant messaging? Have you sent a text message from your phone? Do you have your photos on flickr? If not, it is time.
• Help your work teams evolve. You probably already work with contractors, telecommuters, or distributed colleagues. Are you using web conferencing? Do you pay for employee wireless access? Has Starbucks become a de facto conference room?
• Participate in the idea flow. The speed of change we are witnessing is driven by the speed at which ideas move around the world. Be a consumer and producer of information, opinions, and ideas -- read blogs (and start your own), use RSS (really simple syndication) to subscribe to your favorites people and topics, share your book marks (and track other people’s) with del.icio.us, and rank articles on digg.com.
• Take advantage of “open innovation”. Many more organizations are opening up access to their data, content, and software. You can join in by mixing your materials with theirs by using and contributing to open source software, using creative commons licensing, and developing your own unique services. Check out HousingMaps for a great example of a “mashup” service that joins the housing data of craigslist with geo-location data of Google Maps.
• Join the network. We are constantly looking for other people whether for jobs, business opportunities, dates, or ideas. Social networks or, as I prefer “professional networks”, like Linked in, gather, or even MySpace.com are great places to look. Go ahead, sign-up, and join in.

The bottom line. The next generation of radical change of economic production, eventually replacing the “industrial age” in importance to society, will be the “collaboration age” characterized by highly efficient virtual collaboration supported by online tools and networks. Fortunately for all of us and unlike the assembly line and the industrial revolution, many of the bi-products of the collaboration revolution will be socially positive. We’ll see more flexibility in work environments instead of less, increasingly inclusive (to remain competitive) teams, great increases in the productivity of knowledge, and the economic benefits that will come from that efficiency. Of course, this all implies that we are able to adapt our work habits and those of our organizations to the demands of the new economy and the potential of new approaches.

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