Office 2.0 Conference offers collaboration lessons

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By Alex Handy

September 5, 2008 — Sept. 3 marked the kick-off of the third annual Office 2.0 conference at San Francisco's St. Regis hotel. The event focused heavily on using collaborative Web technologies to increase productivity gains and business agility. While many talks were broad overviews, some highlights included a spirited discussion of UI design and the business lessons learned by GE as it built an internal social network.

The first day of Office 2.0 was an un-conference with dynamically designed sessions focused on audience participation. Steve Bristol, co-founder of lesseverything.com, lead a talk on UI design that discussed everything from Apple to speech-based operating interfaces. Lesseverything.com is a Ruby on Rails consulting firm, but Bristol is likely better known for his accounting program, Less Accounting. He said that developing that application showed him just how much more complex the back end of software can become when the user interface is simplified heavily.

Bristol and others in the session compared vehicular dashboards to user interfaces, and much of the talk was focused on solidifying this metaphor. Bristol did point out, however, that the fundamental key to good user interface is communication. “If you don't have good communication skills, you're not going to write good UI,” said Bristol.

Dr. Sukh Grewal, manager of SupportCentral at General Electric, gave what was perhaps the most interesting talk of the conference. Back in 1999, Grewal was working as an engineer, primarily dealing with turbines and engines. The company then tapped him to head up the creation of an internal Web-based knowledge base. The project began in earnest a few years later, and eventually morphed into a social network. That social network is now nine years old and sees almost 25 million hits a day from GE employees.

Using the wiki model
Grewal said that the team at GE learned a lot about the business applications of Web 2.0 technologies. The fundamentals weren't always the same as those in popular Web sites, such as the Wikipedia, he said. That means ease of editing was certainly a priority, as was oversight and the ability to delete useless or dead content. But for enterprises, said Grewal, sometimes the most important aspect was simply being able to figure out who wrote what. There can be no anonymity, he said.

More education came at the hands of company processes. “What we missed in 1999 is the fact that knowledge and people in an enterprise exist in the context of processes," said Grewal. "You can have all the knowledge you want, but there has to be some action, some service that delivers value to an organization. Communities are organized on processes. SupportCentral is eight years of development focused on community needs to deliver processes. A process is how organizations generate value. This was an epiphany to us, and it changed our entire direction.”

Today, SupportCentral features a number of methods for grouping people together. Users are still given their own spaces, somewhat like MySpace, with their own photos and space for storing personal files. But the groups those users belong to generate much of the site's usefulness.

Users can join expert groups, which are accessed when problems arise in the field. If a company in Australia has an emergency with its generator, the closest support representative can quickly find the group of experts at GE who built the device and connect them to the customer with the problem. This allows engineers who've been moved to other projects to continue to offer their expertise on things they may have helped design, but have long since stopped working on.

In this regard, said Grewal, large enterprises like GE can behave much more like smaller companies.

Also key to the success of SupportCentral, said Grewal, is the constant pruning of dead content. “We have over 50,000 communities. In minutes, anybody at GE can establish a community. We delete about one-third of every community created. It's no big deal, just clean up time,” said Grewal. This was a resounding theme among conference attendees in the social networking and wiki spaces: dead content that is no longer used or maintained should be removed.

Dealing with internal files has also changed due to SupportCentral, said Grewal. “We started out with a simple document management system, but we ended up with almost full document management because some communities really need it. Since we already have a platform here, for us to switch them over from uploading Word docs to just using Zoho [a Web based office suite] natively is very easy. We can save some money on Microsoft licenses,” said Grewal.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery that has come from SupportCentral is the wide variety of statistics that can be gleaned from usage. “We have documented evidence that people work 10 to 20% less on Friday,” said Grewal, as hits on SupportCentral are down by that much every Friday. Of course, that small hit from weekend lust is a drop in the bucket compared to the time saved by the system overall.

“People manage communities that help them do their job. The reason they go here is because they find answers there. The experts are happy because they're not getting the same calls with the same questions again and again,” said Grewal. “We have documented evidence of this system giving productivity gains of up to 70%.”

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