Activity Explorer: New Collaborative Tool from IBM

Activity Explorer is described as an Activity centric collaboration product that emerged from IBM research. The effort is summarized in the paper, Activity Explorer: Activity-centric collaboration from research to product that I heard about from Tomoaki Sawada. It seems like a great idea and one that is also beginning to be addressed by such tools as blogs and wikis. I especially liked their goal to “reorganize collaboration to reflect the work being done rather than the technologies that support the work.” This was our goal when we implemented knowledge management at Cigna Insurance in 1993-94 but tools today are much more able to do this.

The authors state that the most popular tools for informal collaboration, phone, IM, and email, quickly become unmanageable when there is any complexity to the collaboration. This is the same argument used to support Intranet 2.0 or the writable intranet.

In the case of Activity Explorer participants create activity threads that link divergent data sources and tools to support a task and provide context. It blends synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. It also has RSS. Blog and wikis are only asynchronous but they do provide a transparent and searchable record of the collaboration that is independent of the initial players. This allows anyone with reason (and permission) to find it. It also allows the users to step back and get the big picture more easily.

The most recent design for Activity Explorer has search and tagging. There are also different views of the progress of the activity. I think the ability to make the activity a searchable archive and not simply a more effective way to serve immediate needs will be a big success factor. This effort is linked the Unified Activity Management that has consistent goals.

I wrote about Unified Activity Management a year ago in my review of IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications. The IBM site states that, “The goal of the Unified Activity Management (UAM) project is to recast collaboration technologies in terms of the meaningful business activities in which people are engaged, both to support the work of each individual person and team and -- more significantly -- the enterprise…The project builds on our prior work around Activity Explorer and Reinventing Email.”

Both of these efforts are said to influence the next version of IBM Notes. I wonder what non-Notes users can do. Quickplace was designed to offer collaborative features to both Notes and non-Notes users. IBM should do the same with these new tools and they likely are planning to do this. I will be very interested to see how these efforts progress and how they compare with other web (or intranet) 2.0 collaborative tools. enterprise 2.0 enterprise social media

Comments

[Feroz]

Hi Bill,

This post was a good read, thanks. After a little R&D on Activity Explorer, I can't seem to figure out when the release is scheduled. Is this product available to current IBM clients only or is it part of the eTouch SamePage, Socialtext, Jotspot group??

Thanks,
Feroz..

[bill Ives]

Good question. I would ask Tomoaki Sawada - http://jisi.dreamblog.jp/ - his blog is in Japanese but I am sure you could post a question in English. I forwarded your email to him as well.

[Tomoaki Sawada]

Hi Feroz, enhanced version of Acitivity Explorer is already announced as a component of Lotus Notes Version 7 last month from IBM. Suggest you to contact IBM for details of available date .

FYI, You can see Demoostration at
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/lotus/pub/lotusweb/workplace/activityExplorerDemo.exe