Research shows that 25 percent of the time spent in meetings is wasted. With 25 million meetings a day in the U.S. you can see how big a problem this is.

• New meeting platforms enable distributed collaboration and facilitate live manipulation of relevant documents and data. But they don’t address some of the fundamental productivity issues arising from meetings.
• If we do away with 20 percent of meetings right off the bat, by eliminating all status meetings and instead use collaborative project management and task tracking software, then we can save meetings for their real purpose: addressing conflicts and problems or making a decision.
• One of the reasons people continue bad meeting behavior is that they are not aware of the effect their behavior is having on the meeting and overall productivity. Graphically presenting meeting metrics related to purpose and behavior to participants in real time would help to eliminate much bad meetings behavior and save billions. Sometimes all people need is a mirror.

Thumbnail image courtesy: iStock/Thinkstock

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If you are an executive reading this report, you are probably wondering how this new vision of teams will affect your business and how to prepare for these changes. The three most notable findings from this report that you should be concerned with are:

• Teams are becoming more geographically and culturally distributed, yet they are being asked to do more complex work.
• Trust used to be the glue that bound teams together, but as complexity increases, it is a shared context that replaces trust on these distributed teams.
• The idea of a flash team is when one leader pulls experts from a group to form a team to protect the figurative village.

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With these processes as a framework, we will examine a market sector we call process-based collaboration. In our Sector RoadMap^TM, we identified and assessed the relative importance of six disruption vectors that companies can ride or drive to gain revenue and market share. Tech buyers can apply the disruption vector analysis to aid in choosing products that best suit their own situation.

Key findings in our analysis include:

• Distributed teams are becoming a work norm, and understanding the context of your team members is critical to high-functioning teams.
•  Although mobile and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends/vectors/disruptors have been building for the last few years, these technologies are radically changing the way we communicate and ultimately changing organizational structures. Combine that with a blended workforce of Millennials and freelancers and you have a new and rapidly evolving work environment.
• Although this report is called “process-based collaboration” (i.e., the role of collaboration in a critical business process), we are only just seeing the beginnings of process-specific collaboration. Most of the vendors in this report were happy to offer broad-based collaborative solutions and let the user figure out how to apply the technology. As applications get smarter, they also get more specific and process-oriented; “smarter” is just taking longer than I expected.

Based on this vendor research and work I do with end-user organizations, here are a few predictions I see being driven by these disruptors/vectors:

• There will be a greater use of a blended workforce (Elance and oDesk have already merged) in an organization that looks more like a network of networks than a monolithic command-and-control organization.
• Huge amounts of data (from sensors and the internet of things [IoT]) will have to be dealt with, and much of this big data will require collaboration to make sense of it.
• Another outcome of the IoT will be augmented meetings (in which you have more data about who you are meeting with than you would in-person [see current tools like Refresh, Bluescape, and Oblong]).
• The ability of distributed teams to form quickly to do a project, investigate an idea, or verify a critical number is becoming easier, and we will start to see open-source frameworks supporting “flash teams” in the near future.
• Browsers using HTML5 and WebRTC will become more robust and become standards in the near future.
• Because massive organizational changes are occurring, new collaborative HR practices for rapidly hiring and retaining talent will rely more on relationships in communities rather than the specific job title.

In our examination of representative suppliers and their positions vis-à-vis the disruption vectors, no one company dominated the sector the way Google dominates search. Instead there are various groupings of functionality and strategies that address sub-categories of these sectors, and even these sub-categories can have hundreds of vendors in them. Among the companies we evaluated, Clarizen and Microsoft/Yammer currently are best positioned in process collaboration. Adobe and Blue Jeans also look strong, and Decisyon, Biba, Spigit, and Contatta have their own competitive advantages.

Source: Gigaom Research

Thumbnail image courtesy of plustwentyseven/Thinkstock.

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Through a variety of research and case studies this report demonstrates that cloud-based videoconferencing that offers high fidelity and the ability to connect seamlessly to any video end point (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac) is critical to businesses because it increases employee engagement. These tools can make the many meeting rooms that do not currently have videoconferencing equipment fully video capable at a fraction of the cost of a room-based system.

