Secure Information Exchange: Then and Now | OpenText Fax ...

??No one is useless in this world,? retorted the Secretary, ?who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.??

The world for Charles Dickens was a world for collaboration: his characters endlessly collaborate (such as is the context in Our Mutual Friend above, when the ?Secretary,? John Rokesmith, speaks with Bella Wilfer about the plan for Bella to befriend Lizzie Hexam, to learn why Lizzie is in hiding); Dickens joined forces with others desiring to improve social conditions; he formed and published weekly journals to provide a medium for literary collaboration.

It was Dickens? immense desire to do good through his writing, particularly to champion the cause of the social needs of the British poor, the working classes, and the prisoners in the mid 19^th century.? To his great credit, he succeeded, forcing attention on these issues onto a society that would have preferred to enjoy his novels with his creative genius and his wit but without the strong dose of social reform.

Oliver Twist describes the street life of London orphans and prostitutes.? In Little Dorrit, Dickens focuses on the grim lives of the inmates of the debtors? prisons, in which Dickens own father had been imprisoned for a time.? The title character in Barnaby Rudge is mentally disabled, and several of the characters in Our Mutual Friend, from which we quote at the beginning of this post, have physical disabilities.? In Nicholas Nickleby he exposed the abusive, live-in Yorkshire schools, to which many unwanted children were sent; in A Tale of Two Cities he criticizes the violence in modern society; and in Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes he takes on American racism.

In addition, Dickens in his public life was dedicated to collaborative social reform, collaborating with other philanthropists to create half-way houses for prostitutes and soup kitchens for the poor.? He gave readings for charitable causes.? He campaigned for healthy and sanitary causes.

Dickens published many of his novels serially via literary magazines that he edited: first Household Words (from 1850-1859) and then in All the Year Round (from 1859 through his death in 1870).? These were magazines dedicated to publishing fiction (from other authors, as well as his own) and treatments of non-fiction topics, especially concerning social issues of the day.? In these magazines, Dickens occasionally collaborated with other authors to co-write short stories and plays; he co-authored The Haunted House in 1859 with five other people.

In all this, Dickens was a businessman as well as a collaborator; let?s turn to the business of collaboration and the collaboration of business.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the first use for sharing information is a simple one: not necessarily toward any end other than to share life electronically: a photo, a link, a song, an article? anything that can be captured or created by one person and then transmitted to another.? In last week?s entry, I looked at the second use case for information exchange, the workflow: I or my organization needs something, a result, and so I transmit information to you or your organization to execute the next step in the process of obtaining that result.

This post is to describe the third use case for sharing information: collaboration.? While workflows exist to move well-established processes forward (buying a house, reserving a hotel room, placing an ad in a newspaper), collaboration involves communication to move processes forward that are not well established.? Typically these processes can be thought of as part of a project (whether the word ?project? is used or not): a temporary endeavor with a unique outcome.? Projects familiar to us include construction projects, strategic planning projects, academic research projects, etc.? But many other endeavors are projects as well: taking a trip, constructing a flower bed; even conducting a romance is a project of sorts.

Collaborative efforts and projects need the secure exchange of information so that scope is well defined, efforts are well coordinated, and the monitoring and inevitable correction are able to occur to bring efforts back in line with the plan.? During his lifetime Dickens himself wrote more than 14,000 letters in a virtual fire hose of communication and information exchange.

Business collaboration typically takes place to further business efforts, to increase revenue, and to decrease costs.? The world is busy with these cooperative efforts; and most of this work is good work.? But Dickens reminds us that in addition to the collaboration we undertake to make our businesses healthy, we should look to the collaboration that eases the burdens of one another.

Related posts:

1. What in the Dickens is Information Exchange?
2. Great Faxpectations
3. Essar Replaces Fax Machines with FoIP Using RightFax Integrated with MS Exchange and Avaya
4. Microsoft Publishes Case Study on Open Text Fax Server Integration with Exchange Server 2010
5. Circumnavigating the Circumlocution Office

Source: http://faxsolutionsblog.opentext.com/2012/08/20/secure-information-exchange-now-and-then/

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