Collaboration: „Unifying Systems behind simple, intelligent and elegant User Interfaces“

I do agree with the conclusion, that we need a simple, intelligent and elegant user interface.

According to McKinsey, the average worker spends 28 percent of their day dealing with email. This time, they argue, can be unlocked through the use of social and collaborative tools, raising the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent.

The big dirty secret of the collaboration community is that few, if any, organizations ever see these results. …

Generally, each component of the digital workplace — collaboration tools, file storage, HR systems, traditional intranets, social networks — is procured and run separately. An employee might be expected to go into one system to book leave, another to read the relevant leave policy and use email to ask for the time off.

This forces users to switch between multiple user experiences, designs and contexts to perform even simple tasks, increasing cognitive load and slowing users down….

Enterprises need to follow best practice in web design and do the hard work to keep it simple for employees. That means investing resources in masking complexity and unifying systems behind simple, intelligent and elegant user interfaces.

Source: The Collaboration Community’s Big Dirty Productivity Secret

And one crucial way to make the user experience easy and elegant are bots and artificial intelligence:

Bots have huge potential to streamline the digital workplace and boost productivity, by acting as a bridge between systems and interfaces designed for (and by) IT and those designed for humans. Using AI and rules, bots can answer questions and return the information the user needs, doing the hard work behind the scenes to keep it simple and quick.

Source: The Collaboration Community’s Big Dirty Productivity Secret

I would always recommend to check in particular the data privacy aspect of bots and AI-systems used: Where does your companies knowledge go? Who owns the knowledge graph? All these questions have to be taken extremely serious. And yes, it much more than technology:

Unlocking the productivity savings promised by technology requires a commitment to organizational culture that values employees’ time through good content design, commits to a culture which uses tools to their full potential, and prioritizes user experience so technology does the hard work to keep it simple

Source: The Collaboration Community’s Big Dirty Productivity Secret

Thank you, Sharon O’Dea for this article!

Here is a video showcasing the Watson Workspace integrating different systems into one easy to use conversation interface: