It is one of the reasons why we’re getting more demand for our portal by the leadership team, “outside the boardroom”. With our NextGen platform, we support the broader functionality that come with supporting the requirements of both boards and leadership teams, while ensuring the system is a productivity boost rather than a burden for administrative staff. TeamSpaces serve as focal points for processes segregating sensitive communication streams while insuring that boundaries are strictly maintained:

As you can see, BoardVantage is not just a standalone board portal, but is a platform for confidential communication and collaboration.

On a regular basis more “beyond the board” projects are coming up supporting leadership team initiatives where documents are the principal asset, confidentiality is key but there exists a need for modern collaboration tools and iPad support, including:

• HR confidential collaboration
• Business continuity planning (typically a cross departmental group)
• Crisis management contingency
• Collaboration between divisional heads

All of these require the role segregation and best-in-class document management facilities that BoardVantage provides with our NextGen platform.

BoardVantage’s own use of our NextGen platform is an excellent example of just such an Anti-Social Network, one where collaboration and access to resources is critical, but also one where Process Discipline is key, branded presentation is vital and where privacy is ingrained.

As VP of Marketing, I interact with my fellow execs (one of whom happens to be my boss, the CEO, so no pressure there), my team (including remote contractors), and my “customers” (from an internal perspective, that is Sales). For this I use three team spaces: BVExec, BVMarketing, and BVTeam.

First, let’s look at BVExec.

BVExec is the TeamSpace we use among the executives. It’s here that we can freely discuss all manner of issues without fear of misinterpretation and do so quickly and efficiently. Here there is no fear that inadvertently expressing yourself poorly is something that you may be punished for down the line. BVExec functions for us as a communication channel which lets us continue the conversation beyond the standing weekly meeting. Whether in the office or on the road, the executive team needs to be “always on”, and BVExec is the place for that.

Of course, while there is a necessary level of frankness among execs, there is also a lot I don’t want/need to share. As VP of Marketing I run a department with its own unique crop of issues, most of which the rest of the exec staff don’t want to be bothered with. For that, I use a departmental TeamSpace, BVMarketing.

BVMarketing is the sausage factory. It may not look pretty, but I’m paid for what comes out, not what happens inside. It’s here that I maintain a full content repository of everything we’ve ever done (for content reuse), as well as work-in-progress. Other execs have little interest in delving into the details of my department, but I engage with them here through a formal approval workflow to secure buy-in on broad-based initiatives such as branding campaigns, new collateral, or even press releases. Sometimes this may be just me, other times it may involve our CEO, and almost always it will include our VP of Sales, Mary DeFrenchi, who is my principal internal customer.  Trying to do this via a myriad of emails, all entitled “Latest Press Release” doesn’t work. I know because that’s what I did for the last 20 years of my life. Moving the approvals cycle off email enables faster, more reliable approvals and keeps everyone happy. Details such as being able to see when someone has looked at something, and receiving an alert when an updated draft is available are not details. They are central to the process and provide management through visibility.

I can even control the permission levels within the TeamSpace, so that other execs and staff members can interact with Marketing, but be spared the gory details of the parts they’re not interested in. It’s not that I’ve got anything to hide, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to explain exactly why we do the things we do inside the sausage factory. This is the world of Managing Chaos. An additional point is that new information and ideas need to be staged and introduced carefully using a process of socialization. I don’t want to present a wonderful new way of doing email campaigns until 1. I’ve checked it through internally with my own team, 2. Got buy in and support from the VP of Sales, and then 3. Received a green light from the CEO. Only then would I look to communicate the plan to the broader sales force. The golden rule of executive collaboration is to never surprise your peers and certainly not the CEO!

Then, with all the ducks lined up, we interact with the broader company, and to do that we use BVTeam. This is the one TeamSpace that everyone in the company has access to. However, this is also the point where new content needs to be packaged up in a form that is both usable and digestible. Sales reps need content that is ready for customer engagement. They need to be told how and when to use that content. They need to be able to locate it when they need it in the future, along with all the other supporting material. In short, they need context, and that is exactly what a branded page delivers. Folder structures may be ideal for power users who need finger tip access to all the content, but they also lack context and so they are anathema to occasional users who need the information to jump out at them. For that you need a branded page.

On the Marketing tab inside BVTeam I can talk directly to Sales. I don’t need a 48-hour cycle time and several IT staff to update the Intranet. With no more effort than writing an email, I can announce and present new sales tools, and in doing so, start to drive team behavior.  A micro-blogging wall is a great vehicle for making such announcements while engaging on feedback, and the overall layout is one I control directly, making me self-sufficient. Keeping everything in one place means that Sales doesn’t need to keep long trails of emails – they just come to the Marketing tab to get what they need and go. Get in and get out. Fast.

These three TeamSpaces support the three roles I play in the company:

• Peer collaborating with my fellow execs, generating and reusing content
• Manager directing a team, maintaining quality and ensuring process
• Leader presenting final product, engaging the consumers of that content

We see the same pattern in the board world. A General Counsel collaborates with her peers on the exec team. Likewise she has a department to run, the corporate secretary office in this case, one that needs a smooth internal collaboration process. Finally, there is the presentation of board material. The importance of handling that correctly requires no further elaboration.

These patterns of collaboration occur across leadership teams everywhere. That is why we designed our new platform to support People-centric Process.

Most vendors assume that social media is all about peer support and nothing more, so they produce point solutions that function as virtual water coolers that are at best appropriate for departmental use only, and many don’t even include document management. Documents are critical, since 9 times out of 10, a document of some form is the physical embodiment and work product of that collaboration. Along those lines these systems may serve a limited purpose but to really get the job done, you need a system that addresses all three roles at once. Our NextGen platform does just that.

