Download Collaboration in the Cloud at Google and more Exercises Marketing in PDF only on Docsity!
Collaboration in the Cloud at Google
Yunting Sun, Diane Lambert, Makoto Uchida, Nicolas Remy
Google Inc.
January 8, 2014
Abstract
Through a detailed analysis of logs of activity for all Google employees^1 , this paper shows how the Google Docs suite (documents, spreadsheets and slides) enables and increases collaboration within Google. In particular, visualization and analysis of the evolution of Google’s collaboration net- work show that new employees^2 , have started collaborating more quickly and with more people as usage of Docs has grown. Over the last two years, the percentage of new employees who col- laborate on Docs per month has risen from 70% to 90% and the percentage who collaborate with more than two people has doubled from 35% to 70%. Moreover, the culture of collaboration has become more open, with public sharing within Google overtaking private sharing.
1 Introduction
Google Docs is a cloud productivity suite and it is designed to make collaboration easy and nat- ural, regardless of whether users are in the same or different locations, working at the same or dif- ferent times, or working on desktops or mobile devices. Edits and comments on the document are displayed as they are made, even if many peo- ple are simultaneously writing and commenting on or viewing the document. Comments enable real-time discussion and feedback on the docu-
ment, without changing the document itself. Au- thors are notified when a new comment is made or replied to, and authors can continue a con- versation by replying to the comment, or end the discussion by resolving it, or re-start the dis- cussion by re-opening a closed discussion stream. Because documents are stored in the cloud, users can access any document they own or that has been shared with them anywhere, any time and on any device. The question is whether this en- riched model of collaboration matters? There have been a few previous qualitative anal- yses of the effects of Google Docs on collabora- tion. For example, the review of Google Docs in [1] suggested that its features should improve col- laboration and productivity among college stu- dents. A technical report [2] from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia argued that Google Docs can overcome barriers to usability such as difficulty of installation and document version control and help resolve conflicts among co-authors of research papers. There has also been at least one rigorous study of the effect of Google Docs on collaboration. Blau and Caspi [3] ran a small experiment that was designed to compare collaboration on writing documents to merely sharing documents. In their experiment, 118 undergraduate students of the Open Uni- versity of Israel were randomized to one of five groups in which they shared their written assign- ments and received feedback from other students to varying degrees, ranging from keeping texts (^1) Full-time Google employees, excluding interns, part-times, vendors, etc (^2) Full-time employees who have joined Google for less than 90 days
2 COLLABORATION VISUALIZATION
private to allowing in-text suggestions or allow- ing in-text edits. None of the students had used Google Docs previously. The authors found that only students in the collaboration group per- ceived the quality of their final document to be higher after receiving feedback, and students in all groups thought that collaboration improves documents.
This paper takes a different approach, and looks for the effects of collaboration on a large, diverse organization with thousands of users over a much longer period of time. The first part of the paper describes some of the contexts in which Google Docs is used for collaboration, and the second part analyzes how collaboration has evolved over the last two years.
2 Collaboration Visualization
2.1 The Data
This section introduces a way to visualize the events during a collaboration and some simple statistics that summarize how widespread col- laboration using Google Docs is at Google. The graphics and metrics are based on the view, edit and comment actions of all full-time employees on tens of thousands of documents created in April 2013.
2.2 A Simple Example
To start, a document with three collaborators Adam (A), Bryant (B) and Catherine (C) is shown in Figure 1. The horizontal axis repre- sents time during the collaboration. The verti- cal axis is broken into three regions representing viewing, editing and commenting. Each contrib- utor is assigned a color. A box with the con- tributor’s color is drawn in any time interval in which the contributor was active, at a vertical position that indicates what the user was doing in that time interval. This allows us to see when contributors were active and how often they con- tributed to the document. Stacking the boxes al- lows us to show when contributors were acting at
the same time. Only time intervals in which at least one contributor was active are shown, and gaps in time that are shorter than a threshold are ignored. Gray vertical bars of fixed width are used to represent periods of no activity that are longer than the threshold. In this paper, the threshold is set to be 12 hours in all examples. In Figure 1, an interval represents an hour. Adam and Bryant edited the document together during the hour of 10 AM May 4 and Bryant edited alone in the following hour. The collab- oration paused for 8 days and resumed during the hour of 2 pm on May 12. Adam, Bryant and Catherine all viewed the document during that hour. Catherine commented on the document in the next hour. Altogether, the collaboration had two active sessions, with a pause of 8 days between them.
