David Coleman's 2011 Collaboration Predictions: How Did He Do?

By David Coleman (@dcoleman100) Dec 8, 2011

While it's always fun to make predictions for what the next year holds, it is rare when someone returns to those predictions to see how the fantasy held up to the reality. That is exactly what David Coleman does with this piece: Reviews his predictions for 2011 with the benefit of hindsight.

2011 Predictions

#1. To team or not to team?

The very nature of teams is changing; no longer are teams just one group of people, but others move in an out of teams based on their expertise or ability to do a task. This type of team permeability can happen with local teams, but it is more common with geographically distributed teams.

#2. More consolidation of collaboration vendors

With 2000+ solutions available, that is more than anyone can consume. Many of these vendors are “zombie” companies (as I have written about in earlier blogs). More of these zombie companies will realize that they are dead and really die, so hopefully the noise in the collaboration market will lessen. One acquisition I expect is for Oracle to acquire OpenText, as they already have a good relationship and it would fill some holes in the Oracle product line.

#3. Time shifted teams

I do it with my TV, why not the teams I work with? This has more to do with time zone issues than network TV programming. Not everyone on a team is a full time employee and distributed teams can work at any hour of any day or round-the-clock if needed. You do need to be fair with virtual team meetings and not always have one team member meeting in the middle of the night. You need to have your team be aware of local context (more on that in another blog).

#4. Clash with open source

This has been brewing for a long time, and there are many collaboration tools that are available in open source, but the issue is more about adopting the open source model for trust, especially in software projects. Trust will be extended to those who perform and collaborate through various types of reputation models. However, this implies community rather than a team, so we will continue to see the rise of more communities as a way to work and extend trust.

#5. The cloud will continue to dominate collaboration

There are lots of advantages to the cloud: it's quicker, cheaper (at least at the onset), requires less FTE, quicker start, works for both small and big companies, multi-tenant is a more efficient model, etc. Most collaboration tools we track have moved over to the cloud, or if they are smart, have been built for the cloud. I believe the cloud influence on collaboration is just starting and it will help us generate a third order effect (first order was web pages, second order is “social,” third order is finding people through content); this implies that librarians will have a new career as either “cloud searchers,” data miners or community managers.

#6. Team and identity spam

There are already people claiming to be you on Facebook or LinkedIn and they can hijack not only your identity but your business. This type of identity spam will start to spread (remember spam is about 80% of today’s email messages) into communities, with more fake people, topics, discussions, tags, etc. This will bring people to ask “who am I really working with?” and could be a big trust issue in online communities. I don’t see this as much in the growing number of enterprise communities, since in those everyone is known.

#7. Collaborative search and filtering will increase

The amount of information we have to deal with each day is growing at an incredible rate and will only go faster in the New Year. How do we cope with overflowing in-boxes, too many social networks, constant tweeting, etc.? One way is through intelligent aggregation (bring all the input types into one screen) and there are any number of products that do that (Nomee, SocialPlane, threadsy, etc.), but then you have just as much data to deal with, just all in one place.