So it was with some wry amusement I read a recent article handwringing over employee use of Facebook. Surprise, surprise! People are goofing off work quite a bit with Facebook. But is this really news? Similar articles were written five years ago, fingering chat as the villain of the modern workplace. And ten years before that, the Web itself was the culprit. Delving even deeper into the past, time-and-motion consultants used to worry about time spent on private phone calls, and before that it was probably the water cooler.

So it strikes me as a bit unfair to pin all the blame on Facebook. The reality is that people will take time out from their work for all sorts of reasons, both good and bad. Psychologists even have a term for it: Displacement Activity. As times change, the forms of this activity may change, but the substance hasn’t. Had there really been a change in the trend lines, it would show up in these statistics in a drop of productivity. That is certainly not the case according to these US figures .

One thing that has changed is deeper merging of personal and work activity. Whether triggered by dispersion in the workplace or an always-on work ethic, employees generally feel free to book movie tickets during work hours, but after the movie is over, those same employees will often log on to their company servers to check their email from home at 10pm in the evening. In this new normal, the line between work and play isn’t as clearly defined as it once was and there are pros and cons to that for both parties.

However if you’re concerned about the amount of displacement activity in the face of so many temptations, a good place to start is to provide better tools to make the difficult tasks not quite so daunting , something I can almost guarantee will involve more collaboration and more direct access to their peers, friends, and colleagues.

1. Why did the world’s biggest and baddest Internet player, with the biggest and baddest engineering team (the guys that came up with Google Maps) fail so miserably?

2. Is there anything in this wreckage that could be salvaged?

My take-aways on the first point are as follows:

Value proposition. Wave was supposed to be an email replacement but nobody seemed to be able to articulate why exactly it was better and under what circumstances. I confess to never “getting it”, so it was somewhat reassuring that no one else did either. The analyst community, who sang Wave’s praises until recently, seems somewhat lost here. My take? Wave was too unstructured – letting people see what you type as you type might look cool in a demo, but it can be severely career-limiting if your boss is on the other end. If I know one thing about collaboration it’s that process is key. Wave was the opposite.

Performance – or the lack thereof. I’m not sure if this was architecture, Google’s addiction to perpetual betas, or simply them not putting enough oomph behind it. Still, while it’s not often discussed by vendors, performance is hyper-critical for product adoption. No one wants to wait around for a screen to paint. Rest assured at BoardVantage (and it’s one reason we’re not cheap) that we deliver a performance level commensurate with business critical systems.

Integration – or the lack thereof. If you can’t get your content in or out the system, whatever magic happens inside the box is irrelevant. In this context, the fact that Wave integrated with neither Gmail or Googledocs is particularly puzzling.

The second question is harder to answer. It’s easy to poke fun at giants when they trip up, but there is a lot to be said for maintaining context in any collaborative environment – a central feature of a “wave”. At BoardVantage we’ve taken a somewhat different approach with our “discussions” which are integrated both with email as well as the document repository, even to the level of recognizing which versions were relevant at a particular time. Perhaps not as hype-worthy, but similar in philosophy, and one I believe will match more corporate use cases, where you need broad access but without sacrificing process.

PS

I can’t finish this post without a nod to Joe’s article “Size Doesn’t Matter”. If Google can so unceremoniously discontinue Wave, it’s safe to say that company size and product market profile are no guarantees of longevity. Caveat emptor.

IBM was a true pioneer in this area. Mainframe based, PROFS was used internally for email, document management and shared calendaring – all 500,000 employees were on the system as early as 1990. The system also sported a full-text searchable product catalog so you had instant access to IBM’s vast product portfolio.

IBM has always had a strong company culture, one that emphasized empowerment. The phrase “respect for the individual”, was not an empty one. The company placed great emphasis on collegiality (critics might also call that conformity) coupled with standardized process for almost everything.

It’s fair to say there was no such attention to process at Sybase in the go-go nineties (particularly in the City of London’s financial services office). The culture was perhaps best summed up by the typical salesrep’s view that “you’re not really an employee; it’s more like you own a franchise. You get a desk and a business card, but after that, it’s every man for himself”. The company was a case study in natural selection as the best performing reps got access to the best performing tech support teams. Reps who did not make their goals were saddled with less resource and territory, which of course set off a downward spiral.

Sybase’s collaboration tools developed ad hoc. The system engineers (all 10 of us in the UK) had our own shared calendar that only we could use. Sales people were deliberately denied access. Email was company-wide, as was VPN access to the marketing server – a simple shared server for presentations. With just one product in the company, there wasn’t much need for full-text search!

Collaboration is an expression of a company’s culture and its processes, and tools need to be able to capture that culture and that process. To give just one example, consider calendaring. At IBM it was considered normal to book a meeting in a free slot in someone else’s diary, without clearing it with the other party first. At Sybase, time was a competitive resource that was under the sole control of the owner. Access was closely guarded in a gatekeeper model.

The picture painted by many collaboration vendors is too uniform to capture these real-life use cases. Your company’s form of collaboration is unique having evolved over many years and molded by market conditions and executive directives. Cookie-cutter solutions available with a few clicks and a credit card will not be able to accommodate those processes. At BoardVantage, our success is in large part a result of understanding our customer’s unique requirements, and in delivering a platform that can work the way customers dictate, one that meshes, not clashes, with their corporate culture.