Why Collaborative Time Reporting and Approval for Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere is Important
Do you have a group of colleagues you regularly join with to work on a project? Or are you a freelance contractor who has lots of projects with various clients or prime contractors? If yes, then you likely know the nightmare that is involved in reporting and approving time worked.
For these people, time literally is money. They provide a service in exchange for an hourly rate. Therefore, they track their time and report it to a manager, administrator, client, or someone else who approves the work they did so they can get paid and so the approving party knows the work was done. You know the type. They are the growing legion of contingent workers who are only in one place for a short time and then off to the next opportunity.
These folks deal with the reporting problem daily because they don’t have an easy way facilitate that communication. This is a problem the Web was born to solve.
Email is a great example of how the Web empowers people in business to get things done. It’s cheap, effective and lets you communicate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It works so well because we all accept, that in business, communication does not stop within the walls of one business or one building. The true nature of business is that people collaborate with others who are often times not their co-workers.
If everyone worked for the same company, then this problem would not exist. But they don’t, so everyday millions of emails with spreadsheets attached are sent around in an effort to report time. But what about tracking where those emails are, or approving each time report, or aggregating reports across a project? That is where email becomes just email.
The promise of Web 2.0 is to take the concept of email, where everyone is their own account and can communicate with anyone else, and add one key component - COLLABORATION. By doing so, each person stays up to date with their information, like a social network, connecting to form trusted relationships where appropriate data is shared. Each of these relationships are unique and should only see the data that is appropriate for that relationship. For example, I have a project and invite two colleagues to join me, and the client wants to approve all time submitted prior to payment. I simply invite my colleagues to my project as “workers” and the client as that project’s “client”. Since I am the “manager” of the project, I have the “workers” submit time to me and the “client”. I should see all billing and cost info but the client should only see the billing info. I approve and the client approves and everyone is in sync. Both workers never see the other ones data, but everyone gets what they need. This would not be possible without the Net and should be how Web 2.0 is implemented.
We should expect to see many Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 apps that solve similar distributed collaboration problems. A simple rule of thumb is that if you’re doing it with email and attachments, Web 2.0 and the Net could probably do the job better. And it’s my belief that world of freelance workers will be the triggering force for many more of these apps.
You can see this time reporting example in action at TimeXchange (http://www.timeXchange.net)
