Imagine the corporate benefits of an online brainstorming session that allows input from all interested and invited parties in a customized and controlled environment.
Imagine a forum where ideas and solutions are recorded, recallable and updatable by any of the participants at any time. Where the parameters, tone, style and participants and controlled by the organization.
Voisin, a software application incorporating wiki and blogging tools (among others), is more than the sum of its parts. It allows companies to make these tools readily accessible to their teams to use as required by each team within a professional environment.
“These technologies by themselves have no intrinsic value,” says Joel Halse, VP Communications of the web-based software development company IJ Solutions. “If you decided you wanted to have a group discussion and start a wiki, how would you do it?”
It’s all about facilitating the discussion, he adds.
“As soon as you put a barrier up to your workforce, you’re going to decrease the likelihood of success,” he explains. “(With Voisin) you just click to start a group and every group gets a blog for discussion and a wiki to contain the notes. The value comes in reducing the barriers and the friction of group work getting done. No one wants to do something that’s hard.”
While Voisin provides the framework, every company using the application sets up individual parameters required by that group. Similar applications are available via large software development companies like Microsoft, he says, but ownership and control of the forum are never given over to the group or user company. Consequently, it ultimately operates according to the overriding needs of the service provider, not the group.
“The difference is to set it up according to your needs,” says Halse. “The core architecture is going to be the same, but each Voisin will be a reflection of the organization that’s occupying that space. An empty Voisin is really a ghost town.”
Populate it, however, and the social structure will grow organically according to the participants’ wants and needs, he says.
The need for a professional and adaptable set of online collaborative tools came out of Halse’s own difficulties developing IJ Solutions with partner Ian Miller.
Their venture began almost five years ago when Halse and Miller, who met as cadets at the Royal Military College in Kingston, started IJ Solutions while still enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces.
They were challenged by the need to communicate clearly and often despite being stationed in different parts of the globe. With the rest of their team scattered elsewhere (their graphic designer lived in New Zealand, for example), record-keeping was difficult.
Like many colleagues, email was their primary used, but was quickly recognized as inefficient to track and discriminate between various threads of their correspondence. Halse recognizes email as a great tool, but not the right tool for ongoing collaborative work.
Miller’s philosophy is to permanently fix any problems they ran into more than three times, so a collaborative solution was initiated. In doing this, they realized they were not alone in this challenge.
“Everyone is struggling with this – people understand the symptoms, but they don’t recognize the problem,” Halse says.
Consequently, the duo got to work developing a professional social application that can be used as an internet-based program to allow external input, or a more controlled intranet environment that lives on the corporate servers.
Regardless, Voisin (which translates from French into “neighbourhood”) works with existing applications as much as possible to allow a seamless integration to current systems and incorporates an application programming interface (API) to invite add-ons when desired.
“I believe this will have an international impact on the way people do business,” shrugs Halse of the concept of collaborative work software tools. “This is the way it’s going to happen, so you better learn about it or your company is going to be left in the dust.”
In keeping with IJ Solutions’ commitment to collaborative work, Halse and Miller are interested in ongoing feedback to continuously improve Voisin, so everyone benefits.
“From start to finish, you’ll never be alone,” Halse promises. “When you become our client, you become part of the Voisin development community.”
Launched in July, IJ Solutions is now scheduling in-person educational seminars for business leaders, to discuss a new and improved way of using the Internet to do get the job done.
Imagine.
For more information, click the link provided.