Figure 1: This figure shows an example of the collaboration visualization technique. Each colored block except the gray one represents an hour and the gray one represents a period of no activity. The Y axis is the number of users for each action type. This document has three contributors, each assigned a dif- ferent color.
Although we have used color to represent col- laborators here, we could instead use color to represent the locations of the collaborators, their organizations, or other variables. Examples with different colorings are given in Sections 2.5 and 2.6.
2.5 Commenting 2 COLLABORATION VISUALIZATION
Figure 2 shows the life of a design document cre- ated by engineers. The X axis is time in hours and the Y axis is the number of employees work- ing on the document for each action type. The document was mainly edited by three employ- ees, commented on by 18 employees and viewed by more than 50 employees from three major lo- cations. This document was completed within two weeks and viewed many times in the subse- quent month. Design documents are common at Google, and they typically have many contribu- tors.
Figure 3 shows the life of a weekly report doc- ument. Each bar represents a day and the Y axis is the number of employees who edited and viewed the document in a day. This document has the following submission rules:
- Wednesday, AM: Reminder for submissions
- Wednesday, PM: All teams submit updates
- Thursday, AM: Document is locked
The activities on the document exhibit a pro- nounced weekly pattern that mirrors the sub- mission rules. Weekly reports and meeting notes that are updated regularly are often used by em- ployees to keep everyone up-to-date as projects progress.
Figure 3: Collaboration on a weekly report. The X axis is time in days and the Y axis is the number of users for each action type. The activities exhibit a pronounced weekly pattern and reflect the submis- sion rules of the document.
Finally, Figure 4 shows the life of a document used in an interview. The X axis represents time in minutes. The document was prepared by a re- cruiter and then viewed by an engineer. At the beginning of the interview, the engineer edited the document and the candidate then wrote code in the document. The engineer was able to watch the candidate typing. At the end of the inter- view, the candidate’s access to the document was revoked so no further change could be made, and the document was reviewed by the engineer. Col- laborative editing allows the coding interview to take place remotely, and it is an integral part of interviews for software engineers at Google.
Figure 4: The activity on a phone interview docu- ment. The X axis is time in minutes and the Y axis is the number of users for each action type. The en- gineer was able to watch the candidate typing on the document during a remote interview.
2.5 Commenting
Commenting is common at Google. 30% of the documents created in April 2013 that are shared received comments within six months of creation. 57% of the employees who used Google Docs in April commented at least once in April, and 80% of the users who commented in April commented again in the following month.
2 COLLABORATION VISUALIZATION 2.6 Collaboration Across Sites
Figure 5: Commenting and editing on a design document. The X axis is time in hours and the Y axis is the number of user actions for each user location. There are four user actions, each assigned a different color. Timestamps are in Pacific time.
Figure 5 shows the life of a design document. Here color represents the type of user action (cre- ate a comment, reply to a comment, resolve a comment and edit the document), and the Y axis is split into two locations. The document was written by one engineering team and reviewed by another. The review team used commenting to raise many questions, which the engineering team resolved over the next few days. Collabora- tors were located in London, UK and Mountain View, California, with a nine hour time zone dif- ference, so the two teams were almost ”taking turns” working on the document (timestamps are in Pacific time). There are many similar communication patterns between engineers via commenting to ask questions, have discussions and suggest modifications.
2.6 Collaboration Across Sites
Employees use the Docs suite to collaborate with colleagues across the world, as Figure 6 shows. In that figure, employees working from nine lo- cations in eight countries across the globe con- tributed to a document that was written within a week. The document was either viewed or edited with gaps of less than 12 hours (the threshold for suppressing gaps in the plot) in the first seven days as people worked in their local timezones. After final changes were made to the document, it was reviewed by people in Dublin, Mountain View, and New York. Figure 7 shows one month of global collabora- tions for full-time employees using Google Docs. The blue dots show the locations of the employ- ees and a line connects two locations if a docu- ment is created in one location and viewed in the other. The warmer the color of the line, moving from green to red, the more documents shared between the two locations.