The jobs of IT professionals are changing rapidly, as is the structure of the organizations that employ them. No longer is it only IT that can make technology decisions. With free trials and SaaS-based tools, anyone in any department can try a variety of tools to see which fits them and their group, department, or process the best. Whether you are an IT professional or someone helping to run a department or organization, this report will provide valuable and practical information for you to be successful with these new technologies.

Consider the following.

• Eighty-seven percent of remote users feel more connected to their team and process when using videoconferencing.
• Sixty-five percent of communication is nonverbal.
• Videoconferencing today can be used in a wide variety of situations and at a low cost.
• Cloud-based collaborative videoconferencing is a great way to increase engagement and productivity.
• Cloud-based video tools are less expensive and easier to use, and so they can be found in almost any meeting room.

Image courtesy of Thinkstock

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So how do we harness this power? I decided to take some of my own advice about crowdsourcing. This article is about my experience with crowd work, the ups and downs, ins and outs, and if I did really reach my goal more quickly, cheaper, and faster.

The post Case study: how to effectively crowdsource work appeared first on Gigaom.

This piece delves into the different types of collaboration to provide a baseline of concepts. It then examines how emerging technologies like driverless cars, brain science, and 3D printers are being used to further collaboration in the near and far future. These advancements will not only support more and better types of collaboration in the workplace but will also impact where we work, what a workspace is, what we work on (literally), and how we share our work.

The post How emerging technologies are influencing collaboration appeared first on Gigaom.

• Complexity. The tools have many functions, and they are not easy to use or learn. They were originally created for professional (trained) project managers, which 99 percent of users are not today.
• Linear working. Generation Y is often said to be the multitasking generation and can parallel process several different projects at once. However, some project-management software often makes the assumption of a single track of tasks and resources, which is not the way we do business today.
• Poor project communication. There are often just email notifications of a change in status or a project object. No conversation, no buy-in on tasks and no real-time communication support. In fact, Ginger Levin, a project-management consultant and educator based in Lighthouse Point, Fla., who is DPA-, PMP-, PgMP- and OPM3-certified, says,“Ninety percent of a project manager’s time is spent communicating with stakeholders.”

Avoiding these pitfalls leads to smoother processes, more-productive workers and, ultimately, better business practices. This piece discusses each of the above issues in more detail, as well as analyzes how new tools and project management software are creating solutions to these problems. Current tools deal with today’s greater project complexity, parallelism and communications in a variety of new ways. Many projects are part of a community and are more team-oriented. And the tools are often much simpler and don’t require users to be certified by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

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But the next big thing in collaboration is crowds, not social. Social is only a new method of connecting and discovering information; social does not enable and guide action. Business is about delivering results, and for that you need a crowd. I define a “crowd” as a network that drives an outcome, task or goal that has business value. This piece aims to demonstrate how crowds will add value to your business and shows some examples of what work in the future might look like using this largely untapped resource.

We still struggle with silos of collaboration in most enterprises today. By adding social tools we have accelerated communication but not necessarily increased the overall level of collaboration and action in the enterprise. One of the reasons for this is that both social networks and online communities are focused on connection and communication, but there is no expected result or outcome, as there is with a crowd. For example, in 2007 Facebook opened up the language content behind its software platform and split it into 28,000 pieces. It then put out an open call for people to translate them and “make Facebook pages available to everyone, everywhere, in all languages.” The contributors interacted and exchanged knowledge through translations.facebook.com, and as a result 300,000 “Facebookers” translated the website into over 70 languages. Google has used the same technique to get people to label images, and through iReport, CNN has over 500,000 people who help with information that can be reported as news.

Effective collaboration is an age-old issue and one that has plagued businesses since humans were using stone tablets. We agree that “social” is an improvement in connectivity and interaction. But rather than an improvement to business itself, it is a platform for what I call crowd-based business (CBB). CBB is the use of crowds to do work for specific businesses, as outlined in the examples above.

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The current norms and practices are increasingly coming under direct assault by a myriad of social and technological forces that are rapidly eroding business as usual. To be competitive and successful in the future business world, individual workers and entire organizations and firms will have to master new skills in the data sciences and the ability to work in a cooperative or collaborative fashion (in contrast to competition’s being the primary driving force). These same tools may ultimately transform not only how work is accomplished but also the form of the organizations themselves.

Further, at the heart of the future of work and the future firm will be the role of information and how we collect it, manage it, share it and ultimately move from data to information and knowledge to the wisdom that will drive the next generation of innovative products and services.

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