Knowtoable | Virtual Workspaces

Deep Skills and Assets in “Collaborative Virtual Workspaces”

Overview - Collaborative virtual workspaces allow dispersed teams to work together, both in real time, and asynchronously. Workspaces are architected to bring core processes, content, information, and experts together in a highly collaborative environment. Knowledge work is largely non-transactional, and it does not necessarily proceed sequentially. Knowledge work is iterative and complex, and the workspace enables enough structure to organize processes, information, and expertise while allowing the team to exploit a more dynamic and interative work style.

Context - A key aspect of workspace design is that the workspace is context-driven, and can be primarily task, process or intention oriented - or a careful blend of the three. The user navigates by task, process or intention, giving the knowledge worker the ability to dynamically learn, collaborate, and execute work productively. User experience design, learning design, and intentions-based design are all important - intentions-based design being perhaps the most intuitive from a user standpoint.

On and Off-Line - The workspace also doesn't require everyone to be synchronous – it’s a hybrid medium that captures everyone's information and expertise through interactions and standard deliverables that are tracked, logged, and managed within the space - a particulary important feature for dispersed, busy teams.

"Enablement 2.0" - Accelerating, streamlining, and enabling knowledge work is becoming increasingly possible given the integration of established web portal and content management capabilities with more innovative social media, networking, expertise discovery, search and collaboration (“enterprise 2.0”) technologies. We term this convergence “enablement 2.0."

BPM Integration - Of particular interest to KNOWtoABLE is the potential to integrate business process management tools with the enablement 2.0 toolkit, and bring much more process rigor, real-time data, and real-time decision support to the workspace.

The Best of All Worlds? - Ultimately, the workspace is paradoxically: simultaneously information rich & highly filtered, context-driven and yet context flexible. Workspaces enable you to create the right compromise between the need to put the structure and process around the interaction, and a more dynamic unstructured collaboration – getting the best of what both offer.

Workspace Capabilities

Workspaces Blend a Powerful Suite of Capabilities

Bringing Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Performance Management, Portals, and Process Integration, a role-based collaborative workspace enables all layers of management to drive increased performance.

Knowledge Workers can:

- browse, search, and manage highly relevant information

- discover and engage subject matter experts

- track, manage, and version control all team deliverables

Program Organizers can:

- facilitate, focus, and elevate critical conversations

- incorporate workflows and protect intellectual property

- drive context: enabling faster, more efficient interactions

Business Leaders can:

- drive and monitor structured processes

- complement structured processes with ad-hoc interactions

- quickly reshape the team, and securely balance internal expertise with external suppliers, partners, and customers.

Knowledge Models.....the missing link

A particularly critical, nearly always overlooked design element to realize value from a collaborative workspace is a comprehensive, relational knowledge model. The knowledge model is the backbone framework for organizing information and classifying expertise. It allows the designer to structure the information in a natural format, and not by the page, which is inherently limiting and inflexible.

A well constructed knowledge model is the missing link which:

enables multi-dimensional filtering
relates targeted information and expertise to context – e.g., process or user role
enables tagging, classification, search and retrieval of emerging findings, solutions, or insights
enables information and expertise to be directly related to customer intents, and therefore targeted to improve customer interactions and customer experience
enables capture of new information through learning and insight of knowledge worker collaboration.

While tempting, it is a bad idea to leave the knowledge modeling to the technology part of the design, and try to enable the knowledge model simply through the application or technical tools. A business-led exercise that creates a technology-agnostic knowledge model pays huge dividends in information targeting, implementation flexibility, and cost reduction.