Google Apps - Its Not About The Features But The Work Culture

We are feature addicts and love new features whether it is on our favorite device or application. Google Docs is a good example. It is not as feature rich nor, many would argue, or as pretty as Microsoft Office.

However the real question is what impact it can have on the way we work. In a previous blog I put forward a case that merely sharing a document is in more efficient and effective than sending it by email. Newer platforms such as Google Apps really enables better collaborative working and this is often missed by people who evaluate it.

Take Google Docs as an example again. you certainly can make comments in Microsoft Word and review and communicate changes. But these changes are only visible sequentially and by that I mean it is fine if you are working on the latest copy of the document. One way of ensuring that this happens is by using Microsoft Sharepoint and enforcing checking in and checking out the document. With Google Apps the paradigm is completely different. Anyone who has edit access to the document can simply work on it. If another person accesses the document while you are working on it, both of you will simply be able to work on it concurrently and see the changes the other person is making in real time.

Additionally, you can target a comment to specific individuals so that only they see it. The point of mentioning these features not to get into the feature debate but to illustrate the point that features such as these change the way we work and this change is not always obvious. Many individuals simply do not realize that this is a more effective way to work and have difficulty adjusting to it.

Students and people who are big users of social networking get it easily. To make matters worse, if only a few individuals in the organisation choose to work in this manner, adoption will be slow in the same way that the uptake of forums and group discussions have been slower in businesses than in the broader consumer arena.

With the rise of newer web based applications many organisations approach it purely from a feature or cost perspective and ignore the less obvious benefits and productivity gains that can result from changing our work practices that are possible with these new technologies. These gains can be very significant and unless you incorporate them into your assessment and subsequently into your implementation project you are going miss out on them and instead end up trying to placate what you currently do on a different albeit newer technology platform.