Collaboration context, or what is “IT”?

There has been much discussion about email as a collaboration tool, and possible alternatives. These are great discussions and really got me to thinking as well. It seems email started out as a communication tool, and as other information systems become more and more common it was used more as a tool to fill in the gaps of these information systems (“hey, please review this document and get back to me”, “can you login and approve my expense report”, “did you see the stats on the so and so report?”, “the xyz system just generated a system alert, more information here…”). An over generalization is that email discussing something that has no electronic information (as was the case with most things 20 years ago) works good (not great). Email as a bridge between the gaps in other systems doesn’t work as well.

Michael Sampson discusses the importance of correct usage and people issues, and it seems to me a large influence on this is what is “IT” that you are talking about? I think much of the email in my inbox is about some other system (see diagram below “Application Context”). In this situation, the person is switching context in order to process the email, they must also go to another system or have access to additional information. This diagram holds true for people sending notification of wiki pages to people on email as well. However, using Mashups, it seems possible to take the existing tool of email and allow it to be shown within the context of another application (see diagram 2). This would require some ability to tag, or differentiate emails for a specific context (for instance, a purchase order going through the request chain could have all the emails about this shown on the same page).

I tried out the new Gliffy for these diagrams, it worked great, thank you!

Thanks also to these articles for helping stimulate my thoughts here:

http://www.innovationcreators.com/2006/09/email_is_critical_to_enterpris.html
http://www.annezelenka.com/2006/09/email-the-good-enough-collaboration-tool
http://www.grey-consulting.com/blog/2006/09/email_the_good_enough_collabor.html
http://www.michaelsampson.net/2006/12/email_vs_collab.html
http://www.mindthis.net/mindthis/2006/12/counterpoint_em.html
http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2006/09/10/on-social-software-and-consensus/
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20060901/column-freedman.html