7. Telecollaboration
Henry Fuchs’s vision of the office of the future
Drawings by Andrei State, University of North Carolina
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN [1967],
THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE
Why Telecollaboration?
At last we are positioned to examine telecollaboration. Why do design teams now harness communications technologies to enable collaborations among people who are not collocated?
Specialization
The super-specialization of skills now occasions much collaboration. But any particular specialized skill is not available in every hamlet—or even in every city. The ubiquitous village blacksmith has become the rare materials-scientist expert in titanium alloys; the town fireman has become the Red Adair, summoned to the corners of the Earth to snuff multimillion-dollar oil-well fires.1
Home
People have strong, even dominating, preferences as to where they live. For many, it is the call of the family, of clan, of culture. For others it is rural versus town versus city. For yet others it is climate or seacoast or mountains. People with highly specialized skills can often write their own tickets. Telecollaboration technology enables more and more such experts to live where they please and work elsewhere. Of my own former students, one has lived in Iceland, one in Brazil, while working “in” Silicon Valley.
Around the Clock
Rotation of the Earth enables work to be advanced around the clock by team members each working only day shift.
Cost
Wide disparities in both cost of living and standard of living make common high-tech skills available at radically lower cost via outsourcing. Of course, dredging a (telecommunications) channel between disparate economies begins a torrent of leveling, surely the healthiest form of “foreign” aid.
Politics
Large international ventures with government support inevitably involve the partitioning of jobs among nations, hence among locations. Consider the Airbus 380, a bold work of engineering (Figure 7-1). Not only the manufacturing but also the development was partitioned among France, Germany, Britain, and Spain.
iStockphoto
Jeffrey Jupp, then Technical Director of Airbus UK in England, explained to me how Airbus wings were designed in Bristol to lift and fit the fuselage designed in Toulouse:
• Full telecommunications capabilities were used.
• Bristol had some of its own engineers on-site in Toulouse as ambassadors.
• Every day a company plane flew from Britain to Toulouse and back, carrying live people both ways.
In my experience, none of these collaboration aids could be omitted. Alas, the Airbus 380 also illustrates a special pitfall, one perhaps more hazardous for politically occasioned distributions. The French and British teams used Release 5 of CATIA CAD software. The German and Spanish teams used Release 4. Lo and behold, in part because of differences between these releases, the wiring harnesses designed by one team required larger radii than those provided by the other team’s conduits. These and other initial delivery delays, some 22 months, have been very painful.2
Been There, Done That—Distributed Development of the IBM System/360 Computer Family, 1961–1965
The initial seven IBM System/360 computers were concurrently developed in four locations across three countries: Poughkeepsie and Endicott, New York; Hursley, UK; Böblingen, Germany. These computers, the first upward-downward strictly binary-compatible family, pioneered the industry switch from 6-bit to 8-bit bytes. I was Project Manager. Chapter 24 is a case study of the architecture design for System/360. (The Model 20 wasn’t downward-compatible—a mistake in the mind of architect William Wright, and in my view.)
Over 40 new 8-bit input-output devices had to be concurrently developed, each exploiting the specialized skills and experience of still more separate and separated laboratories: La Gaude, France; Lidingö, Sweden; Uithoorn, the Netherlands; San Jose, California; Boulder, Colorado; Lexington, Kentucky; and Endicott, New York. A technical innovation radically aided the coordination of these efforts—the meticulous definition of a standard logical, electrical, and mechanical interface for attaching any I/O device to any computer.3 Even so, managing the distributed development of these devices was a major task. Software development was even more widely partitioned.
For computers, software, and I/O devices, we used the same management techniques as those described above for Airbus. Our telecommunications facilities were far more primitive: I leased IBM’s first full-time transatlantic phone line. We didn’t run a company plane back and forth, but we bought a lot of airline tickets. The British lab maintained a resident participant in Amdahl’s Poughkeepsie architecture group; we maintained resident participants from Poughkeepsie on the processor implementation teams in Britain and Germany.
Besides thousands of phone calls and documents, many pair-wise face-to-face meetings coupled the laboratories. Annual two-week-long whole-team meetings settled hanging conflicts and challenges—some 200 of them at one session.
