Applied Collaboration – tell them about it

Collaboration is not only about doing things together or exchanging information.
Collaboration is also a very powerful tool in internal public relations: Tell them what you do; make them know about it. Sharing is a way to gain power, to recruit new ideas or comments and enhancements.

Collective Experience

There is collaboration, there is userexperience and there are many more: semiscientific disciplines that describe what we can do and where we can twist and turn something to succeed.

And there are a few common basics:it’s all happening in a community; it is always a collective experience.

Shaping worlds – meet the Truman Show

Just a quick thought: Managing information is like juggling between very ambitious open space models (greek agora) and the “Truman Show”.
But don’t tell anybody…

Multilingual Sites – the untranslatable

There are several reasons why some contents can not be translated:

• specific terms
• specific languages (english, russian, latin)
• multimedia – pictures, video, audio
• you would not understand it anyway: “is your birthday calendar really the high priority content for the intranet-homepage?”

Hierarchical terms that denominate positions that do not exist in other countries, popular terms that are hard to understand for non native speakers and even harder to translate – both are great in creating identity, they are entertaining and they are good means of communication.
But they are also tools to exclude others: That’s our thing, we say that, you don’t have to bother. You can no and should not get rid of this on a local level, but you can not use it if acting internationally; you have to neutralize yourself (one common way: just talk broken english – as I am doing it here – nothing will be perfect;; everybody will understand… )

Sometimes, it’s not the language, but the attitude that can’t be translated.
The further east I go the more I am impressed by how important birthdays and namedays are in many cee-cultures. – That must be highly fertile area for any social media services, but it’s very hard to integrate warmest wishes into business-style intranets as we know them. As prime content on the portal homepage, notabene.

A third quite special case are pictures, video- and audiofiles. Metadata can either be translated or use common language so that it’s easier to argue about, captions and other supporting texts are also easy to translate.
Pictures should be general, but actually they are not. Pictures tell a lot about tradition, power and personal views, and that is closely related to local views and traditions. A western CEO may want to visualize cooperation, openness and friendliness, an  eastern CEO may rather want to represent strength, wealth and power. Western users will understand the strength-image as something oldfashioned, maybe even threatening. Eastern users may interpret open friendliness as weakness.
A universal picture language will end up being just boring. So this has to be handled somewhere else, it’s a mainly cultural and political matter where official media can only support.

Videos strongly transport values and identity. Use them only, if your plan is really clear – or if your actors are great. Information-driven videos that contain a lot of explanations can synchronised; vox pops or interviews should never be completely synchronised. That will just destroy their actual value. 
To summarize: I feel more and more that multilingual sites are not a matter of translation, workflows, contentmanagement or menus, but they interfere a lot with cultural and political values in the enterprise, they have a high impact on information architecture – and they are one of the big cost drivers for portals.

Multilingual Sites – The impact of Information Architecture (and the other way round)

Where do you make the difference between different languages or different localizations of your site?

I think we can assume that there ist actually very little information that is really the same and will be reused all over; most of the contents will have some local variations.
If you think of a site containing product information, the products may be similar in different countries, but they will have different names (what requires different pictures), different selling propositions and different terms and conditions. That reduces the reuse quite a lot.
Company information on the other hand should not allow any variations: If an international company is addressing it’s audience – no matter if customers, employees or investors – the message must be consistent and uniformous. There should be no local influence and no chance for local stakeholders to change or delay that information.
Nevertheless, this information should find it’s way to the audience like any other information, it should not be published in specific exile-sections.

So where to make the difference between local and international contents, between translated and native, between local-language-only and mandatory to be translated contents, how to display that so that the user does not get confused?
Actually,it’s easy: the user should not notice any difference.
So the difference should not be named, it should not be part of the menu,it should not make the user think about local or international contents – all contents should just be there.

 

Having a menu entry labeled “International” would require to translate everything in there – that means you have to enter enough content to make it an entry of it’s own, to translate everything and to think about reasons why certain contents are part of the international section and not of the other local channels. Maybe you will end up with having the contents in both places – that’s the best way to kill your international section.

So be careful with emphasizing multilingual features and translations, don’t make the user think about it – but invest a lot of thought in what and how to translate.

Multilingual Sites – Beyond Workflows

 When asked for multilingual features, skills and experiences, experts, consultants and tool-providers are quick to present workflows and other technical solutions.

What we know now for sure is

• there are cms- and portal solutions who bring translation-workflows out of the box
• there are best practices for handling translations, including the management of translators, change notifications and versioning
• there will be a good technical case-study for every issue we may come up with

 

Does this really answer all questions? What actually are multilingual sites?

Multilingual sites are pages that present content in different languages; some of ythese contents will be the same in all languages. That requires translation.

Pages that display different contents, are actually not multilingual sites – they are just different websites.

So one big criteria for multilingual sites is translation – and it is one big challenge to decide which contents should be translated.

