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Conversational Collaboration Platforms

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Chapter 8 | Conversational Collaboration Platforms



of the last few Telex machines in use. Nevertheless, it was my first experience of such a form of communication and I thought it was the coolest thing ever! It mixed the instant nature of voice calling without requiring synchronization between the participants as a voice call does. For an “Internetless” kid of the
80s, this was as close to magic as I could imagine.

Of course, fax, e-mail, and now modern instant messaging applications have made the noisy Telex technology redundant. Telex, however, was the technol- ogy that proved the value of (almost) instant written communication in offices around the world for over 50 years.

Nowadays, e-mail together  with messaging-based collaboration applications like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Facebook Workplace are an integral part of the digital work environment. In many ways they are as important as the building you work in or the desk you sit at. In fact, messaging applications are likely the only stable “environment” in a world where people are often on the move and remote  working is on the increase.

In this chapter we will explore how the combination of messaging applications and conversational AI is going to lead to a new way of working and thinking about work. We will start with an overview of the state of messaging applica- tions and how they have evolved to become much more than just a way to exchange messages. These new conversational collaboration platforms, enhanced with AI-powered applications, can have a lasting impact in how we get work done.


Conversational Collaboration Platforms
In Chapter 7 we talked about the rise of messaging applications both within organizations and as a means for organizations to communicate with users. We touched on how messaging applications are the fastest growing applica- tion type and how that creates an opportunity for business to talk to consum- ers (and their employees) in a whole new way.

In the same way that messaging applications on our phones such as WhatsApp or Telegram are much more than just a means to exchange messages between two users, messaging applications in the work environment have evolved and matured  to support  a range of activities. In fact, the evolution is such that calling them simply messaging applications or chat applications doesn’t cap- ture what they are really doing. It is far more appropriate to call them conver- sational collaboration platforms.

They are  conversational  because the  primary means of interaction  with other  users on the platform (and quite often other  applications) is through the exchange of messages. This gives us, the humans, the upper hand. We are very used to conversations, since it is how we already communicate and
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collaborate outside  the  digital domain. Conversations  on these  platforms can take different forms. From free-flowing conversations with colleagues in private  1-1 communication, to  group  discussions, to  conversations  with applications that  will use a mix of natural language and more  structured actions.

They are all about collaboration.  The only reason we introduce this soft- ware into our organization is because we think it will make it easier for us to get things done. If they fail in that task, they’ve failed their goal. As we dis- cussed in Chapter 3, we can consider to what extent they are passive in help- ing us achieve this goal or they are active participants. A simple messaging application that does nothing other  than facilitate the exchange of messages is a passive participant. Increasingly, however, these tools are becoming active participants. Whether  it is Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Facebook Workplace, their  product  development  teams include AI experts  that  are working to make these tools more  useful by introducing various forms of automation. Slack, for example, will highlight what it considers important messages, and it gives you the ability to sort messages you have missed “scientifically” in addi- tion to more common choices like “newest” or “oldest.” What they mean by “scientifically” is that a machine learning algorithm helped them order  mes- sages based on some measure of importance that they derived by monitoring your interactions in your Slack environment. The hope is that this will allow you to focus on the important things first, which, in turn, will facilitate col- laboration with the entire team.

Finally, they are platforms  because they offer a rich set of ways to add func- tionality to them. We can install applications that can redirect  our e-mail to show up in a shared message board, help us better integrate with project man- agement tools, or help us plan and coordinate meetings. We can also develop our  own applications, unique to  our  organization, that  can expose  custom functionality to  everyone, such as the ability to  cause actions to  happen in other applications.

As such, these conversational collaboration platforms can become the glue that connects all the different aspects of our organization (people, processes, and tools) and the interface through which we access them. They can become our organization’s operating system.


