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Oh Really! 5 Questions With...
[Peter Frishauf]
Jan 2004In each issue, this section presents an interview with someone in the field of content management.
| Name: | Peter Frishauf |
| Company: | PFKC Ltd. Corp. |
| Title: | Principal |
| Brief Bio: | Founder of SCP Communications, Inc. and Medscape, Peter is the immediate past president of the Healthcare Marketing & Communications Council, Inc. and is a former director of the Association of Medical Publishers. |
[1] How would you define collaboration?
Peter: Collaboration is the process of improving understanding by connecting and organizing people and resources. The elusive goal of collaboration is organizational vs. personal productivity: in simple terms, teamwork.
Most organizations struggle with the concept of teamwork, for the simple reason that most people are territorial, and very few managers understand how to get people to work together productively. It's why most managers have offices. The most effective way to increase collaboration is to tear down the walls and take away the offices. I've believed in this since my early days as a media entrepreneur and it was often looked at as radical thinking. But it shouldn't be. Today, the most effective mainstream advocate of the open office is none other than Mike Bloomberg. Bloomberg Media has no offices, and soon neither will New York City government offices. In my view, the open offices will be Mayor Mike's most important legacy and New Yorkers will benefit from his thinking for years to come: when people who work together can no longer hide, they actually start working together. The results can be pretty amazing.
The electronic analogue to the physical office is the disconnected PC, where every user lives in their own space. He or she can be blazingly productive working alone, but that's not organizational productivity, it's personal productivity. Networking their PC, giving them access to email, and the Web gives them tools to learn and collaborate, but if they don't understand the culture of collaboration, they might as well stay home.
[2] What are some of the best examples of collaboration in the information business?
Peter: Any daily newspaper. The reason: successful collaboration requires heart and soul. The heart is the system that interconnects resources. The soul is the commitment to creating and policing the exchanges so that they are meaningful and productive.
Collaboration is a hot topic now because in most companies, especially publishing companies, organizational productivity improvements are becoming more elusive, and it's probably weakest at the central office. Management is frustrated because they bought everyone a PC, installed a network, and bought expensive, proprietary software they believed would increase productivity dramatically. Initially, providing computers, networks and the Internet helped: personal productivity increased as people could create and edit copy faster, cheaper and better with a PC and word processor than with a typewriter, organizational productivity increased as employees could research subjects on the Web, and deliver copy by email. But where do we go from here? What's the best way for multiple people to work on a document? How do we make sure that versions are not confused? At what point do we share, start working on the design, fact-check, copy-edit, and prepare for distribution—and in what media? No one individual—no matter how productive their personal productivity may be—can be responsible for everything.
[3] What are some of the business advantages for publishers to adopt collaborative technologies?
Peter: Once they bite the bullet, and take the time to plan out, test, and make collaboration part of the culture, publishers can see huge gains in productivity. They will be more innovative, and work faster and smarter. But few publishers will do this, because few managers have the skills or commitment to work this way. And many employees resist collaboration too, seeing it as kind of a Big Brother culture where everybody knows what everyone else is up to. It's true that collaboration removes privacy, but if you're part of a workgroup, there really shouldn't be any privacy since the product of the work isn't yours, anyway. But there's no getting away from collaboration being a social process.
[4] Many of the top content management system companies, including Documentum, Vignette and Interwoven, have recently acquired collaborative technology companies. How do you feel this integrated environment will benefit publishers?
Peter: I doubt these companies have the skills necessary to really improve collaboration themselves. Current CMS systems are far too rigid to enhance collaboration, and the painful and expensive process of customizing their features is too much for most organizations. That's why most companies that use these systems resort to email for collaboration. It's not ideal, but it works. Most CMS systems are organized as a hierarchy, similar to an org chart. But collaboration often doesn't work that way in the real world. There's some interesting research in this area, the most famous example probably being the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon described by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, and popularized in the 90s. Milgram studied how information and understanding could be passed around when neither sender nor receiver knew each other—not the kind of thing a CMS really understands. A new book, Six Degrees Linked by Duncan Watts expands on these lessons.
[5] What are some of your favorite resources for keeping up-to-date on the collaboration field?
Peter: My favorite resources are my eyes and ears. I love to watch how people work read, listen, see, and learn, and figure out if there are ways in which that work might be made more productive and rewarding. Pure observation is how I came up with my magazine concepts in medical publishing, both in print, and for Medscape, which I started in 1995 at SCP Communications. And I always learn when I watch how people use these resources. I live in Manhattan, and I used to commute to SCP by subway. Whenever I spotted a doctor on the subway reading one of our magazines like Infections in Medicine, I would watch them go through the journal, then introduce myself and have a conversation about how they use it, what they like and what they don't. With Medscape we had tools to see what people were clicking on, but I learned just as much by watching people use the site. And at work, it was paying attention to the flow of information that produced the greatest gains in collaboration. If someone picked up a piece of copy from a printer that someone else printed and found that it contained the solution for their problem—if that happened it meant that our collaboration processes needed work and we set out to solve the problem. Sometimes good lessons come from attending conferences and reading books from smart people like Richard Wurman, or his legacy conference TED, and Mark Hurst at Creative Good. In the pure tech area, I like to read Esther Dyson's brilliant Release 1.0 newsletter, which always evaluates the social context of technology. Blogs from Kevin Werbach and Clay Shirky (both also write for Esther) and from Robin Good, Lawrence Lessig, Mitch Kapor, Ward Cunningham, Ray Ozzie, David Wiener, Ed Taekema, and Bill Seitz are also helpful.
I think it's also important to recognize that collaboration will always be messy—just like human nature. Getting along productively is hard work, and requires constant analysis. Those dedicated to collaboration will always be humbled by its unending challenge, but companies that have real commitment to this areas are always the most productive—and are the best places to work, too.