Our distributed development effort was occasioned by the same forces as usual:
• Distributed technology specializations
• Immovable talent pools
• Interdivisional politics and distribution of work
The effort was highly successful.4 Make no mistake, however: distributed development of a unified product is work! Moreover, the distribution per se creates a lot of extra work! We sorely underestimated the immense importance of the informal communication channels at work within collocated teams, until we experienced their absence. Space barriers are real!5 Time-zone barriers are real, sometimes more so than space barriers! And cultural barriers are very real and must be taken into account!6
Making Telecollaboration Work
Distributed design will only increase. Telecommunications technology continues to explode. How shall designers and design managers harness it to make telecollaboration work?
Face-to-Face Time Is Crucial!
Consider your own telephone conversations. Do you experience a difference not only in comfort but also in effectiveness when talking to a stranger, as opposed to an acquaintance?
How far would you walk to avoid using each of {videoconferencing, telephone, email, written mail} to
• Make a lunch appointment?
• Seek a discount on a purchased service?
• Negotiate a complex business deal?
• Plan a family vacation?
• Fire your administrative assistant?
For some of these, you would prefer email or telephone over walking (and time synchronizing); for others, you would gladly walk quite a distance.
The most successful telecollaborations I have known have been built on extensive face-time histories, and even these have required some face time during the ongoing telecollaboration. Absent such histories, travel is worth what it costs in money and time.
Some of the most fruitful dollars I spent at IBM paid for a bus to take the S/360 project’s administrative staff and secretaries 60 miles from Poughkeepsie to White Plains, New York. They spent the midday lunching and talking with their counterparts at division headquarters, familiar voices hitherto faceless. This lubrication was much more effective than just more pressure on cooperation.
I am told that Boeing brought its scores of distributed design teams for the 777 airplane to Everett, Washington, for weeks of together time, as the design was starting.
People instinctively know the value of face time. So, in spite of potent videoconferencing technology, airplanes still carry lots of business travelers.
Clean Interfaces
Defining clean interfaces among remotely designed components is a hard job. The job doesn’t end with definition—continual question-and-answer interpretation of the definitions’ semantics proves necessary. Changes must be made, controlled, and widely communicated.
Another important part of system architecture is not merely the definition of interfaces, but management’s designing a predetermined mechanism for resolving differences of opinion or taste. There is no substitute for authority.
But the payoff from these costly labors is incredible! Clean interfaces make a big difference in the error rate of the design. Some have estimated that errors and rework, though affecting only a small fraction of a design, may account for half the design cost. Worse yet, errors due to vague or sloppy interfaces usually surface late, during system integration. Nastier to find, costlier to fix, they impact the whole system schedule.
Moreover, clean interfaces enhance the joy of the work. Designing is fun; ironing out misunderstandings with peers is usually not. When designing, one feels progress happening; when resolving interface misunderstandings, one feels slippage. Clean interfaces give multiple designers each the joy of ownership, of the privilege of signing a piece of work. They also facilitate sequential ownership, as small components flow together into recognizable larger subsystems.
Technologies for Telecollaboration
Decade after decade, technology pundits predict that designers’ travel will be obviated by telecommunications. It hasn’t happened yet.7 Why? Will it? My guess is that more and more convenient and lifelike communications technologies will indeed successfully substitute for more and more face-to-face meetings.8 Nevertheless, because of the endless nuance of human communication, being in the same room together from time to time will never cease to be very important for design collaborators.
Low Tech Often Suffices
The Document
The most potent technology for telecollaboration is the document shared, whether by network or by post. Formal prose and formal drawings carry the precision that demands study, enables critique, stimulates interaction.
Gerry Blaauw and I found, when crafting our 1,200-page Computer Architecture [1997], that most of our transatlantic interaction was effectively done by mailed drafts. However, this effective remote cooperation was built upon nine years of daily face time; a resulting deep knowledge of each other’s design style, sensitivities, and “collaboration manners”; and upon deeply shared convictions about computer architecture. Even with this foundation, iterations of remote exchanges of drafts had to be supplemented by quarterly telephone meetings and semiannual three-day face meetings.
