The Evolution of Information Sharing with Valeri Colón at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hey, it's Mitch Ashley here in Barcelona at Atlassian, team 24 Europe. I have a pleasure being joined by Valerie Cologne, PhD who works with the company Con Connect, sorry.

Connect Centric. Excuse me. Welcome Valerie.

Thank you for having me today. