Enterprise Technology By Phil Edholm

Older: Thoughts on a New Business
Newer: Video and Collaboration Blog 2

Video and Collaboration Blog 1

By Phil October 18, 2007 1:32 pm

At Lake Tahoe - On vacation?

A question on one of my posts about travel caused me to think that a couple of blogs on how video (and other communication modalities)  apply to different inter-human situations would be appropriate. 

A number of years ago I came across the work of Alphonse Chapanis http://www-personal.umich.edu/~danhorn/chapanis.html and his investigations into how humans communicate as a reference model for machines.  In  1974, he and Robert Ochnis published the paper; "The effects of 10 communication modes on the behavior of teams during co-operative problem-solving.”  (International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 6: pgs. 579-619).  This paper detailed research into how humans interacted when given a task and varying the interface between them.  To accomplish this, he put a sender of information in one room and a seeker of information in the other.  They would collaborate on a task, such as assembling a barbeque.  To measure the effectiveness of communications modalities, the communications interface was varied, starting with typing, and then progressing through: electromechnical writing machine (EMWM-whiteboard), typing and EMWM, voice (phone call), voice and typing, voice and EMWM,  and so on, finally by opening a crtain between the rooms a simulation of video interaction.  With multiple experiments with teams using the different modalities, the time to completion was representative of the "goodness" of the modality to this specific collaboration exercise.  chapanis.gif

The interesting result is that when voice was added to the task, completion times dropped by about 70%, while enhancing to video had no appreciable further drop.  The conslusion was that voice is the critical modality to cooperative activites.

This was further reflected in a paper generated by observing EU interactions:  "Michailidis, A. and Rada, R. (1991). “Organizational Roles and Communications Modes in Team Work.”  (Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences - 2001).    In this work, it was observed that communications modalities that were deemed approriate were highly related to the work being accomplished. 

When the work was focused to a task, lower modalities were adequate, but for interactions at the minister or deputy level, face to face or other visual communications were generally required.

eu-comm3.gif

So this work shows us that task oriented collaboration, voice (or even less) is an adequate and capable modality, but for less task oriented communications such as board meetings, visual modalities have value.

Next blog, bringing this together into a framework of communications modalities versus inter-personal relationship.

Categories: Unified Communications, Multimedia, Technology, Architecture Trackbacks (1)

Tags: No Tags

Trackbacks/Pings

  1. […] the size and capability to meet the needs of the “selling” part of the Video Blog 2 from last year (Video Blog 1 was about how humans communicate). I believe the next big market in video is in the fringes […]

    March 3rd, 2008 at 7:57 pm from Enterprise Technology » Blog Archive » VideoConferencing - Going Consumer?

Comments

  1. Phil,

    If I want to assemble a BBQ or any other physical device, I don’t think video adds a lot. But I don’t think you can extrapolate that to mean that video doesn’t add value to task-oriented collaboration. It depends on the task.

    Board meetings are a bad example. These are not ‘task’ oriented meetings. The board meetings I’ve been to consist of people voting for things that half of them don’t understand based on inputs that half of them haven’t read. Voice and video don’t add a lot to these tasks. However, most project-oriented meetings can be just as effective using video conference as they would be face-to-face. And, as the quality of video goes up, even the relationship building/maintaining aspect of meetings can be achieved over video. I’ve had several video meets with people around the world using Skype video and it is very effective. I find that video triggers more chit-chat than audio and therefore is a stronger relationship tool than audio-only interaction.

    October 19th, 2007 at 1:03 am by Paul Stevens

  2. An interesting and useful posting by Phil and I tend to agree based on my personal experience. Re. Paul’s comments, I don’t think there is a claim that video does not add any value to tasks. I suspect it does, but audio is sufficient and certainly more useful than video in such tasks. The example Steve gives re. effectiveness of Skype video project meetings illustrates in my view that a combination of voice and video is certainly effective but I doubt if it tells us any thing about the effectiveness of the respective mode of communication. I personally find the conclusion that audio is sufficient for many types of communication quite useful. The added value of video if and when available at similar cost & convenience is certainly not to be ignored either.

    October 19th, 2007 at 9:29 am by Ajit Ghai

  3. Phil,

    I agree with Paul for a lot of the same reasons. I think the cost that is eating away at corporate profits the most after health care, is employee commuting and situational costs. People moving further and further away because of affordability and quality of life, sitting unproductively in traffic, taking up costly square footage in lease buildings, global sourcing of project teams……..etc.

    Just when the tasks and jobs people are asked to do are becoming more and more abstract.

    Remote interaction when dealing with abstractions is greatly enhanced by face to face communications. Frankly, my experience that task level interaction is where video is needed and the insinuation “upper modalities” is only applicable to upper management or BoD meetings is laughable.

    BTW, the studies also seem on their face to be pretty one dimensional. They seemingly fail to measure how adept people are at using a given “modality”, or how many times in a day a given communication tasks are performed when measuring their usefulness.

    October 19th, 2007 at 7:06 pm by many

  4. The key points that you have surfaced are that we have change in multiple dimensions; the cost/complexity of invoking a video communication is decreasing, the ability to do video for key communications events that are inter-organizational is improving, but at the same time the workforce may actually may be getting comfortable with more simple interactions.
    I still find that face to face is critical for many meetings, but for internal, with a few exceptions, voice and collaboration tools seem sufficient.
    Anyway, I put up the second part of the blog that discusses these and more - let’s move the posts to that one.
    As an aside, would you all prefer that I do this kind of topic as one BIG post or break it into two (or more) so it is not so long?

    October 23rd, 2007 at 7:50 pm by Phil

Leave a Reply