These latter were always very instructive. Inherently, they focused on the tough nuts that had not yet been cracked. We found that when a text paragraph couldn’t be made to work, it was always because we didn’t know what we were talking about. Half-hour discussions usually ensued. We learned something new about computer architecture.
The modern equivalent of the red-marked draft is the Word document with changes tracked. Many critics can interact; each has his changes distinguished from all others. Word’s Track Changes is a well-designed capability. Yet I find the red-marked document far easier to create and to study, largely because of its easy two-dimensional access. Our electronic technology isn’t there yet. (Or I’m just a dinosaur.)
The Telephone
Next to the document comes the telephone, an even bigger breakthrough than email. Email users know the hazards of extemporaneous writing with no attached vocal inflections and no instant give-and-take. Instant messaging is a poor substitute for telephony.
Telephone-Plus-Shared-Document
Telephone-plus-shared-document becomes vastly more powerful than either alone. The combination adds real-time interactions, which save a lot of written explanation and head off much misunderstanding. Less obviously, the shared document adds much specificity and detail to a phone conversation. Having to agree word-by-word forces the collaborative facing of many issues that would otherwise be missed.
This combination is very powerful. In our laboratory, Kurtis Keller, our staff mechanical engineer, was collaborating with Sam Drake at the University of Utah on the design of a new head-mounted display. We were operating a quite effective real-time, high-bandwidth video teleconferencing system between UU and UNC. Our videoconferencing station was only 150 feet down the hall from Kurtis’s office, a short walk. Yet we observed, well into the design process, that Kurtis was not investing even that minimal effort in the teleconferencing system. He was working in his office, by phone; both he and Drake had the drawing up on their workstations.
Videoconferencing
Once hyped as the “game-changing” tool for telecollaboration, videoconferencing has come into widespread use, but far more slowly and less extensively than originally expected.
Why so slowly? In the early days, low bandwidth led to low frame rates; the experience was quite artificial. Now that normal video rates are available, what technical advances will make the experience better?
• Field of view. Video is good for one-on-one conversations, but if one half of a committee is meeting with another, it’s hard to see everyone and at the same time to really discern facial expressions.
• Better sharing of documents and presentations. One wants to view speaker and slide or document simultaneously, not alternatively. One wants to spread materials out on a table. One wants to make both private notes and shared markings. A symmetric shared whiteboard is really needed.
• More resolution. Resolution is still not good enough to enable one to share a full 8½ × 11 page of text, or to read faces well.
• Better depth cues. The lack of depth cues, although very rarely producing ambiguities, continually reminds the participant that he is in fact not there.
When Is Videoconferencing Most Valuable?
In spite of the current technical shortcomings, in some social situations videoconferencing is much better than telephony, although still poorer than face-to-face conferencing. These are situations when facial expressions and body language really matter:
• When screening stranger job applicants to select finalists
• When issues are vital to one or more participants
• When the participant at one end is quite insecure
• When organizational or national cultures are different
High-Tech Videoconferencing
Considerable research has been done piloting maximum-realism teleconferencing systems. My colleague Henry Fuchs has enhanced videoconferencing with depth cues and demonstrated anecdotally that the enhancement substantially increases one’s feeling of “being there.” Each participant’s head is tracked, so the powerful kinetic depth effect is harnessed—when one moves his head, the reconstructed objects on the screen shift according to their distance from the cameras. Moreover, multiple cameras yield a 3-D image, which is displayed in stereo via two projectors with polarized filters.9
Telecollaboration Technology—Pulled or Pushed?
Much academic research has been invested in telecollaboration hardware and software. This has yielded many tools and systems, some commercially marketed, and a conference series10 and a respected journal11 that cover the subject (as well as collocated cooperation).
One is forced to the conclusion that most of those tools and systems spring from a technical idea rather than from an analysis of a collaboration pattern or need. Indeed, in a quick Web search for telecollaboration, 49 of the first 50 entries were on tools or education, not on collaboration in design. In a library shelf study, of 20 books, 19 were on tools, not on applications of the tools to accomplish tasks.