In a multinational company, translation is not only a matter of cost, but also of politics and strategy: what does it mean to translate, why is it done, what are the targets? There are several possibilities:

• be close to the employees; don’t create a distance to internationally relevant information
• keep the barriers as low as possible
• ensure that all employees have the same chance to understand
• touch people in their direct environments
• give employees the right terms for their future conversation with colleagues, customers and other local environments
   

These criteria are to be applied differently, depending from

• who is talking? an international headquarter or a local subsidiary?
• who is addressed? locally or internationally woprking employees?
• what other environments are relevant? what languages do they speak?
   

That creates a matrix that can help to decide which translations are really necessary, which can be avoided because they dont fit the criteria and which have to be done even though may not seem to be the most important ones at first glance.

 

Applied Collaboration – Spread the Word

We had a long discussion today on how to publish the reports of our research department. They are of very low interest to most users, but very important to some; most of the time they are considered to be nice to have, but they can become very critical information very soon.

• Emailing the reports is the worst solution: they waste space (500k – 1 meg), they are deleted or archived and forgotten and only considered as another annoying newsletter.
• Publishing a summay of every report as a news on the intranet also takes your users straight to boredom – this will be the perfect example of a never read information.
• On the other hand, people complain that they dont find enough information if they search the intranet for business-, market- or country-specific-information.
• The complete information is published on the internet – but employees dont go there to search, and on the research-department’s share – but that’s where employees don’t have access.

We decided to start a report-channel that published only very short abstracts of the reports, containing just enough keywords so that a search on this business or that market should find it. Monthly news highlighting the most important reports will be published to point users to that service and to keep the curiosity alive.
The full reports would be found in the internet only; the summaries will link there.

What a lot of work. But we have to prevent the ongoing experience that there is nothing in the intranet.

What a beautiful solution would it be to have a common report-directory, maintained collaboratively by the researchers, descriptions of their reports on their personal pages or phonebook-profiles and downloadable reports that could be accessed from there.

That would not only mean less work for us a intranet managers, but it would also save the researcher’s time – and it would deliver a much greater value to the users: The easy combination of information empowers searching and browsing features, because the higher density brings better search results and makes menus more understandable, it creates a goof overview of the content’s context (because there is a direct relation to the authors and their environment) – and information would have to be stored only once, but linked to very often.

Other benefits:

• users get more into the intranet, they are invited to look around
• keeping a clear and strict information architecture, but mixing the access to information and providing multiple entry pages (from channels to personal profiles or phonebook entries) makes the intranet more transparent and inviting for users
• it’s actually not exactly collaboration, but it prepares people to use the intranet, to add their own views and contents and to participate and socialise.

Applied collaboration – Share files

It’s ridiculous, but true: It’s still a problem in the enterprise to share files. Emails get blocked because of attachment-sizes and extensions, network drives are not available for everybody and the administrators are unknown. And even if you managed to put the file on a place where everybody can access it, you still have to tell people where it is. And there is no control – once it’s open, you can hardly exclude anybody, you don’t see who already downloaded it, and if you have a new version of your file, the trouble starts all over again.

Applied collaboration should allow you to store files, manage access rights, get statistics, control versions – and, most important: tell people where and how they can find it.
If there is then some realtime editing mode and more stuff that allows “true” collaboration on one file – that’s a nice add on. even though I think that this perception of collaboration does not focus on it’s biggest benefits. Concentrate on information, opportunities and status. Collaboration doesn’t mean that others will do your work.

Applied collaboration – Get in touch

You don’t go there and ask people what they are doing, not in the enterprise environment.
But if they write it down – you may be highly interested…

You can do some research without being intrusive, you can talk to people without having to hide your findings, you don’t have to feel like a stalker.
And you can present yourself as an expert, you can tell everything you want and you don’t have to talk louder than anybody else. You don’t even have to care whom you are talking to – of course you should think about your target group, but if your audience today does not understand a thing – maybe your audience tomorrow is perfect.

So an applied collaboration network could be the place to give you information about new people, colleagues you’ve met for the first time. And it is the place for you to set the tone: How do you want people to perceive you, how do you want to position yourself. – It becomes an important tool to shape and steer your career – more transparent and flexible than MBOs, Performance Contracts or Review Meetings, more tailored to your needs, and more under your control.
It’s not only the content that matters, but also the mere activity: do you do something, do you want to achieve something? As an opposite, you can also use networks to hide: If you’re not in there, nobody will find you. Whatever that tells about your company…

Applied collaboration – The collaborative value of doing nothing

Applied collaboration is extremely valuable, if you’re doing nothing. Well, maybe not literally nothing, but not what somebody expects you to do.

As an example: I’m waiting for Patrick to send out meeting minutes, coordinate a workshop and give me more information on the innovation project he’s working on. I haven’t heard anything for the whole week. So how should I know? Call him? Wait for an email? Or just wait?
Or should I send him an email, asking what he’s actually doing, when he will send the meeting minutes and if there is anything new with the innovation stuff? – You know how likely emails are to sound rude, and how easily rumors are spread: Is the innovation project dead? Am I telling Patrick that he does not do his work?

A collaboration network with minimal status-notes could tell me that Patrick was very busy with the innovation project, did not have any time for the meeting minutes, and is dealing with our partner agency to schedule our workshop.