The broken telephone
Most of us played the game as children. A message passes down a line of people, and by the end it has changed. Something has been added, something important has gone, and nobody can say where it happened.
Operations have their own version. An alarm becomes a phone call. The call becomes an email. The email is forwarded to a contractor, and a crew arrives on site with half the story. The people furthest from the original signal, often the ones who have to act on it, know the least.
Why email makes it worse
Email is everywhere and it has its place. As the way to run operational work, it has five weaknesses.
- Volume. The messages that matter sit among the ones that do not, and sorting them takes time away from the work.
- No context. Each team keeps its own thread. When something goes wrong, someone has to rebuild the story from several inboxes.
- Knowledge leaves with people. When someone moves on, their tasks, files and conversations often stay locked in a mailbox. The person who steps in starts again, and colleagues stop work to bring them up to speed.
- Wrong recipients. One mistyped address can send sensitive information to the wrong person.
- Decisions wait for reports. Managers rely on separate reports from each team, and someone has to merge them before anyone can decide.
Context belongs with the work
The answer is to keep the conversation with the thing it is about. In Affectli, work is organised around the objects in the ontology: the asset, the site, the incident, the work order. A message about a generator repair sits on the repair task, and the task is linked to the generator.
A-Box is where this comes together for each person: one workspace for tasks, messages and documents, with timeline and calendar views. Open a task and its history is there: what happened, who said what, what was attached and what was done.
What changes
- Handovers get shorter. A new person opens the task and reads it.
- Outside parties work inside the same rules. Teams and workspaces carry their own permissions, so contractors, vendors and partners see what their job needs.
- Sensitive messages stay protected. Messaging and broadcasts in Affectli are end-to-end encrypted.
- Work moves with its context. Workflows built in Affectli Designer on BPMN 2.0 raise tasks from events, against criteria the organisation sets, and each step carries the history with it.
- Decisions use live data. Dashboards and reports update in real time, so managers can decide without waiting for a merged report.
People, processes and systems
Mi-C3, the company behind Affectli, has long described this as getting people, processes and systems to move together. Collaboration tools help most when they sit inside the process, next to the data, with the people who need them.
See A-Box and the apps built on Affectli, or read how one operator ran remote sites from one picture.
