Cisco’s new cognitive collaboration story might be the next evolution of computer-assisted cooperative work.
Every marketing type, I’m told, dreams of a positioning that combines the cloud, artificial intelligence, 5G networking, open-source software, and a little of IoT – a marketing royal flush. We might even be seeing its emergence in the concept of “cognitive collaboration,” a recent Cisco storyline. Is it more than a nice story, though? For that, we’ve to look beyond Cisco at how these five marketing face cards might be converging on something real.
History of CSCW
The notion that technology could help us collaborate isn’t new. Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) goes back to 1984 as a specific terminology, and as a topic at least five years longer. Numerous studies have been done on what makes collaboration effective, and the results generally accept two approaches. The first is to augment network communications to simulate person-to-person communications, which is where things like videoconferencing come in. The second is to contextually present target collaborative information, which is where I think cognitive collaboration is focusing.
