Content FeedActivity-centric Collaboration (AcC) is clearly one of the big buzzphrases of the moment. IBM is doing a lot of work in this area in terms of R&D and many other vendors and consultancies are following in their footsteps. However, it's often difficult to get a grasp of exactly what a new concept such as AcC really is about and how it might benefit your organisations.
I've just spotted a new blog entitled Enterprise Productivity, which I think is by Chris Messina - however I could be wrong! Anyway, welcome to the Blogosphere whoever you are ;-) which is by Fredrik Stenbeck (updated, please see comment).
In the first full post on the blog, Fredrik gives a good potted description of AcC, and includes an excellent diagram describing where AcC fits:
(Click to enlarge. This is originally from an article by Geyer and Co for the IBM Systems Journal which covers AcC in much more detail. Well worth a read, but make a fair bit of time to do so!)
I think this schematic makes it really easy to see why AcC is so vital to our organisations, particularly to SMBs, as currently collaboration is occurring mostly at lower levels - particularly amongst individuals and small teams. We have probably all witnessed this occurring in our organisations, hopefully collaboration is already occurring at team, location or business unit level. However, the next step in maximising the opportunities for collaboration in our businesses and to make it more efficient to capture the output from these "collaboration incidents" is to increase the collaboration at an organisational level.
Activity-based Collaboration (as demonstrated by Lotus Connections) is one of the key methods of achieving this, and promises to assist organisations to continue to progress along the unique collaborative journeys they are travelling.