■    Conversational collaboration platforms can become our organizational operating system, one that more closely resembles our organization and on top of which we can combine people, process, and tools to achieve our goals.
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In the next section we will take a closer look at exactly what a conversational collaboration platform looks like in an office environment and why it is becom- ing such a popular tool. We will use Slack as our starting point, as it repre- sents both a good example of the type of environment we are exploring and a simple one. We will also reference Facebook Workplace, since it expands the paradigm with some more “traditional” social networking ideas.

As a slight aside, Slack is also interesting as a company and startup. Their rise is exemplary of the significance of the space of conversational collaboration platforms. When Slack was originally announced, as a pivot from a different operational and business model, people had a lukewarm reaction. It was going after  a space that  most  would describe  as not  particularly exciting. Why would you want to build yet another instant messaging application and com- pete with the likes of Skype, Google Talk, the old and trusted  IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the myriad of apps out there  that allowed people to chat? What  people failed to  see, though, is that  Slack was never trying to  build “just” an instant messaging application. Slack was working on a conversational collaboration platform for the office.

Slack realized that while there  were a lot of ways to solve the instant com- munication problem, there were few that were tackling the broader problem of collaboration in a way that teams could self-manage. This relentless focus on supporting work in a more general sense (and not just messaging) coupled to great marketing techniques, easy sign-up processes for teams, and effective design made Slack the darling of many office teams.

Slack was so successful that even teams that were already provided with an officially approved communications tool (usually Skype for  Business) would install Slack “under the radar” because it represented  a better, more fun way for them to collaborate. The company grew in just a few years to revenues of
$401 million in 2019 and a market  value of $15 billion. In the  meantime, Microsoft has responded with Microsoft for Teams (the “Slack” of the Office Suite) and as of 2019 was claiming more users than Slack, since they could exploit their enormous reach into all types of organizations. Facebook, on the other hand, has a quiet (in media terms) but huge (in numbers terms) success story on its hands with Facebook Workplace, which is exactly what the name betrays. Its promise is that it provides all the familiarity and power of the most popular social network and messaging infrastructure exclusively for your busi- ness. Companies like Walmart, Spotify, Starbucks, and Heineken are using it as the common platform for their entire workforce.


Core Features
Conversational  collaboration  platforms need  to  tackle  at  least  six key areas to act as a strong starting point for the organization’s digital OS. They need to
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Provide a way for us to find and interact with everyone else in the organization.

•     Indicate what the team is doing and who is available.

Support 1-1 as well as group conversations in a variety of configurations based on project needs.

•     Support the exchange and display of documents and links.

•     Allow search across both conversations and documents.

Provide the means to  integrate with the outside world (i.e., the rest of the organization’s digital estate as well as outside partners and service providers).

People

The first step is, of course, to gather the people on the platform and be able to discover them in useful ways. In this context, it is informative to consider the differences between Slack and Facebook Workplace. Slack starts out as a messaging platform and grows into a conversational collaboration platform. Facebook Workplace starts out as a social network and grows into a conver- sational collaboration platform. The different starting points are evident in how they handle people information.

On Slack, each member has a profile with some very basic information (photo, e-mail, a “what I do” field). Users can add additional fields, and Slack offers both “built-in” fields such as a link to your LinkedIn profile or the ability to create  custom fields. Workplace, on the other  hand, betrays its origins by starting out with a much richer profile including fields for things such as skills and departmental information.

In either case, what is significant is the ability to create profiles with structured information so that software can take advantage of that information in auto- mation processes. Going back to the AI techniques mentioned in Chapter 4, this structured  information can, for example, power  a broader  knowledge graph of people and their skills. Depending on your specific needs, you can add  fields  that  describe  information  that  your  organization cares  about. Through the platform, people can self-manage their part of the knowledge graph, which can then be aggregated and reasoned over.

