Tools don’t matter. Tools absolutely matter.
Summary
While tools aren’t the end-all and be-all for distributed collaboration and knowledge sharing, they’re hardly trivial. Companies cannot allow their collaboration tool stack to languish. They must aim for a world-class user experience.
Let’s not forget that there’s no distributed work without tools. So tools matter a lot.
People’s exposure to the consumer web shapes their expectations from enterprise tools as well.
People endure poor experiences for mandatory tasks, but for optional activities, they expect an outstanding user experience.
So, while enterprise tools are often familiar and ubiquitous, they must stay current with their user experience too.
I’m an old foggy of the tech industry by now. Grey hair, two decades and all that. Through that transition of twenty years from a head full of thick black hair, to every shade of grey, two conversation threads have been constant in my career. One is digital collaboration; since I’ve always worked in distributed organisations. The other is distributed learning and knowledge management. Both these conversations were ongoing even when I started my career.
With how long these conversations have happened in the industry, you’d think these are problems that most companies have solved. But they aren’t. There are many reasons for this; far more than one article can address, but one reason is the polarising discussion about tools. No, it’s not about which tool is the best. I’d understand and empathise with that kind of debate. It’s about whether tools matter at all.
So one side argues that tools don’t matter. After all, people only need to have conversations, create documents and be able to search through these artefacts. Basic, right? The other side indexes heavily on the importance of tools. Like all polarising debates, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Here’s what I think that truth is.
Tools aren’t the only topic that matters for distributed collaboration or knowledge sharing. But tools still matter a lot!
The first part of that statement is easy to agree with. Remote-native ways of working and a global community and knowledge strategy address many of the “non-tools” part of this debate. This website too has addressed those aspects many times over.
So in this article, I want to address the tools part of my opinion. Why do tools matter so much?
There’s no distributed work without tools
Tools are the reason we’ve been able to work in distributed teams for so many decades. When I started my career, teleconferencing bridges and email were the primary drivers of digital communication. Some companies employed wikis for team and company-wide knowledge sharing. These platforms then gave way to enterprise social networks (ESNs). More recently, video conferencing, instant messaging collaborative documents and whiteboards have become popular. And the innovation continues, with varying degrees of sophistication. As Nick Bloom noted some years back, patents that support distributed working, continue to see an uptick.
The point I’m making here is that it’s naïve to ignore tools in a distributed setup. Every company has improved its collaboration and knowledge-sharing stack since I started my career. While everything seems to have improved from those early days, it’s imprudent to rest easy on any tool stack.
The consumer web shapes user expectations
Take a few moments to reflect on your experience with the consumer web, over the last few years. Think about how many new tools and services you’ve exposed yourself to. Think about the big pivots established platforms like YouTube and Instagram are making. Facebook, which was at the heart of most people’s internet experience, seems to have lost favour with many. Think about what a big part AI has played, in the last 18 months, in your experience of interacting with the web. I’d like to wager that you now take ChatGPT and similar services for granted.
Indeed, the way many of us have grown to interact with LLMs is only illustrative of how the consumer web shapes our behaviours and expectations. The internet is a hotbed of user-experience innovation. The more we experience the web in certain ways, the more those ways become our basic expectations. What’s one day a world-class experience, feels like a chore on another day. Web search is one such example. Google search was and continues to be world class on many parameters. Yet, the ease and approachability of ChatGPT and Bard make traditional search feel old-school and cumbersome. This hedonic adaptation to technology is something we can’t ignore even within the enterprise.
Optional activities demand a world-class experience
In our personal lives, as well as in our jobs, you can broadly classify activities as mandatory or optional. Banking, for example, is a mandatory activity in our personal lives. Filling a timesheet at work is also mandatory for many jobs. For such activities, we’re willing to endure some discomfort. It’s unsurprising then, that both banking and timesheets often provide unglamorous user experiences.
But with optional activities, we have a higher bar. Investing is the optional counterpart to mandatory banking transactions. Social media is the optional counterpart to email. Knowledge sharing at work is the optional counterpart to video conferencing at work. For all these activities, we demand the most modern and sophisticated experience possible. Think about it. This is why fintechs scramble to give users the easiest investing experience. It’s why TikTok, Reels and Shorts are battling to corner the short-form-content market. It’s also why new tools like Almanac and Notion are pushing incumbents like Confluence to stay sharp.
If an activity you expect your employees to do is optional, you can’t afford a shoddy experience. We’re so spoiled for choice by the consumer web, that we have no reason to soldier through a sub-par experience that has zero impact on our effectiveness at work.
So in summary, let me rephrase my initial assertion - for high-quality collaboration and proactive knowledge sharing, it’s perilous for organisations to ignore their tool stack. Of course, this doesn’t mean that a company must always shop around for the latest and greatest tools out there. But this is where tool selection must be a thoughtful part of your knowledge strategy. You must pick tools not only for their present-day capabilities but also for their track record of user-experience innovation.
Collaboration and knowledge-sharing tools in the enterprise benefit from three key characteristics:
Ubiquity. Everyone you know and work with, is using these tools.
Familiarity. You’ve used them enough that you know how to make the most of the tools.
Up-to-date user experience. Even if the user experience isn’t cutting edge, the tool keeps up with user-experience innovation on the consumer web. This helps drive adoption and daily usage.
So yes, all that you need is the ability to have conversations, create documents and to search through everything your produce. But if you perform these tasks on ubiquitous tools that everyone’s familiar with, while ignoring an up-to-date user experience, collaboration and knowledge sharing will suffer. I’m certain that’s not the outcome anyone wants!