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Are You Communicating or Collaborating?

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Where exactly is the borderline between communications and collaboration? Am I confusing the two when I opine about Why Messaging Has the Momentum in Business Collaboration? I was challenged to answer this question recently while participating in a panel discussion moderated by Jon Arnold, an independent analyst who covers unified communications.

I was representing Glip, the team chat platform that RingCentral bought over the summer. Funny thing, but I got the opportunity through my old boss at Redbooth. When he was unable to fulfill his role on the panel discussion at ITExpo in Fort Lauderdale, he was kind enough to hand it off to me. I currently consult with RingCentral, formerly served as Redbooth’s chief evangelist, and keep up this column as a continuation of the social business research I did for Social Collaboration for Dummies and other journalistic projects.

Collaboration built around team messaging, also sometimes referred to as workstream communications and collaboration, represents a convergence of forces that has multiple technology players jockeying for position.

Also on the ITExpo panel was Holger Stotz, director of global strategic business development at Unify Inc., creator of the Circuit team collaboration app. Unify Inc. , a unified communications player descended from the Siemens telecommunications business and now owned by the French IT services firm Atos SE, created a team chat environment to anchor real-time interactions such as video conferences. This makes it possible to preserve the video playback and all the associated documents and messages shared as part of a collaboration in the same workspace.

RingCentral has a similar interest in building a communication-rich collaboration environment around its cloud phone, phone conferencing, and video conferencing services. They bought Glip with that in mind, although some customers (and all the businesses who signed up for the free version) continue to use it as an independent chat and productivity platform. Glip already had built-in support for moving from text chat to video chat, and now RingCentral Office customers can make calls and kick off conference calls from within a Glip team.

Cisco Spark and a number of other products fit within the same broad category.

On another frequency of convergence, Glip and Redbooth share a focus on task and project management as a way of giving online collaboration more of a focus on getting work done than you get with a platform built solely around messaging and collaboration. Redbooth originally structured its workspaces abound a combination of task lists and discussion boards, although the latest version incorporates chat as a more central feature. Through integrations, Redbooth also supports video chat and click-to-call telephony.

Meanwhile, Glip from the beginning was a Slack-like team chat environment, but with more built-in tools for structuring collaboration around tasks and events. That is, instead of sending someone a message saying you want something done by Friday, you can make it a structured task with a deadline for tracking and accountability.

The common conclusion all these players seem to have come to is that the best way to get people interacting is with relatively fluid and unstructured chat, supplemented with voice and video. At that point, it’s reasonable to ask whether we are really talking about communication or collaboration.

Using the two terms interchangeably tends to muddy the definitions, Arnold argued. “The way I would put it is, you have to communicate to collaborate, but you don’t have to collaborate to communicate.” He wants to preserve crisp distinctions so he can have better analytical conversations with his clients.

Stotz agreed the language used to discuss these modes of interaction is confused, given that “unified communications” is also sometimes used as a synonym for collaboration. Unified communications originally referred to combinations of voice, video, and instant messaging, as well as mashups like voicemail messages being forwarded to email. Circuit is aimed at wrapping those communications in a less transitory, more productive framework.

“Collaboration is an act where people come together and create something,” Stotz said. In other words, it’s defined more by results than the mechanics or communication and interaction.

This reminded me of my conversations with the analyst and technology buyer’s advocate Tony Byrne of the Real Story Group about the difference between social networking and collaboration. While enterprise social networks derive part of their value from building relationships within the organization, collaboration is not about making connections, he pointed out. Collaboration is about getting work done, typically in smaller, more focused teams rather than enterprise-wide networks.

This ties in with my theory around why collaboration environments built around team chat seem to be generating more enthusiasm, at the moment, than enterprise social networks. ESNs require a more intensive focus on building and sustaining communities and educating employees on how to use a social network in a work context. Team chat presents less overhead, inviting users to just start messaging each other and learn the collaboration features of the environment along the way.

“Really rich communication enables collaboration,” is the way I put it in the panel discussion. “But you’re right that they’re two different things. It only becomes collaboration when you’re accomplishing something.”

Arnold’s follow up question was, “Why now?” – as in, why are new modes of communication and collaboration suddenly catching fire.

Stotz put it down to the influence of millennials, who make up an ever larger share of the workforce. “These young kids hate email, absolutely hate email,” he said. “They want to work in an environment where we – Glip, Slack, and Circuit – are catering to the way they collaborate.”

I attributed the same trend to consumerization. You don’t have to be a millennial to hate email, and hating email is not necessarily new, but today most of us have built up habits in our consumer lives where we communicate in various compartmentalized ways – messaging friends through Facebook or professional contacts through LinkedIn as a way of bypassing the clutter and spam of email. Similarly, team chat lets you segment out the work you do with your closest collaborators so when you get a message through that channel, you know it’s important.

Is that a change in communication or collaboration? If it helps you get your work done, that is all that matters.

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