You could either  contain all relevant information within the conversational collaboration platform or integrate it with a more powerful external tool that pulls information from the platform. This information can then be used to power  searches  to  find people  in the  organization, based on  a variety of parameters such as skills, departments, geographical location, and so on.
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Presence

The green dot next to a person’s name, indicating whether they are logged into their messaging application or not, is the digital equivalent of glancing across the office to see if Sarah is at her desk. However, unlike the analog world, we can make that  green dot  more  interesting by posting a specific status update next to it such as: “please don’t disturb,” “happy to chat,” “try- ing to focus,” “having lunch,” etc. We are providing context that in the analog world could be hard to replicate. This is useful information that both col- leagues and automated  programs can exploit to  determine  how best  and when best to  interact  with someone.  A simple example of utilizing this is integrating your  calendar with your  status  information. Now  people  can know that  even though you are at your desk you are actually in an online meeting, or you are working through time you blocked on your calendar for a specific task.

These types of integrations are the building blocks for increasingly more intel- ligent and interesting automation. Automation needs a clear as possible model of the world it is trying to automate. Presence information is a piece of that puzzle.

In addition, it is not just information that  is useful to  describe the current state of things. Presence information over time also gives valuable information about the ebb and flow of work in an organization. When do people log on, how long do they stay logged on, how do other  events (company meetings, conferences, etc.) influence the availability of people?


Conversations

Conversations are, of course, at the heart of any messaging application. The key aspect here is the application’s ability to support the richness of different types of conversations that may be required. In the same way that in an analog office we congregate in different places for different reasons, the digital space must allow it. You can have digital watercoolers, kitchenettes, private meeting rooms, and town hall assemblies.

There are three dimensions to consider: the structure  of groups, the type of conversations, and control of access to groups.

First, in what configurations of groups (or channels) are we able to converse? We need to be able to have 1-1 conversations, ad hoc group conversations as well as longer-term  topic-based conversations. The different configura- tions will end up being a reflection of how your organization operates.  At times it may be a truer reflection of the real groupings than what your official organizational chart reveals.
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Second, what type of conversation should be taking place? One example is the  difference between  a free-for-all open-ended  conversation  and a more Facebook-like interface with a main long-form post  and comments  below that. In Slack that  is partly replicated with threads, where a user can reply directly to a specific message within a channel, making that top message the equivalent of a post in Facebook. There are also applications that attempt  to marshal conversations so that clear outputs  can be highlighted and specific decisions are pulled out of the flow of input.

Finally, from a security perspective you need to consider

•     Who is able to join or leave groups?

When a new member joins a group, do they have access to the historical information in that group or not?

Who  can create  private groups and what are the rules that govern these behaviors? If an organization is striving for transparency but people realize that there are numer- ous private groups that they cannot join, what does that say about the organization?

In general,  are  conversations  to  be  considered  truly private (even 1-1 conversations)  or  is the  organization planning to access that information. In simple terms, if I am chatting away with a colleague in a private conversation on the organizational conversational platform, who might eventually view that information?

Different  situations  and  different  types  of  groups  will call for  different approaches. What works best is something that each team needs to explore and experiment  with. The one fundamental point here is that  these  issues should not be considered minor details or secondary. In just the same way that one would not allow physical spaces to be arbitrarily designed, your digi- tal spaces need the same care and attention.  As we discussed in Chapter 6, everything feeds into what defines you as a group. If you are not intentional about what culture is being developed, you may end up with a culture and processes that are not only unsuitable but also very hard to change.

Next, I outline some examples of different types of groups, based on configu- rations I’ve seen across multiple environments, to give you a more concrete view of what different setups can look like.

Community of practice groups: These groups support peo- ple working in the same field across an organization (e.g., all front-end developers, all project managers, all digital marketing people) to share information and chat about the way they do their work.
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Project groups: Project groups provide a space for a cross- functional team working on a project to gather and focus on just that work. They last as long as the project requires them, and the participants can change as people join and leave the project.

