The collaboration frontier: Presentations

The office memo has gone the way of the typewriter (except in a few industries where accuracy in communication is paramount, e.g. law). Shorter thoughts are communicated via email while bigger arguments are typically slapped into presentation format, even when there is no intention to actually present it.

For the recipient, a PowerPoint deck is perceived to be quicker to read. For the author(s), the benefits of making your case in PowerPoint are the way that bullet points don't require much time spent constructing sentences and that the format easily incorporates illustrations. Draw few basic shapes connected by a lot of arrows then you can call it a model and it looks like a profound insight (and maybe it is, visual communication is powerful and effective when it is well thought out).

Does reliance on PowerPoint decks for communication constitute a barrier to the adoption of collaboration tools? The typical scenario is one of PowerPoint decks being emailed around to contributors and reviewers but lacking the change tracking capabilities of, say, Microsoft Word. Collaboration tools that cater for presentation format are in their infancy and moving away from PowerPoint means breaking habits.

Tools: Collaborative editing of text is helped along by some elegant solutions and spreadsheets are being collaboration enabled. If anyone knows of good collaborative editing tools for presentations, I would be keen to try them out. The Zoho Office Suite has collaborative solutions for documents and spreadsheets but their presentation authoring tool does not allow for concurrent editing. Google Docs & Spreadsheets (thus named in order to avoid using the word Office?) is just that: Documents and spreadsheets. When searching for tools, I did find a university project called CoPowerPoint with the objective of building a collaborative function layer on top of Microsoft PowerPoint itself.

Habits: The temptation to fire up PowerPoint and start drafting a presentation to illustrate an idea is a natural one. The bullet format makes it a good environment for outlining and drafting (although some of us prefer mind mapping). Illustration capabilities add to the attractiveness. But habits sometimes give way to new processes when the benefits of collaboration are accepted as illustrated by use case three in this case study from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, an investment bank, where a wiki is being used to define the structure and content of presentations before putting it into PowerPoint.

Tags: Google Google Docs & Spreadsheets Google Office collaboration presentations PowerPoint CoPowerPoint Zoho wiki