The Case for Non-Persistency

"Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink."

-- Martin Lomasney, Massachusetts state senator

We have collaboration, we have enterprise file sharing, we have enterprise content management systems. It’s secure, efficient, and compliant. Yet, most collaboration is still done using email. Why is that? What does email have that all the collaborative software doesn’t?

What all these tools have in common is that they are persistent. The messages, comments, and documents that we create and share as part of collaboration are meant to remain preserved in the repository for a long time. And, for a good reason. They are part of the organizational body of knowledge, the corporate memory, that can be leveraged by the entire organization today and in the future. Often, there are also compliance reasons that stipulate persistency, sometimes even requiring us to turn all collaboration artifacts into formal records.

Photo: Flickr

But this persistency has a side effect. For one, employees often refuse to commit to bits the communication that they don’t want anyone to forward or discover. No, I don’t mean any politically incorrect jokes or some corporate sexting. I mean useful, productive communication in the form of feedback, opinions, advice, or critique that are often only shared in person. That’s why a lot of this communication either doesn’t happen at all or happens via SMS text messages and consumer instant messaging tools outside of IT control.

Another problem of persistency is vulnerability. That’s the benefit that Snapchat exploits so well when they say that delete is the default. Persistent information can be leaked or hacked. Information that has vanished because it was non-persistent, can’t. Many consumer companies have recently learned a tough lesson when their customer database has been hacked and the customer data has been leaked. If the data wasn’t persistently stored in the database, it wouldn’t have been leaked.

The other side effect of persistency is the added burden on employees. When you are saving a document in a repository where it may be shared with other people, you have to save it responsibly. Responsible collaboration means you have to think about where you save it, what you name it, decide with whom you share it, specify access permissions, assign metadata, add an expiration policy, and perhaps even classify it as a record. If you don’t do that, you are not collaborating responsibly because the organization won’t be able to get much benefit from what you are sharing.

Sure, some of those tasks can be automated and there is an entire industry trying to solve that problem. But some of the steps can’t be and that makes it a hassle. That’s why so many people just email the document to those they need to collaborate with right now. With email, we are free to collaborate irresponsibly -  we don’t need any of that metadata or policies, we don’t even have to name the document. All we need is just to click on Reply to All.

Email is not exactly non-persistent but it seems that way. Sure, some of us might be aware that the emails live on a server somewhere and some might even know that their IT department archives all emails for possible litigation and compliance purposes. But that’s only preventing us from engaging in irresponsible behavior, not in irresponsible collaboration.

There is one more burden that persistency creates. It creates clutter. The more sharing of documents and comments, the more clutter that is being created. If the collaboration artifacts remain persistent, the volume of documents, folders, messages, and comments just keeps growing and growing. Pretty soon the repository becomes difficult to navigate and nobody can find anything anymore. The corporate memory becomes a digital landfill, denying the organization the benefit of future reuse.

In fact, non-persistent collaboration is a gap in the collaboration market. We need a solution where a few people can quickly come together in an asynchronous way and just share, review, comment, and edit information. It could be a single document, a collection of images, or just an idea in the form of a sketch. After the collaboration is concluded, the initiator can decide whether the result should be moved to a persistent area or just leave it upon which it would vanish. The versions, comments, and messages would all vanish too.  The vanishing could be timed or immediate and it would always be the default behavior. Any move to persistence would have to be deliberate and it would notify all participants.

I am not aware of any commercial offerings providing non-persistent collaboration today but they might exist. I know that the US military has been using such a solution in the past, perhaps they still are. Obviously, the security aspects of non-persistency have a great appeal for a security sensitive organization like the military. I should probably also mention Snapchat again here. It is not exactly a commercial offering but it certainly has made a mark with its non-persistent messaging.

Would such non-persistent collaboration finally replace email? Maybe. Probably not. If I had a penny for every time someone declared email for dead… But it would address a gap in people’s needs. I know it goes against the grain of every corporate legal counsel and chief compliance officer but non-persistency would make us more productive.

Sometimes, Common Sense Beats ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is supposed to be the magic that makes any software sell instantly - the ultimate silver bullet for any sales person. You simply offer a logical, monetary justification of the solution’s value and the customer has no alternative but to buy. Right? Yeah, right...

The reality is that ROI can be a very elusive value proposition. For one, it rarely considers any competition. You have a problem and you can solve it by reducing your cost by x% for the price of $y which represents the initial and ongoing fees for the solution. Well, chances are that the competition has a similar solution and - what an audacity - they claim the same cost savings! It will be rare that your solution has a quantifiable capability that results in a unique and competitively differentiated ROI.

