The development of new online software products and services occurs so rapidly that just keeping pace with change is hard enough, especially given the fog of vapourware and spurious differentiation that can sometimes obscure real progress. However, in most cases developers do not have the attention span to perfect their inventions, nor can users learn how to make them work properly, before we are all supposed to move on to the next “Big Thing.” It’s as if we invent the bicycle on Monday, the car on Tuesday and then by Friday we build the space shuttle, yet we still don’t know how to ride the bike properly - it takes time.

In the past few years, we have seen various new breeds of enterprise communication software used within organisations – such as e-learning, knowledge sharing, project collaboration, business process management, CRM, e-commerce and publishing applications - but until very recently each of these has been regarded as a separate specialist application rather than as one element or mode of our online interaction. In real life, we shift back and forth between such modes of interaction without needing to learn a new language or set of rules, yet on corporate intranets and other online systems, such activities are often rigidly segmented. As a result, these distinct areas have specialised and theorised faster than they have actually progressed in terms of their usage. Individual users tend not to demand bigger and more feature-rich separate systems; they just want to interact, learn, share and communicate better, faster and easier.

A good illustration of this problem is the absurd distinction between e-learning and knowledge management software. For several years, these “sectors” have held countless conferences, published reams of ideas and generated more and more buzzwords – and they have been getting more specialised all the time. Leading e-learning analyst Brandon Hall attempted to address the integration of learning, knowledge management and human resource software at the 2002 Online Learning conference. His presentation and discussion suggest that even this modest goal is ahead of the curve for major purchasers of enterprise software.

Common sense suggests that dividing up the various aspects of our interaction with people and information in this way is basically counter-intuitive. Each of these elements has an important role to play in building online relationships, but ideally they should be just one part of a clear, simple, holistic online experience. The area of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is receiving more attention from corporate IT departments trying to bring their different systems together, but this is about data and interoperability rather than creating an integrated experience for users. We need a new approach to building adaptive social applications that are easily deployed and can be humanised – not just customised – to support different types of online interaction and different modes of communication.

Many organisations now have more IT infrastructure than they can usefully manage in the form of hardware, software and online applications, whilst others are still getting up to speed; but the real challenge is how to make all this technology work for the people it is intended to serve – and that is fundamentally a social issue. Only as the design and usage of online communication tools and applications becomes more transparent - more natural and usable – will we begin to learn how they work when embedded in our day-to-day life, rather than simply used because they are novel.

As we move beyond the invention and adoption of first wave online communication technologies into the assimilation phase, we need to take what has been invented and learn how to make it work for us, to help organise ourselves and our work better. This phase is all about understanding people and the many different ways in which they engage with each other online and offline. It is about serving people’s needs to build valuable online relationships, adapting systems to people rather than the other way around.

There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that computer users tend to adapt their own way of thinking and experiencing to computer-related concepts, such as files, directories and even, as Paul Ford describes in a recent essay , image layers and channels. In such cases, what we are really doing is adapting to the limitations and bugs of past hardware and software development in order to get on better with our machines. Jaron Lanier, philosopher-scientist and Virtual Reality pioneer, suggests in an interview on the Sun Web site that we try to overcome one aspect of this problem by making software less rigid and more fault-tolerant: “If you look at how things work right now, it's strange -- nobody -- and I mean nobody -- can really create big programs in a reliable way.”He suggests we use pattern matching and inference logic to emulate the way we think, which would help computers interact with us, but also with each other, in a more adaptive manner. Most computer users quickly realise that they need to adapt to their software rather than the other way around if they are to get anything useful out of it. Whilst we might be able to forgive this in basic productivity tools, the inflexibility and intolerance of some of the communication and organisational software we use is a much more serious problem.

The more we use technology to interact and the more inter-connected we become because of it, the greater the anxiety and alienation it can cause us. In his musings on the dangers of over-reliance on technology and what he calls interaction anxiety, Fabio Sergio quotes Philip Agre’s article Welcome to the always-on world , which discusses some of the challenges of a world which is undergoing “a tremendous shift in human relationships: from episodic to always-on.”One indicator of this shift is in levels of email use. A December 2002 BCS Henley Research Panel survey of senior IT managers in the UKfound that “Respondents received on average 52 E-mails per day. 7% of the sample received more than 100 E-mails per day.”In such a context, it is obvious that the usability of email and contact software can have a dramatic effect on peoples’ working lives and their productivity.

If we are to address these challenges, the balance of adaptation must shift in our favour, so that we can start to use computers and online technologies as tools to augment our social interaction rather than manage it for us. To a certain extent, as Adam Greenfield argues, most things we do online are basically social, whether it is finding information, organisations and people or managing our day-to-day work, and that also applies to most of the tasks we ask our technology to perform. Since the earliest days of the Internet, developers and users alike have been striving to develop the social aspect of online communications. Indeed, this is arguably what the Web was intended for. Yet this is badly under-developed in most current online software, especially business-related systems, despite the fact that it is vital to the task of encouraging take-up and usage of online systems in general.