3 THE EVOLUTION OF COLLABORATION 2.7 Cross Device Work
2.7 Cross Device Work
The advantage of cloud-based software and stor- age is that a document can be accessed from any device. Figure 8 shows one employee’s visits to a document from multiple devices and locations. When the employee was in Paris, a desktop or laptop was used during working hours and a mo- bile device during non-working hours. Appar- ently, the employee traveled to Aix-En-Provence on August 18. On August 18 and the first part of August 19, the employee continued working on the same document from a mobile device while on the move.
Figure 8: Visits to a document by one user working on multiple devices and from multiple locations.
Not surprisingly, the pattern of working on desk- tops or laptops during working hours and on mo- bile devices out of business hours holds generally at Google, as Figure 9 shows. The day of week is shown on the X axis and hour of day in lo- cal time on the Y axis. Each pixel is colored according to the average number of employees working in Google Docs in a day of week and time of day slot, with brighter colors represent-
ing higher numbers. Pixel values are normalized within each plot separately. Desktop and lap- top usage of Google Docs peaks during conven- tional working hours (9:00 AM to 11:00 AM and 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM), while mobile device usage peaks during conventional commuting and other out-of-office hours (7:00 AM to 9:00 AM and 6: PM to 8:00 PM).
Figure 9: The average number of active users work- ing in Google Docs in each day of week and time of day slot. The X axis is day of the week and the Y axis is time of the day in local time. Desktop/Laptop usage peaks during working hours while mobile usage peaks at out-of-office working hours.
3 The Evolution of Collabora- tion
3.1 The Data
This section explores changes in the usage of Google Docs over time. Section 2 defined collab- orators as users who edited or commented on the same document and used logs of employee edit- ing, viewing and commenting actions to describe collaboration within Google. This section defines collaborators differently using metadata on doc- uments. Metadata is much less rich than the event history logs used in Section 2, but meta- data is retained for a much longer period of time. Document metadata includes the document cre- ation time and the last time that the document
3.2 Collaboration for New Employees 3 THE EVOLUTION OF COLLABORATION
was accessed, but no other information about its revision history. However, the metadata does in- clude the identification numbers for employees who have subscribed to the document, where a subscriber is anyone who has permission to view, edit or comment on a document and who has viewed the document at least once. Here we use metadata on documents, slides and spreadsheets.
We call two employees collaborators (or subscrip- tion collaborators to be clear) if one is a sub- scriber to a document owned by the other and has viewed the document at least once and the document has fewer than 20 subscribers. The owner of the document is said to have shared the document with the subscriber. The num- ber of subscribers is capped at 20 to avoid over- counting collaborators. The more subscribers the document has, the less likely it is that all the subscribers contributed to the document.
There is no timestamp for when the employee subscribed to the document in the metadata, so the exact time of the collaboration is not known. Instead, the document creation time, which is known, is taken to be the time of the collabora- tion. An analysis (not shown here) of the event history data discussed in Section 2 showed that most collaborators join a collaboration soon af- ter a document is created, so taking collabora- tion time to be document creation time is not unreasonable. To make this assumption even more tenable, we exclude documents for which the time of the last view, comment or edit is more than six months after the document was created. This section uses metadata on documents cre- ated between January 1, 2011 and March 31,
- We say that two employees had a subscrip- tion collaboration in July if they collaborated on a document that was created in July.
3.2 Collaboration for New Employees
Here we define the new employees for a given month to be all the employees who joined Google no more than 90 days before the beginning of the month and started using Google Docs in the given month. For example, employees called new in the month of January 2011 must have
joined Google no more than 90 days before Jan- uary 1, 2011 and used Google Docs in January
- Each month can include different employ- ees. New employees are said to share a document if they own a document that someone else sub- scribed to, whether or not the person subscribed to the document is a new employee. Similarly, a new employee is counted as a subscriber, regard- less of the tenure of the document creator. Figure 10 shows that collaboration among new employees has increased since 2011. Over the last two years, subscribing has risen from 55% to 85%, sharing has risen from 30% to 50%, and the fraction of users who either share or subscribe has risen from 70% to 90%. In other words, new employees are collaborating earlier in their ca- reer, so there is a faster ramp-up and easier ac- cess to collective knowledge.
