I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Michael from Shared Spaces picked up my earlier post on the Changing Nature of Work.
Another big change is nature of my work has moved so that Virtual Collaboration is becoming a larger part of my day. I (verb) email, Skype, IM, Web demo, Conference call etc. (noun) Partners, Staff, Customers, Analysts, etc.
Virtual Collaboration is bigger than just communication as information gained through interaction needs to be stored and be accessible. So each communication interaction adds value to the shared information.
My main tools are email, a bit of SharePoint and LiveMeeting. All largely unconnected.
At a meta level, what I do is exactly the same as thousands of other IT professionals. Yet we have almost no tool support or consistent framework for managing these relationships and shared inter/intra-company information.
I’m going to follow what Michael says closely this year as I think we’ll start to see the emergence of a consistent way of managing this new way of working. With Ray Ozzie at Microsoft we’ll see leadership from them. They may not provide the ultimate answer but will accelerate the industry.
Collaboration can’t assume that all parties have access to the latest technology. It needs to be more inclusive and acknowledge the long tail of technology that your partners/customers may have. So rather than an all encompassing piece of software, like some new bits in Office 12, I think the opportunity is a methodology and some glue over the standard components we use now.
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