Page 116 - DCAP307_PLANNING_AND_MANAGING_IT_INFRASTRUCTURE

Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes
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Caution It may not be long, but it is not instantaneous in the way that Twitter, IM, and chat
sessions are.

Role-Based Sharing: How are products of the collaboration shared? Are they made public,
or can they be restricted to only those who participated? Can the collaboration be shared
with wider audiences as it becomes more refined? Blogs and wikis may be configured as
“open” or “moderated” based on the preferences and objectives of the creator(s).

Discoverable Collaborators: Do collaborators find one another through prearranged
channels or personal connections, or are they able to find one another through a common
interest in a topic? Can collaborators find one another by shared interest? Are they able to
associate by location or by affiliation? Many social networking sites require an invitation
to join an affinity group. Some membership sites require a reference from a member,
while others are completely open to anyone who wants to join. Does exclusivity ensure a
more robust network?

Ownership of Contribution: Is it clear who “owns” a particular contribution? Can you
track contributions and attribute them to specific authors? In some tools, collaborators are
represented by different colours. Are collaborators able to modify the work of others?
Can the history of the shared resource be tracked?

Playful or Engaging: Is the collaboration tool playful? A tool like Flickr encourages playful
dialogue around photos and themes. Second Life encourages play. MySpace and Facebook
actively promote playful interactions between multiple participants.

Social: Is the tool social? Does it permit serendipitous discovery of peers, friends, and
topics of interest leveraging your existing network? Does it allow you to post updates (or
micro-updates) about yourself? Are you able to connect to and work with those of your
network with whom you are most compatible?

Self Assessment

State whether the following statements are true or false:

10. Twitter, IM, and chat are considered as asynchronous collaboration tool.
11. MySpace and Facebook actively promote playful interactions between multiple participants.

6.4 Shortcomings of Collaboration Tools

For every effective collaboration tool with well-implemented features, there are tools that do
not succeed. The shortcomings of failed projects range from simply having an unintuitive,
clunky interface to being too expensive or requiring too much hardware.

Example: Lotus Notes is a powerful, multi-featured collaboration tool that imposed too
large a resource burden on users and administrators and was not able to successfully make the
transition from proprietary server/client application to accessible, user-friendly web application.
The challenge for any collaboration tool is to offer a combination of the following features:

Richer experience than any previous tool
Easier to use than other tools
More cost-effective than competing tools

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