Chris on SmartSheet and an unexpected benefit of web20′ing a regular business chore

My friend Chris Matthews as I wrote about earlier, was one of rare brave/clever souls to show up at Office20Con last month with the intention of buying some “office2.0″ tools - rather than just talking about them.

One demo we caught was SmartSheet - basically a cheap-and-cheerful Web-based excel clone of sorts for collecting and sorting information in an spreadsheet-like layout. Their elegant twist on the spreadsheet is email workflow integration. e.g. the app will let you automatically send out emails for instance to a group of people to remind them to fill in their section of the sheet and then visibly keeps track of progress for everyone etc.

So this lets you web20 [yes that's me using web20 as a verb] some fairly run of the mill day-to-day business processes. Got to be at least slightly more efficient than the old way of e-mailing out multiple copies of some word or excel template for input - if just by saving you the trouble of versioning and merging the results etc.

Anyway I was interested how this product worked out for him.

chris matthews: btw, I used SmartSheet for the first time this week

Thomas Purves:Did it work?

chris matthews: totally!

Thomas Purves: nice
Thomas Purves: glad to hear these things work sometimes

chris matthews: I put up a sheet with the english text from a web page we needed to translate. then had columns (blank) for the other languages. And sent it to like a dozen people who speak many languages.
chris matthews: within 24 hours I had 4 of 5 languages completed
chris matthews: and the fifth will be done tomorrow

Thomas Purves: sweet

chris matthews: yup
chris matthews: it has a fun side effect: no one likes to be the last one done their work
chris matthews: socialmedia creates socialpressure

Thomas Purves: that’s cool
Thomas Purves: i hadn’t thought of that effect, Thanks to the visibility/transparency yes
Thomas Purves: social pressure enforces productivity

chris matthews: ClearPressure ™?

Thomas Purves: ha ha

I like this story as both an anecdote of a web tool driving not just some tangible boost in work efficiency but also for the unexpected (might we say emergent?) change in behaviour caused by just a subtle shift in the nature of the interaction.

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