Enterprise collaboration is unnecessarily expensive, time consuming and frustrating. Companies and organizations are wasting untold fortunes by applying antiquated computing metaphors to how they work and collaborate. The fact is, information required to achieve goals is disconnected and fragmented across a multiplicity of application and data silos. These silos are databases, file servers, Office documents, CRM, ERP, financial software, portals, blogs, wikis, forums and legacy systems such as stale intranets. Additionally data is increasingly walled in a plethora of web services, SaaS applications and subscription based data sources. In today’s workplace nearly every task requires access to these systems and data sources. However, accessing data efficiently and intelligently from these disconnected silos is difficult if not impossible. Enterprises are required to work in an increasingly hyper-networked, real-time world yet for most Enterprises the tools at their disposal are static and disconnected. As a result organizations are perpetuating the disconnectedness of their information of which the unavoidable result is the hemorrhaging of money from inefficiency. This culminates in the hindrance of enterprises to understand and the inability act.

Consider for a moment a typical task required of any knowledge worker. Routinely the following are required: files from the network file server, email threads, wiki pages, CRM reports, SQL queries, Internet research and information from the legacy intranet. It is unlikely a single person can access all the requisite information autonomously. Moreover, multiple departments are likely involved. Once access to the information is achieved, which is always time consuming and sometimes not even possible, then content and disparate data types must be pounded into something consumable by others or, at least, sufficiently threshed for the knowledge worker to analyze and make a decision. I call this actionable information. Lastly, the actionable information is shared and the entire process is repeated with colleagues. The applications and data sources may have been different than today, but this a 30 year old collaboration pattern and it’s incredibly wasteful because it unnecessarily repeats and creates work that could be automated.

Most knowledge workers still employ spreadsheets and text documents as the primary medium for making information actionable, sharing and collaborating. However, the types of data we operate on today has expanded dramatically and commonly includes images, web searches, feeds, audio, video, presentations, interactive maps and more to go along with the tables of numbers, formulae, graphs, charts and text. Therefore, achieving actionable information today yields a collection of spreadsheets, text documents, video files, PowerPoint, etc… This collection of files gets sent about, commonly via email, and new versions are created and more are added. It quickly becomes a snarl of snapshots in time. Disconnected, static (essentially dead) documents. New silos, or at best, more data in existing silos. Reuse is not worth the time expenditure, if at all possible, and every new task repeats the same process without leveraging existing assets.

The fact most companies are still subjecting themselves to the tedium of this obsolete pattern after thirty years of software innovation is a clear indication there must be a more efficient, less expensive way to collaborate. A new collaboration pattern is long overdue and after three decades of the old, this new pattern will surely create a revolution in productivity increases.

In 2005 MindTouch was founded by a team with robust experience in distributed systems research. It was clear to us the solution to our productivity problem in collaboration lie in realizing today’s enterprises collaborate across a distributed heterogeneous system. We understood the world needed a collaborative and social canvas to be created that could be stretched across the disconnected applications, legacy systems, data sources and tap into the rapidly expanding cloud of web services in order to create an easy to use general purpose application that would revolutionize enterprise scale collaboration in a similar way that VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet application) revolutionized personal collaboration. The solution we developed at MindTouch: Deki (Japanese for smart). MindTouch Deki enables users to connect and remix enterprise systems, social tools and web services.

MindTouch Deki  provides a profoundly different collaboration experience than the thirty year old pattern we’ve suffered from and discussed above. To put it in lay terms, imagine a Microsoft Word like experience that is accessible through your web browser. In a click you can edit pages that can consist, not just of text, but also of video, audio, images, feeds, database queries, interactive maps, spreadsheets, formulae, graphs, charts, etc… Nice, right? It’s web based so everyone can edit it, every edit and file attachment is versioned and everything is indexed by a powerful integrated search engine. And, of course, there is robust enterprise permissioning. Here’s the thing though, the data can exist in other applications and data sources; meaning, the content is dynamic and updated real-time. No more silos. No more painful and expensive processes to access requisite information. No longer must you laboriously hammer data into “actionability” only to yield dead files and a snarl of emails and directories on a shared network drive. Rather, the information and apps you require are accessible in a web interface that makes sharing and collaborating easy, social and some even say fun. Nice? No. This isn’t just nice! This is revolutionary and immediately becomes critical to the operations of users.

If your company or organization is still toiling with the obsolete disconnected, static, file based metaphor of computing and collaborating you can be certain you are bleeding money in lost productivity. Wake up now while your team, department and company is being required to do more with less. Now is the time to champion a technology that will dramatically improve operational efficiency.

MindTouch Deki is already creating a revolution in collaboration with many millions of ecstatic users, hundreds of thousands of installations, and a long list of marquee customers, such as: Mozilla, Microsoft, Intel, Intuit, The Washington Post, US Army, EMC, Harvard, Timberland, The United Nations… most of which are reporting double digit percentage increases in productivity and orders of magnitude of return on investment from MindTouch Deki powered collaboration and communities. Now, more than ever, your organization needs you to start the revolution.

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