What happened to Collaboration?

What happened to Collaboration?

This piece was originally posted on Medium.

The Rise (and fall) of Enterprise Collaboration Platforms.

Let’s go back to May 18, 2012. Facebook has just completed the largest tech IPO of all time, boasting a market capitalization of more than $104B. Articles speculate that more than 1,000 Facebook employees will become millionaires from their stock options.

Just weeks later, Microsoft announces its intention to acquire Yammer for $1.2B in cash. Yammer has over 4 million registered users, and 20% of their user base are paying customers. Microsoft will bring Collaboration to the Enterprise!

David Sacks, CEO of Yammer, wrote in a note to investors:

“When most people thought social networking was for kids, we had a vision for how it could change the way we work.”

There are other established players in the Enterprise Collaboration space. JIVE Software had recently IPO’d in December of 2011. On the day of its IPO it was worth nearly $900M. In the months following, shares surged more than 100% and JIVE saw a peak market cap of over $2B.

It’s fair to say that Collaboration was red hot. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were teaching us that social networking was vital and businesses were following this lead — striving to making their operations more collaborative.

It seemed that collaboration presented a new opportunity! Information would be more discoverable! Insights would be readily available from every corner of the company! Tina in Sales would collaborate with Jim in Marketing to improve customer engagements! But, it didn’t work out like that, did it?

So, what went wrong?

Email was, and remains to be, the predominant way most people communicate at work. It’s the unrelenting backbone of corporate communication. Need something done? Send an email. Have a question? Send an email.

The problem with Enterprise Collaboration tools was that they didn’t solve a problem that people felt they had. Most importantly, collaboration didn’t happen in the same place as communication. Email wasn’t being disrupted in any meaningful way. Even the Enterprise Collaboration platforms would send you email alerts. More work, more email notifications. These platforms were additive —yet another application that people were meant to monitor and interact with.

Enterprise Collaboration faltered because Communication was still an unsolved problem. Email was never built for team communication. In my proposed Hierarchy of Team Interaction, communication is a more fundamental requirement than collaboration, and must be addressed first.

Communication is primarily intra-team. You probably do 80%+ of your communication within your team, workgroup, or function. If you’re an engineer, you spend more time working with other engineers than you do with marketing or finance. Today’s work teams have to move faster than ever, so it’s paramount to get communication right.

Collaboration is primarily inter-team. It’s the other 20%. Clear and effective interactions between teams only happen once the teams themselves are performing well. If Marketing and Product are working on a launch together, it’s important that they can collaborate effectively. But if the Marketing team has internal communication issues, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll be able to collaborate well with Product.

Cohesion by definition is, “the action or fact of forming a united whole.”Cohesion is all about the alignment of human capital, building a team of teams that works in unison towards the organization’s stated mission. This is the realm of the CEO — getting alignment amongst executives, and their respective teams.

The Rise of Messaging

Fast forward just two years to 2014: Slack launches in February, offering ‘real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams.’

“We’re on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.” — Slack

Facebook acquires WhatsApp for an astounding $19B. Facebook’s own Messenger product already has half a billion users and is on a trajectory to hit the billion user milestone by 2016.

In November of 2014, Microsoft announces that Lync will be replaced by Skype for Business, a much needed consolidation in their communications portfolio. In China, WeChat dominates in a way that Facebook can only be envious of. WeChat is integrated into every aspect of one’s life and has over 300M users. LINE continues to grow in Japan with over 100M users. Messaging has become the norm in our personal lives.

At work, messaging is starting to deliver on its potential to replace email, and save time. But that alone isn’t enough to make it useful. Moving something from Pile A to Pile B isn’t an improvement.

In the workplace, transparent and persistent team-based messaging offers an entirely different mode of communication. Everything is there: Your files are there, your colleagues are there, even the services and apps that you use are there (think Google Drive, Trello, JIRA, New Relic etc). Messaging enables functional teams to communicate more effectively, which demonstrably improves productivity.

The Rise of ChatBots

Jump forward two more years and you’re here in 2016. Messaging is no longer a tool, but a platform. ChatBots, machine learning, AI, and natural language processing are all abuzz on tech blogs.

In probably the most spectacular #chatbotfail of the year, Microsoft released Tay.ai onto Twitter, where the trolls won and she quickly became a racist bigot, and just as quickly was shut down.

In April, Facebook launched bots on Messenger, and the growth of Messenger bots has been remarkable.

Concurrently, the Slack App Directory surpassed 650 unique bots, apps & integrations, making it the largest directory of ChatBots for the workplace, while Slack itself is used by over 3M daily active users.

What’s next?

Messaging in the Enterprise is becoming more mature, and inevitably will be a major battleground for companies like Microsoft, Google, Slack and Facebook over the next decade. I believe that nearly every company will choose a messaging platform in the same way that every enterprise has a financial platform & an HR platform.

ChatBots are still in their infancy. If Messaging is the platform of the next decade, then ChatBots are the apps. Billion dollar businesses will be built whose primary user interface is a bot. If your company doesn’t yet have a bot, it will. Bots will become indispensable in helping automate away the repetitive and simple and then eventually the unique and complex, as AIs evolve. The macro implications of this are both amazing and terrifying.

Intelligent ChatBots will be able to mine, synthesize, and offer insights from team communications in the same way that Google has indexed and surfaced relevant information from across the entire internet.

With Messaging and ChatBots enabling better communication and collaboration in a single centralized environment, leading companies will focus on cohesion to outperform.

What do you think about the future of Messaging & Bots? Are they here to stay or just the technology du jour?

Thanks for reading! ✌️


Paolo Bocci ✔

Founder & CEO, UCaaS & SD-WAN Strategist

7y

Hi Mike, valuable post. Thanks. Your pyramid (Communication, Collaboration, Cohesion) has a single name for me: UC&C.

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Sophie Barrington

Equine Marketing | Equestrian Marketing | Horse Business Marketing | Equine Copywriting | Equestrian & Racing PR

7y

Interesting post. Thanks.

Rich B.

Enterprise Sales Executive - AI, Automation, DevOps & RevOps Transformation

7y

A few comments: 1. When platforms like Jive solve a biz problem (which it often does), collaboration and communication happen in context. Eg. Learning, knowledge mgt, corp comms, support, innovation, etc. very sticky use cases that provide high value and searchable "corporate memory". If you try to throw fb@work, yammer or any basic social tool w/o some purpose or utility that help users get their job done, they fail. And those tools dont solve deeper business use cases like those. I hear many many complaints about noise in basic social tools. 2. Email maybe universal but its also noise at scale and lacks context. Its a silo where knowledge within those emails dies. Slack does offer more context in channels and integrating via bots is useful. Of course other social collab tools offer in stream integrations just the same. Slack is not unique. 3. However there are still concerns that conversations whether in email or in a tool like slack cannot be easily found later or managed as knowledge in a more structured way. If someone crowdsources a question, how easily is it found later? Whats the impact of that discussion? Sentiment? Etc. There are compliance and analytics that companies require. I dont disagree with some of what you are saying. But you are making assumptions that arent necessarily true.

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Duncan Acres

Business Development at Immutable | Building the Future of Gaming

7y

Great piece, Mike - thanks!

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Chris Heard

Helping companies make better IT decisions | CEO @ Olive Technologies | Sales, GTM, Startups

7y

Great article Michael! Thought provoking, scary and very topical.

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