What was your (or your customers’) collaboration experience like pre-COVID-19? Are you missing the in-person interaction and spontaneous work sessions and brainstorms, or have you found a way to match the same creativity and output in an extended time of remote working?
For context, like many, I’m about two months into #WFH. I don’t know about you, but something is missing, even though I’ve loved my experience working remotely and finding that my coworkers and I are collaborating quite nicely with our good ol’ instant-messaging platform and Zoom. So what’s lacking? I want to say I’m missing the collaboration “experience.” But maybe I’m just confusing collaboration with being surrounded by coworkers (not that I don’t love my sweet shepherd mix, Zoey, and her not-so-sweet barking at the mail carrier every day).
While they go hand in hand, collaboration and in-person experience, I don’t think the two are synonymous. Collaboration comes in many forms — not just through the traditional means of everyone sitting in a room for an ineffective brainstorm dominated by Type-A personalities. Part of me dislikes when manufacturers claim their UCC product or solution can help you achieve “true” collaboration — because what does that even mean? Collaboration does not look the same for everyone, and it certainly isn’t the same for every company. How can manufacturers better explain and describe how their product helps achieve true collaboration? There’s the opportunity for a lot of experimentation here: What do we want “an experience” to be? How do we bring a community element and human nature to all these tech innovations? It’ll take a problem-solver to figure that out.
In addition to a jam-packed newsletter of product and industry news, this issue of rAVe UCC includes two hot takes on Zoom’s latest security updates; a thought piece on how (if?) installation verticals will weather the storm of COVID-19; and a fruitful piece from Christopher Gillespie on “ITIL, ITSM and the Challenge Confronting the AV World.” We also republished (exclusively, mind you) Julian Philips’ column, “The Not So Selfish Gene.” It’s a provoking read about how collaboration is hardwired into our DNA. Agree or disagree?