“I will have to send you the tracker.”

“We have developed a tool that helps us track things.”

“You have the wrong version of the tracker.  I am sending a new one out now.”

“Did you get the tracker I sent last night?“

Ugh. Head butt me with a barbed wire bust of myself. I really do have a visceral reaction to the word “tracker”. It pains me greatly. I immediately have nightmarish visions of being buried alive under reams of awkwardly-printed spreadsheets. I peer up out of my Office-borne grave while a lifesize Excel icon cackles madly and continues to shovel.  No thanks (unnamed) friends (quoted above). Keep your trackers. I’m opting for sanity.

Seemingly, the act of “tracking” things is important. But the tool of choice for execution is almost always an utter failure. I mean no disrespect to the people I have come to know that use these tools. For the most part you work off inertia, inheriting endless scrolling and eye-scratching color schemes from some former POC. You toil madly to maintain the false reality of “up to date”, applying cryptic file naming conventions that no one understands but you, all the while crushing your co-workers’ email with multiple meg attachments replete with animated gifs and 18pt Comic Sans. Super. Please send more.

I thunk on this for a while and tried to figure out what about this practice bothers me so much. Here’s what I came up with:

1. The information is never current. Never. The sheer mechanics of emailing requests, receiving and consolidating information, and then sending out again is too slow to keep up with the velocity of life. Every time I get a tracker briefed to me, there are always caveats that x,y, and z, have changed since the time of publication. Alrighty then. So what’s the point? Thanks for letting me know what life was like last week.
2. The information is presented in the way the “collector” believes to be logical, understandable, and efficient. Unfortunately, this thesis is rarely true for anyone else. There are discrete professions dedicated to making information consumable and meaningful. 99 times out of 100, you are not one of these professionals. Therefore your use of color, presentation, and the basic tenets of usability are about as informed as my understanding of dairy farming or snake handling. (I love me some Dirty Jobs, but you definitely don’t want me to milk anything.)
3. Spreadsheets are great for accounting. But drop dead awful for faking workflow or including narrative. Creating columns to be filled in with dates that signify actions is not only the technological equivalent of building a house with an shoe-last celt, but completely ridiculous for conveying current status. And don’t get me started on narrative. Spreadsheets can handle a word or two here and there, but if I have to read another center-aligned, 6pt font excerpt in cell AZ154 I am going to blow a major artery.

So what is the alternative you ask? Simple:

Anytime you think you might need to track something with inputs from multiple people, say one word out loud: WEB-BASED. Start there and you will probably be miles ahead of where you are today.  I am a big fan of Confluence and JIRA for things like this but there are literally thousands of applications out there that will remove you from the hellish existence of spreadsheet trackers.

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Nonetheless, I promised some time ago that I would keep you posted on the score with respect to Wiki Part Deux (Electric Boogaloo) . In short – so far, so good. Adoption, usage, and pervasiveness continue to steadily grow regardless of some rather daunting challenges like no SSO, no communication efforts, mandated account requests, and no integration with enterprise search. It’s all viral, all day and frankly it has been working surprisingly well. Like a virus. Errr…a friendly virus. A friendly virus that promotes transparency and recently added some hot new drag and drop capabilities. Yeah. That kind of virus.

As awareness increases, I have been fielding more and more questions on the difference between the wiki and (insert any big name document management platform here). The questions pertain to other internal systems or client systems. I (as well as a bunch of other much smarter people) have said some of this before, but thought it helpful to put it out there again.

Simply put, the wiki is not a new place to put content. It is a new way to create content. Think of the wiki as a replacement for Word or Email. Big name document management systems (in almost every organization I have seen) work like this: Open Word. Write something. Save it on your desktop. Upload it somewhere a few people can see it. Hopefully they find it. Hopefully they are the “right” people. Hopefully they download it. They make comments or changes. Hopefully they reupload. Hopefully you can reconcile the changes with everybody else’s. Rinse and repeat.

The wiki (in my organization) works like this -> Open the wiki. Write something. Save it. Everyone sees it. Some people comment or make changes. Actual (and rapid) collaboration ensues.

