There is a lot of discussion and advice online about use of collaboration technologies. Unfortunately, however, most of this discussion is really about communication technologies.
Collaboration technologies help manage work by multiple people, whereas communication technologies are point solutions that enable messaging and content-sharing.
This distinction is poorly understood in general, so here is a picture showing the landscape for collaboration technologies:
My own interest is in the Human Interaction Management System (HIMS), the most recent development in collaboration technology.
The HIMS is unique in letting organizations manage collaborative work that is either:
Repeated and adaptive
The Stages/Roles/Deliverables model of a HIMS is a more practical means than GANTT charts, cases or flowcharts to describe, carry out and manage such work.
or
Cross-boundary
A HIMS automatically synchronizes all participants’ copies of a process via email, removing the need for all parties to login to the same server.
In future posts to this blog, I will show how simple it is to use a HIMS to describe human collaborative work that is repeated and adaptive.
Keith Harrison-Broninski is a researcher, writer, keynote speaker, software architect and consultant working at the forefront of the IT and business worlds.