More often than not, your competitive advantage lies on a different level - product architecture, user experience, quality of service, or...ehm...price. Sure you can argue that each one of those characteristics too has an ROI but now you start overlaying one ROI calculation of a solution characteristic on top of business value ROI which is probably going to be too complex and less and less credible.

Let me give you an example. Say that the solution in question has to do with accounts payable where we know the cost for processing each invoice and a proposed solution results in a 15% cost reduction per invoice. Every CFO usually knows the number of invoices processed each month and the resulting savings can be compared with the cost of the solution and voila - we have an ROI! Pretty easy, right? But of course, every competitor can claim similar savings, assuming the cost of the solution is comparable.

We could in theory add a set of ROI calculations that estimate the savings of a particular user experience compared to the competition, or the savings resulting from a better product architecture but let’s face it, this will be a tough one to make credible.

That brings me to the main issue with ROI. Some solutions - like my accounts payable example - have a very measurable, credible ROI. Others don’t. Usually, anything to do with knowledge worker productivity or customer experience is difficult to measure. Often, it is impossible - or impossible to make credible.

Just take knowledge worker productivity (or effectiveness) which is a frequently quoted value proposition. What’s the ROI of the telephone on your desk? Or the wi-fi network in your office? How about the ROI of email? It’s hard to argue that these tools don’t contribute to the knowledge worker productivity but the benefit is so obvious that we just don’t bother calculating it. Sure, we can calculate the ROI moving from traditional PBX phone system to Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones. But we don’t need any formula to justify purchasing phones for every employee.

Any calculation that deals with knowledge worker’s time savings is dubious. Sure, a transactional type of work is really measured in hard numbers but most of the knowledge workers are switching between tasks, going to meetings, spending time brainstorming, thinking, creating, and communicating with others. It is not credible to argue that because a particular solution saved 30 minutes a day, it results is a measurable productivity increase.  

The bottom line is that ROI is not a magic bullet. It may very much help to establish the need or even justify the purchase for certain types of solutions. But there are many solutions purchased not because of an ROI: communication, collaboration and social software, knowledge management, document sharing, office and personal productivity applications - all such offerings are usually purchased because they just make sense rather than as a result of a hard ROI.

Don't sweat the ROI too much. Because sometimes, common sense beats ROI.

The Software Alone Won't Make You Social

I hear about many organizations that struggle with taking advantage of the power of social media. The first problem is of course buying into the idea that social media isn’t a waste of time. The second, far larger problem, is to get users to actually use the software and become social with their colleagues.  Yes indeed, deploying social software alone will not make you social. The ultimate goal must be to use the technology to raise employee productivity by increasing the level of social collaboration across the enterprise.

Many organizations, however, do not have an inherently social DNA. Sometimes, it is the focus on individual accomplishments that has created an individualistic culture. Other times, the nature of the business has historically not stimulated collaboration across teams. And sometimes, organizations that have gone through years of tough times, develop a culture where employees compete with each other and their primary instinct isn’t to share and collaborate but to horde information to make themselves indispensable. Such survivalist behavior is at odds with the openness and team spirit that social software can stimulate.

There is often a big difference between various functions and groups in the organization. Typically, particular groups embrace social media quickly while others remain in denial. This is where the organization needs to focus on adoption. There are various approaches that an organization can apply to stimulate the adoption. For example, the organization should suck into the social software as much already existing profile data as possible from other applications. Employees should be encouraged to post their pictures. Or, the pictures should be automatically imported from the employee badge database. Nothing makes veterans update their profiles faster than when they find out that their 10 year old badge picture is visible to all of their colleagues.

These tricks are based on a simple realization. Unlike in the consumer space, the enterprise social media knows all of its users already. They are the company’s employees and their user accounts already exist. We don’t need to convince them to join in - we can make them part of the application automatically since we know who they are. As a result, the early adopters of the social software can mention anybody in the enterprise by their user name - which then sends the mentioned user an alert. And when people see that they are being spoken about on a social site, they will come to check it out.

The adoption of social media in the enterprise has a few advantages over the public social media. It does not happen automatically though, particularly not in organizations that are historically not very social. In the end, however, the greatest driver is the corporate culture. If the culture hasn’t been very social, the management really needs to take this issue on and work towards a change. The best place to start is leading by example: when management starts communicating via social media, employees follow.