Announcement  groups: These groups are meant for team- wide announcements and minimal other types of interac- tion. It makes it easy for people to track these announcements  without  them  getting lost  in the  chat flow of busier channels, and also makes it easy for people who were  not  around  to  catch up. Depending on the platform you are using, these  groups can also be made read-only so that people are not tempted  to discuss the announcements  in that  same context,  making informa- tion clearer to follow.

Fun and hobby groups: Are there a lot of ardent cat lovers in your team, or perhaps pub quiz aficionados or sport nuts? Create  separate  groups  for  them  and let  them enjoy the chit-chat around their favorite topics, and build bonds  across  communities of practice,  project  teams, and organizational divisions by discussing their  favorite topics.

Shared groups:  This is a Slack-specific feature,  but  one that I believe is very exciting. Within Slack you can create a group (or channel, as Slack specifically calls it) that is shared  across  different Slack organizations. What  this means  is that  people  from  company A and company B can access a shared group to  collaborate, with Slack handling all the upfront authentication and authorization issues. This is a great way to create shared spaces for you and your partners to come together and collaborate.

There are several other options and variations to the aforenamed groupings, but I hope you can see how incredibly useful it can be to organize a digital space like this. As mentioned earlier, the key is to be intentional and make sure that the team considers (and keeps reconsidering) what the norms and regulations are that should govern the creation of these groups. Let me repeat it once more: in the same way that  in a physical space you wouldn’t  want people moving desks ad hoc or knocking down walls, you need to ensure that it doesn’t happen in the digital space.

Finally, as with presence information, the understanding of what groups people belong to and how the shifts evolve over time can be incredibly powerful. A lot of effort is spent in understanding the network dynamics within organizations.
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Collaboration tools like Slack can provide the strongest  signal yet of what is actually happening in the  clearest  way for  organizations to  exploit. You can directly map who is talking to whom, what teams people belong to, and you can even explore the ways people are collaborating. Are they being constructive or critical? How does their behavior change across different teams and contexts?


Document Exchange

Another aspect of collaboration is exchanging relevant documents. Tools like Slack make that extremely easy, since they allow you to simply drop files in the flow of a conversation with an associated message. Now, one could argue that this is a bit too easy, and I can attest  to how confusing it can get at times. Imagine working on a document and discussing it with a team with new versions of that document constantly being dropped  into the flow of a conversation. It becomes tiring to  keep track of what you should be focusing  on. The reasoning for  sharing documents  this way is that documents are part of the conversation and work, so you can keep everything in context.  The promise of conversational collaboration plat- forms  is that  search and integrations will then  be able to  surface those documents once more.

Indeed, some progress is being made. For example, Slack has a very useful integration with Google Documents. When you share a Google Document you are not sharing the actual document but a link to the current version of the document, which at least removes the question mark of whether you are working on the latest version. The catch, however, is that when you then go to the document, you discover that there is a whole other conversation tak- ing place within the  document  itself! Google Documents  allows users  to exchange comments and chat within Google Documents. So now you have two conversations going on. The one in Slack, where perhaps people who are not directly working on the document had some interesting things to say and then one in Google Documents. That’s clearly not an ideal situation.

Overall, I have yet to see an application that has really cracked how to prop- erly deal with this. We  are  dealing with separate  collaboration  tools  and potentially different modes of collaboration. At times we share links to docu- ments while at other  times we share the document itself. These documents and links become part of a conversation, but search is not always as effective in finding what we really need; and while integrations can help, they can also add complexity.

Norms can once more help here, since teams can clarify how they are sup- posed  to  work.  However,  this is definitely an area  where  more  work  is required to give us the type of collaboration space we really need. It is infor- mative to  look at tools  like Dropbox  that  now also offer  a collaboration
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environment, but one that is much more document-centric (since that is their heritage). Ultimately, we should see conversational collaboration platforms evolve to encapsulate a much more document-friendly toolset.