In my book the big difference between the two is a process improvement, not a location improvement. I don’t download. I don’t save attachments. I don’t worry about versions. I don’t send emails . I produce actual content.  My team and I are able to produce better content because we can work faster and with more brains at the table. Sure, there are great benefits in the knowledge management game, but at the end of the day it is about $ to me. Efficiency and leverage are the lifeblood of successful projects. Shifting how you think about producing the content, not where you think about putting the content will get you larger gains. It just so happens that the wiki is indeed a “place” of sorts at the end of the day, but the true value is in the process itself. This is why I see so many disappointed wiki users who do nothing but create pages and attach documents to them. There isn’t really a compelling improvement there. But when you change the process…now we’re cooking with gas.

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While my interactions with Jeffrey were relatively limited from there on out, he was unwavering in his support and advocacy.  No matter how long it had been since a sale or a marketing event, he was gracious, appreciative, and genuinely interested in our continuing slog through the E2 adoption quagmire. In light of his tragic passing yesterday, we wanted to express our condolences and gratitude to his personal and professional family at home and Atlassian HQ.

Jeffrey, you will be sorely missed. We would not be where we are today without you and the dedicated people at Atlassian.

Thank you.

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All in all, the event was a bangin’ good time. In addition to my blathering and Jay’s wisdom, Ken Olofsen was on hand from the Atlassian mothership to give product updates, company overview, etc to the attendees consisting of government and private sector types from around the Beltway. Also, shout out to the guys from Blackboard who gave a neato rundown on their Atlassian stack to SilkCentral integration. 

Thanks to everyone at Atlassian (especially Jessie Curtner!) for throwing down a righteous shindig in the District. Well…as righteous of a shindig that can be had with a bunch of geeks like me. Looking forward to doing it faster, better, and with even more consultanese at the Summit.

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As I was sitting in the session today, tweeting my thoughts on Enterprise 2.0, I began to ponder the value of moderating collaboration. If you haven’t had a chance to see the admin features in Clearspace, they are robusto. Essentially, you can control everything. It ranges from deciding who can and can not blog to creating automated filters for users with a propensity to curse like a a trucker. It is very clear (at least to me) that their content moderation approach was baked via their deep experience with forums facing the jagged masses of the public internet. And as their marketing guns also seem to have shifted aim toward powering external communities, these capabilities make even more sense. But I wonder….could these same capabilities, which are much needed on the public facing side of collaboration, provide an opportunity to over-manage an internal user community?

I contrast the capabilities I saw today with those available in the (internal) enterprise Wiki I administer, powered by Atlassian’s Confluence. Hands down, Confluence has nowhere near the control and admin capabilities of Clearspace. And when implementing in a low-risk, high-lawyer internal environment I fear that the mere presence of such control may encourage unnecessary administrative fear-mongering. By extension, the resulting collaboration environment could be so locked down that the users contribute little content and create little value.

Frankly, I sort of like the idea that if some moron in my company drops an F bomb on a blog post, that slickness is immediately exposed to the entire company. I hope he gets fired. And HR keeps the post up as an example of “what not to do with the enterprise Wiki.” If you are that dense I am 1) glad other people know, 2) convinced you don’t deserve a job here, and 3) now aware that we might need more stringent hiring practices. All good things in my book. This staffing action can happen in our Wiki.  If the filtering capability was there, I am not sure I could have convinced the risk-dodgers to turn it off.

On another other hand, Clearspace’s admin capabilities do a great job of providing much needed structure and tailoring to the collaboration needs of a community. I would guess that their adoption rates are much quicker with the vast majority of users than that of a wiki. The blank-slate paradigm works only for the hyper-creative. We continue to run into adoption issues with people who “just want more structure” or “don’t know where to start”. We could very easily solve this is we had the admin capabilities of Clearspace.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Clearspace is an awesome product with a boatload of power. It toasts my E2 Reuben for sure.  The administrative capabilities are both flexible and powerful. But as with any powerful tool placed in paranoid hands, incorrect use could lead to undesired results. Maybe the answer is don’t let the FUDdites know some of the the admin capabilities exist? Maybe different communities need different paradigms?

What do you think?

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