Author: Saghar

Today Obama accepted that the tax break for the richest Americans will have to continue for another two years. Boehner now must accept to extend unemployment benefits for average Americans. Does this mean the Democrats and the Republicans are collaborating and making decisions together? Are Democrats and Republicans able to minimize the affective elements of conflict and maximize the cognitive elements so as to benefit from their conflict in terms of decision making? Are we at the “best spot” in decision making?

American politics is certainly full of emotions. One problem is that many of the issues at stake are not money related issues, but social and religious issues where ‘affect’ and emotions are important and very hard to minimize. Otherwise things would be easier: the Republicans would defend the rich, the Democrats would defend the middle class and the result of their conflict would be decisions that are a compromise (someone told me the poor don’t count much in the US because they don’t vote as much as the other two groups, but I still have to confirm this). If this were only about money and taxes, the whole problem would be more cognitively based because these things can be counted and agreed upon.

But there are so many issues, like religion, war, race, immigration where the emotions are at high levels. These areas of conflict are obviously far less cognitively based and therefore harder to benefit from conflict in terms of decision making. Also, ideological parties seems to create like a permanent “dialectical inquiry” because each side is offering an ‘alternative solution’ and each political party sticks to its own ‘alternative solution’, which according to our data, raises the affective, not the cognitive.

In the collaboration module, we have seen how effective collaboration can help enterprises in different situations. Effective collaboration could boost innovation, decision making process, and bring outstanding results to companies. But how do we promote and manage collaboration in a company and what tools to be used for this purpose? These are areas that must be analyzed carefully before taking any steps toward implementing and improving a collaborative environment.

Gartner recently revealed its predictions about social software usage after 2010 and their roles in enterprise collaboration. Gartner’s report is about emerging collaboration tools and how they would play a different role within enterprises and how people collaborate in the near future.

Most of us have seen or probably tried a few number of collaboration tools and we know how they encourage/discourage people to collaborate. I could not say to what extent all Gartner’s predictions are likely to come true. But Gartner performed a good job at least in challenging the readers and also warning top management about the future changes.

For example, the first prediction -social networking services as a substitute for email- depends on how we define ‘social networks’. Some ‘social networking’ sites are in fact professional sites geared towards professional advancement, rather than socializing or befriending others. I believe Linked-in could be a good example of what Gartner is talking about here.

The second prediction is about microblogging; definitely microblogging is great. But I have a feeling that much blogging is becoming something akin to writing diaries. It is a great way of recording thoughts but do employees have the time to read their co-worker’s microblogs? The proliferation of information has already overwhelmed us from filtered streams (online news, feeds, etc.) let alone unfiltered thoughts of our colleagues. I agree with the article that scalability is a problem for enterprise microblogging. However that may or may not be the primary challenge for them. The efficacy of information is a more fundamental a problem.

The fourth prediction talks about collaboration and smartphones. I really believe in the future of mobile technology. I am just wondering about the limits, as I remain optimistic. Will the majority of our communication needs be addressed with apps? Mobile poses a lot of challenges that are as yet unsolved. Usability is still a huge challenge and human machine interfaces are still dangerously unhealthy.

These predictions challenged me to thinking more about the importance of setting and diffusing effective collaboration ground rules in companies. As long as enterprises are not aware of good vs. bad collaboration and employees do not understand when/where/what to collaborate, IT breakthroughs are not likely to help a lot in this area. This is a strategic decision left for the top management to how to catch up with and get benefit from organizational and social behavior changes in the near future. If Gartner report is to be true, who is/are responsible to take the right action before it becomes too late to manage? I believe there are still some strategic issues to be addressed before melting into the new realm.