This inversion concerns me deeply. It is wasteful of a precious resource—PhD research efforts—and it mis-educates our ablest students. Effective toolsmithing always starts with the user and the task. In my experience, it is best done when the toolsmith has a real user with a real task that must be done. Buggy prototypes will not then satisfy; critical feedback will be immediate and blunt. I have written extensively on this elsewhere; those positions have not changed.12
Notes and References
1. Lohr [2009], “The crowd is wise (when it’s focused),” reports on the concept of “collective intelligence” in which specialized teams coalesce via the internet for major technical projects:
But a look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. “There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”
2. Clark [2006], “The Airbus saga,” is an excellent newspaper account. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_380, accessed on September 9, 2008.
3. This work required a small architecture team of its own.
4. Wise [1966], “I.B.M.’s $5,000,000,000 gamble,” has a very competent, thorough, and fair discussion of the project and its troubles, as seen two years after announcement. As to collaborative design, he says, “The international engineering group was woven together with considerable effectiveness, giving I.B.M. the justifiable claim that the 360 computer was probably the first product of truly international design” (p. 142).
Peter Fagg, the System/360 project’s Engineering Manager, did a phenomenal job of managing the interdivisional, international development of the dozens of new input-output devices, without line authority over any of those teams.
5. Herbsleb [2000], “Distances, dependencies, and delay in a global collaboration,” and Teasley [2000], “How does radical collocation help a team succeed?” document the disadvantages of distributed work. Hinds [2002], Distributed Work, presents a set of reports of various aspects of distributed work.
6. Ghemawat [2007], Redefining Global Strategy.
7. Garner [2001], “Comparing graphic actions between remote and proximal design teams,” reports an interesting study comparing collocated and remote collaborations on a design project:
This paper outlines the conduct and findings of a research project which compared the sketching activity and sketched output of pairs of design students collaborating face-to-face to other pairs linked by computer-mediated tools. . . . Sketch Graphic Acts are used to illuminate the phenomenon of shared sketches and the importance of “thumbnail” sketches—which were commonly exploited in laboratory studies of face-to-face collaboratively working but were significantly impoverished in studies of computer-mediated remote collaborative working.
On the other hand, Sonnenwald et al. [2003], “Evaluating a scientific collaboratory,” not only observed no differences, but also discovered that scientists found advantages and disadvantages to each mode of working:
The evaluation of scientific collaboratories has lagged behind their development. Do the capabilities afforded by collaboratories outweigh their disadvantages? To evaluate a scientific collaboratory system, we conducted a repeated-measures controlled experiment that compared the outcomes and process of scientific work completed by 20 pairs of participants (upper level undergraduate sciences students) working face-to-face and remotely.
We collected scientific outcomes (graded lab reports) to investigate the quality of scientific work, post-questionnaire data to measure the adoptability of the system, and post-interviews to understand the participants’ views of doing science under both conditions. We hypothesized that study participants would be less effective, report more difficulty, and be less favorably inclined to adopt the system when collaborating remotely.
Contrary to expectations, the quantitative data showed no statistically significant differences with respect to effectiveness and adoption. The qualitative data helped explain this null result: participants reported advantages and disadvantages working under both conditions and developed work-arounds to cope with the perceived disadvantages of collaborating remotely. While the data analysis produced null results, considered as a whole, the analysis leads us to conclude there is positive potential for the development and adoption of scientific collaboratory systems.
8. An anonymous writer in Economist.com [2009] speculates that “the cyclical downturn may be coinciding with a structural decline in business travel because of advances in information technology.” Thus the downturn may accelerate the adoption of videoconferencing.
9. Raskar [1998], “The office of the future”; Towles [2002], “3D telecollaboration over Internet2”; http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/inthenews/pdf/washingtonpost_2000_1128.pdf, accessed on August 28, 2009.
Virtual worlds such as Second Life are also being explored for telecollaboration. See for example, http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2008/12/serious-virtual-worlds-applications.html.
10. See http://www.cscw2008.org/.
11. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): The Journal of Collaborative Computing. ISSN: 0925-9724 (print version); ISSN: 1573-7551 (electronic version).
12. Brooks [1977], “The computer ‘scientist’ as toolsmith”; Brooks [1996], “The computer scientist as toolsmith II.”