Figure 10: This figure shows the percentage of new employees who share, subscribe to others’ documents and either share or subscribe in each one-month pe- riod over the last two years.
Not only do new employees start collaborating more often (as measured by subscription and sharing), they also collaborate with more people. Figure 11 shows the percentage of new employ- ees with at least a given number of collabora- tors by month. For example, the percentage of
3.4 Collaboration Between Organizations 3 THE EVOLUTION OF COLLABORATION
a given number of collaborators at several times in the past. There we see that more employees are sharing and subscribing over time because the fraction of the group with at least one sub- scription collaborator has increased from 80% to 95%. And the fraction of the group with at least three subscription collaborators has in- creased from 50% to 80%. It shows that many of the employees who used to have no or very few subscription collaborators have migrated to hav- ing multiple subscription collaborators. In other words, the distribution of number of subscrip- tion collaborators for employees who have been in Sales and Marketing since January 1, 2011 has shifted right over time, which implies that collab- oration in that group of employees has increased over time.
Finally, the number of documents shared by the employees who have been in Sales and Marketing at Google since January 1, 2011 has nearly dou- bled over the last two years. Figure 13 shows the number of shared documents normalized by the number of shared documents in January, 2011.
Figure 13: This figure shows the number of shared documents created by employees in Sales and Market- ing each month normalized by the number of shared documents in January 2011. The number has almost doubled over the last two years.
3.4 Collaboration Between Organiza-
tions
Collaboration between organizations has in- creased over time. To show that, we consider hundreds of employees in nine teams within the Sales and Marketing group and the Engineer- ing and Product Management group who joined Google before January 1, 2011, were still active in March 31, 2013 and used Google Docs in that period. Figure 14 represents the Engineering and Product Management employees as red dots and the Sales and Marketing employees as blue dots. The same dots are included in all three plots in Figure 14 because the employees included in this analysis do not change. A line connects two dots if the two employees had at least one sub- scription collaboration in the month shown. The denser the lines in the graph, the more collabora- tion, and the more lines connecting red and blue dots, the more collaboration between organiza- tions. Clearly, subscription collaboration has in- creased both within and across organizations in the past two years. Moreover, the network shows more pronounced communities (groups of con- nected dots) over time. Although there are nine individual teams, there seems to be only three major communities in the network. Figure 14 indicates that teams can work closely with each other even though they belong to separate de- partments.
We also sampled 187 teams within the Sales and Marketing group and the Engineering and Prod- uct Management group. Figure 15 represents teams in Engineering and Product Management as red dots and teams in Sales and Marketing as blue dots. Two dots are connected if the two teams had a least one subscription collaboration between their members in the month. Figure 15 shows that the collaboration between those teams has increased and the interaction between the two organizations has becomed stronger over the past two years.
3 THE EVOLUTION OF COLLABORATION 3.4 Collaboration Between Organizations
Figure 14: An example of collaboration across orga- nizations. Red dots represent employees in Engineer- ing and Product Management and blue dots represent employees in Sales and Marketing
Figure 15: An example of collaboration between teams. Red dots represent teams in Engineering and Product Management and blue dots represent teams in Sales and Marketing
REFERENCES REFERENCES
References
[1] Dan R. Herrick (2009). Google this!: using Google apps for collaboration and productiv- ity. Proceeding of the ACM SIGUCCS fall conference (pp. 55-64).
[2] Stijn Dekeyser, Richard Watson (2009). Ex- tending Google Docs to Collaborate on Re-
search Papers. Technical Report, The Uni- versity of Southern Queensland, Australia.
[3] Ina Blau, Avner Caspi (2009). What Type of Collaboration Helps? Psychological Own- ership, Perceived Learning and Outcome Quality of Collaboration Using Google Docs. Learning in the technological era: Proceed- ings of the Chais conference on instructional technologies research (pp. 48-55).
