HARMON.IE: HELPING US IN THE BATTLE FOR INTEGRATION
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I recently wrote “Give me integration or give me death....” I am fed up with having to jump from application to application both on line and in the real world. Turns out I’m not alone in my behavior or my feelings. David Lavenda, VP Marketing for MainSoft said at the recent NetWork conference:
People are drowning in digital overload. According to a New York Times/CBS poll, we’re switching applications 37 times an hour! Too much information and too many useful-but-disjointed tools make it harder to get our work done. Aggregation will reduce the number of context switches, but business users typically resist changes to their work habits, thus widening the enterprise 2.0 adoption gap.
David was at NetWork as a Net:Work Future Ideas Launchpad Finalist for his firm's Harmon.ie product. Turns out David and I also have similar research interests and so I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with him and learning more about Harmon.ie. The product’s name is perfect. Harmon.ie harmonizes many common tasks across enterprise email and document collaboration. CloudAve’s review:
Harmon.ie is not your bleeding edge cloud based collaboration tool. Rather, they are on a mission to bring some of the modern day collaboration into the old fashioned workflows inside the enterprises. Those of us who live on the edge of the technology easily adopt modern tools even before they enter the beta stage. But if we peep outside the Silicon Valley technology bubble, we will see many people still using Microsoft Outlook religiously.
I’m sad to report that even inside the Silicon Valley technology bubble there are old fashioned workflows....
Harmon.ie may be the training wheels that some companies need to move into an Enterprise 2.0 way of working. “Training wheels” are implementation tricks that help to trigger new expectations around technologies tools and practices organizational practices.
Changing our expectations about work has to be mixed with our choices of technologies to do that work. (Thanks to Austin Henderson for helping me see this design process as layered like 3D chess.) However, unlike training wheels, Harmon.ie has value in more sophisticated settings too. In checking my own workflow against some of Harmon.ie’s capabilities, I found Harmon.ie provides features I don’t currently have (e.g., drag and drop sharing of Google Docs from within email).
So, here’s to Harmon.ie: Kudos to you for your Launchpad success and thank you for joining the fight for integration!
New York Times article quote: “Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.”
