Informal Collaboration Systems: Financial Professional’s Organizer or Controls Concern?
Have you heard about Discord, Telegram, Airtable or Slack? Have you been asked to fill out a Doodle? Are you part of a cross-organizational effort with a shared information base where none of the work seems to be taking place in the official shared information base? This column on informal collaboration system may be useful to you.
Financial professionals are accustomed to information systems that complement and augment their formal systems. Probably the first word that comes into your mind is Excel (the accountants hammer, as in, “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And financial professionals are aware that Excel makes it easy to do a lot of things that the ERP or official business and accounting system can’t do or does in a complex fashion. That leads to potential control problems and inefficiencies. Let’s take that out of accounting to the rest of the information that makes working together efficient.
Computer-supported cooperative work solutions
I am involved in a number of cross-organizational, collaborative activities. Most are related to standards organizations, but some are in commercial collaboration with other organizations in my role at Cohen Computer Consulting. As such, I have had the incentive to work with a wide variety of online solutions for intra-organizational and inter-organizational group productivity, sometimes called computer-supported cooperative work solutions. As ThinkTwenty20 editorial staff is considering an in-depth guide to the tools commonly used today, for an upcoming issue of the journal, I though it might be helpful to begin laying down some groundwork.
I will not go into each of the solutions in detail here, I wanted to provide a brief backgrounder, and speak to some of the governance issues involved with the use of informal, inexpensive groupware solutions. In particular, I wanted to provide some thoughts for those responsible for governance and oversight of an organization informally allowing groupware beyond those under the centralized control of the organization. If you have heard of Telegram, Slack, Discord, Doodle, Airtable, or any number of things starting with the word “Google”, this may be interesting for you.
An Evolution of Informal Groupware
When the XBRL movement began, more than two decades ago, we needed an inexpensive (free!) solution for collaboration for a growing but rag-tag group of otherwise unrelated participants. One such free solution was called eGroups; eGroups was - shortly after our adoption - purchased by Yahoo! and rebranded as Yahoo! Groups. Prior to Yahoo! choosing to shut it down in February 2020, it provided-an-easy-to-use suite of collaborative tools, including membership management, email lists and discussion areas, file and photo sharing, a group calendar, polling, and other features.
In the twenty years since, a wide variety of specialized and more generic computer-supported cooperative work tools have arisen. New functions reflect the changes in our use of the Internet, from the dial-up days of 2000 (the word WIFI was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2005) to the screen, audio and video sharing, and VoIP more recent times.
Still, some of the most useful additions have been the simplest. One of the tools I have found most helpful for years has been a deceptively simple one: Doodle (doodle.com), a free online meeting scheduling tool. You have a handful or two of people that you need to get on a call simultaneously. Playing the game of herding the cats by phone or email is quite difficult. But Doodle lets an organizer poll a group of people to find the best common time. Simple but very useful, and not really a big controls issue (unless exposing the time people are free or busy can be exploited by someone within the group.)
The transient tools seem to hold the least concern. Online polling tools can be used in the middle of a webcast or in a shorter-term period to bring together people’s opinions. Google Forms are quick ways to survey a group and get their input. Google Docs and Google Sheets help people to collaborate on content. On a call today, someone said, “Let’s put together an Airtable of people and their strengths and capabilities”, referring to Airtable’s cloud collaboration that takes the spreadsheet interface one step further, backing the spreadsheet interface up with a database, attachments, and other more sophisticated functionality.
So, we have seen an increase in the collaborative tools that are focused on the transient. Many now incorporate real-time collaboration, real-time chat, audio, video sharing and screen sharing.
My greater concern are the tools where information is kept for a period of time. Document revision and maintenance and retention, captured conversations that are sensitive, information that should be moderated – these are all issues that can bring legal and reputation problems for an organization. While modern collaborative tools can leverage AI-like tools to help with governance and oversight, this does not remove responsibility from those involved.
Some initial considerations
So, what is the issue here?
Many organizations have their own groupware at this point. Sometimes it is even integrated with the FIrm’s ERP system. These solutions are centralized, controlled by the IT group, overseen by corporate governance, and are supervised (generally) to make sure policy is followed, behaviour is controlled, and access is available to the right people and limited to others. When a group permits the use of informal systems, all of these issues become risks. Informal systems can be used to freeze out certain participants, obscure work being done, expose information to those who should have that access, and potentially lose information vital to future considerations.
I mention my collaboration in standards organizations, a few of whom have recently updated their member collaboration platforms, but not seemingly for the better. One of the biggest issues is that group communication, primarily by mailing lists and archives, have disappeared or is no longer as friendly. Scheduling is more for publication than for user ease. And few functions to actually craft the deliverables are provided.
As such, most groups want to leverage the free tools. “Let’s use Google Docs to draft our standard.” (Oops – Google Docs is blocked in at least six countries; that would lock some participants out.) Let’s chat about things in Discord. (How do we make sure anything important is captured and put in the official system?) “Did you know that Jeff fled the country and the RCMP are looking for him”? (Does Jeff still have access to the system? Did he get admitted in the first place?)
With all that in mind, some things to think about:
1. Informal systems should be considered as temporary aids and not long-term storage. It should be clear to all users that the actual work of the group should be captured/maintained in the official system, and you should never need to go back to the informal system for more information in the long-term. Informal platforms often wind up become the platform of choice, which means information can be lost to the future.
2. Someone has to maintain membership in the platform so new people are added on a timely basis (and that people should be removed on a timely basis.) The systems cannot be open to all, and they cannot be used as a weapon by an unofficial leader.
3. Information a member needs to know must be in the official platform. If someone is left out because they are not leveraging the informal platform, that can be a problem. The new platform should be a help, not an additional burden.
4. Speaking of not being an additional burden. moderation of the new group should not fall on management, or it becomes an official platform. If it isn't mostly self-moderating, you have just introduced new pressures on the leadership.
5. The informal platform should be perceived as temporary only. There are few mechanisms for rolling an older tool into a newer one, and popular platforms change regularly. Telegram gives way to Discord, for example.
Ad hoc systems can be a great help to bring together unrelated groups and to augment formal systems for related personnel. But you need to think twice before you set up another Google Sheet, Form or DOC. It may seem to make life easier, but as organizations with a plethora of abandoned spreadsheets know, it can make life in the future more difficult.
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