Search

Search across  people, conversations, and documents  is what can tie it all together,  and it’s a crucial function for any conversational collaboration plat- form. Knowing that you can rely on powerful search is liberating because it encourages higher levels of sharing and engagement, since people are confi- dent that they will be able to find that information again.

Current  search capabilities are impressive. For example, on Slack, you can create a search that is looking for a file that was shared in the “2019 Annual Conference Planning Channel” by Tim or Mariola, within a certain date range, and has the keyword “Sponsors” associated with it. The speed of response is near instant and the quality of results is high.

Nevertheless, while these types of searches are impressively powerful, they also require consideration and focus from the user to construct. It is too easy for users to get lost in all the choices or forget what combinations are even possible. Overall, while search is already very useful, there is a long way to go still and (unsurprisingly) it is one of the main areas where the further applica- tion of artificial intelligence techniques will allow us to make progress.

Ultimately,  I would hope to see search that is much more conversational and combines access to  a number of different document  sources  from a single location. It should be more conversational, so we can search in the same way that we think rather than have to adapt our thinking to the filters and options that the tool provides. We should be able to use natural language to describe what we need, and rely on a combination of conversational applications to help guide us through the possible options. It also needs to take into consideration the fact that information lies across many different places, from our e-mails to our document stores and our conversational collaboration platform. We need paths from the platform to the outside world so that we can connect it all together.


Integrations

So far, we’ve talked about collaboration environments as the place where a team discusses issues and make decisions. Integrations with the outside world means that these same collaboration environments can also become the place within which actions are performed and change is affected.
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Let us take one simple task and consider how different it can look with and without integration. The objective is to know when someone has asked for some vacation time and approve that request, reject it, or ask for more infor- mation before making a decision.

Without  integration in your collaboration space, you are hopefully going to get that notification via e-mail or the eager colleague, who knows you only check e-mail a few times a day, will message you to say that they’ve put in a request. After all they are anxious to get an answer so that they can continue planning their vacation! Once you do see the request, you will likely head to your browser  and log in to the HR software (hopefully it is single sign-on; otherwise you will need to retrieve the password and do a 2-factor authenti- cation). Finally logged in, you start clicking around a bit to figure out how to get it approved. Eventually you get there. You then realize that you are going to have to check in with a couple of people. Other  e-mail chains are fired off and you have the mental load of ensuring you check in time, connect all the pieces together, and eventually make a decision. Now you have to remember what it was you were actually trying to do before this entire process started and get back to that.

With integration you will get a message in your conversational collaboration environment. You immediately know that it is about a vacation request since it is coming for VacationBot. The message contains all the information you need, and you can click “Approve,” “Reject,” or “Discuss.” Clicking “Discuss” creates a private channel and drops both you and the person requesting time off into it. There you can quickly ask a couple of planning questions and per- haps invite anyone else who needs to have a say. The entire conversation, with the  relevant  participants,  is  in  one  place. Eventually satisfied, you  click “Approve” and the channel the discussion happened in and the bot go away.

Integrations can be incredibly powerful and can transform the collaboration tool into a full-blown operating system for how you run your organization. All the main messaging collaboration environments provide dedicated app stores where you can find a very wide range of applications and integrations.

These types of applications are what I  call conversational applications and they are the focus of Chapter 9. There is just one other type of conversational platform that I would like to discuss before though.


Custom Conversational Platforms
So far, we’ve  talked  about  conversational  platforms  with  the  underlying assumption that we were dealing with software that came from large technol- ogy companies (such as Slack, Microsoft, or Facebook). Before we move on, it’s important to note, however, that conversational platforms can come in a variety of sizes and shapes. They can range from platforms that  focus  on
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specific verticals (e.g., finance,  health) to  fully customizable conversational platforms developed for the  unique needs of a particular organization and application.

