Team Collaboration at Angel.com

1
Team Collaboration at Angel.com

• Sam Aparicio
• IP.4.IT, Las Vegas, Nov 2005

2
About Angel.com

• What we do
• We provide on-demand call center and Interactive
  Voice Response (IVR) solutions.
• We serve over 1,500 customers including Reebok,
  KB Toys and Kelloggs.
• Our distinctive competence
• We innovate by translating complex phone
  technology into simple tools that any business
  can use.

3
Some Challenges we faced

• Critical information for one side of the business
  was being lost or never captured by the other
  side.
• People were revisiting old problems from scratch
  without leveraging previous work
• Internal processes suffered from inconsistency
  dropping the ball

4
Collaboration requirements

• Looking for a system that
• Could store ideas forever
• Flatten access to those ideas
• Would provide transparency
• Would be easy to adopt
• Would be easy to maintain

5
Socialtext

• What it is
• Wiki platform
• Hosted or appliance
• Attuned to the needs of a mainstream business
  environment
• Cheap (10/user/mo)

• Just right feature set
• WYSIWYG editor
• Email to wiki to email
• Right navigation paradigms
• RSS In Out
• Blogs
• Content tagging

6
What it looks like
7
What we use Socialtext for
8
Socialtext enables paradigm change

• Transparency becomes the default
• BEFORE Find a reason to share it
• AFTER Find a reason NOT to share it
• We always build on previously existing work
• BEFORE Costly to retrieve and review previous
  work
• AFTER 10 minutes suffice to turn up context
  content to build on
• Knowledge now travels faster
• BEFORE What do you know about X?
• AFTER Thanks for your contribution about X?

9
Lessons in adoption

• Its not about the software
• Its a question of culture
• More about social interaction than user training
• Collaboration cant be forced
• Grassroots approach is more successful
• Success breeds more success
• Tech people have less trouble sharing than
  business people
• You get better ROI when you improve collaboration
  around unstructured problems
• E.g. Competitive intelligence, technology
  research, product design

10
Questions?

• Sam Aparicio
• VP, Products Strategy
• aparicio_at_angel.com
• 703-286-6415