An industry requiring a different approach is the finance industry. Traders, just like any other  profession, can benefit from instant messaging and collabora- tion but require  a degree of security and conformance to  regulations that goes beyond what most industries require. This has created  the conditions for a thriving vertical of messaging applications that specifically cater to the finance industry. Tools such as Symphony,2  offer the required level of security coupled to features such as appropriate audit paths, trusted identify manage- ment across organizations, and data ownership.

Similarly, given a large enough problem, it might also make sense to build a completely custom conversational collaboration platform from the ground up. As part of work that my team has been doing for the accountancy firm BDO, we built a custom conversational collaboration platform precisely because it is only through a customized tool that we could tackle the problem.


CONVERSATIONAL TOOLS FOR AUDITS

The problem  that BDO was looking  to address was how to streamline their audit process. Expert auditors from BDO interact  with the client over a long period of time, and data is gathered from a number of different sources in order to complete the audit. While there was some tooling available to help with  the process, such as a shared document store, ultimately it involved a lot of ad hoc back and forth, e-mails, and placed considerable demands on the entire team to coordinate so as to avoid confusion.

After some initial experimentation we decided that the best course of action would be to build a dedicated tool that would allow audits to be designed and completed. The tool is a conversational collaboration platform in that it allows the auditors and the auditees to exchange messages during the audit process, with specific groups set up to handle the different aspects of the audit. All the audit information is collected in appropriate ways through the application (with custom forms and fields). In addition, an automated tool—a conversational application—acts as the coordinator, providing proactive and reactive support to both auditors and auditees as they are going through the process.  It can react  to requests  for help (e.g., “how  should  I be handling  VAT in this region?”) but it can also proactively offer suggestions based on the type of data that is entered. The overall platform  also interfaces  with other BDO systems so as to streamline the transfer of data.




2 https://symphony.com
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The end results were

A much more user-friendly audit process, which leads to higher quality audits

A much better understanding of audit data, as it is collected in a structured way

Complete control and security over audit data through a wholly- owned platform

The opportunity  for BDO to capitalize  on the advantage of having lowered the overall effort required to complete an audit while increasing the reliability of the audit itself


Building a custom chat application from the ground up is not an unrealistic proposition, even for smaller organizations. If you feel that there are enough benefits to  be  gained from  completely controlling information  flows  and behavior on the platform, then it is possible to combine a number of different existing technologies in order  to create  an environment that is within your control and entirely owned by your organization.


Your Organizational OS
In this chapter  we’ve dissected  what  it means to  have a conversational collaboration platform and how it can act as an operating system layer for your organization. These platforms can delineate the  space within which your digital environment can grow.

With features such as people management, presence information, group man- agement, and so on, these platforms can allow you to structure  how work is done. As with anything, it is important to ensure that you proceed with spe- cific purpose, so that the resulting processes are a reflection of the type of team and culture you are looking to have.

By integrating these  collaboration  platforms into  other  aspects  of your organization, you convert them into the interface through which potentially every other  aspect of work can be accessed.

These integrations, or conversational applications, can be a key differentiator for your organization and through  automation  they can provide significant gains. In the  next  chapter  we examine in more  detail what conversational applications are and how you can use them within conversational collabora- tion platforms.
C H A P T E R
9







Conversational
Applications


In 2016, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that “Bots are the new apps.”1
The world at the time was riding a wave of optimism around what chatbots would be able to do. It was clear that messaging applications were growing faster than social media, and users were suffering from app fatigue.2

Chatbots  looked  like the  ideal way for companies to  position themselves where users were (i.e., within messaging applications). In addition, since adding a chatbot was as simple as adding any other contact to your messaging app, it meant that you didn’t have to download and install something separate.

Others took this optimism further still, declaring that web sites were done for as well. Why have a web site when you can directly talk to a brand on Facebook Messenger? Chatbots  were going to take over the world and nothing could stop them.





1 https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/03/30/microsof-ceo-nadella- bots-new-apps/82431672/.
2 “App fatigue” is a term used to describe the reluctance of users to install yet another application on their smartphone.


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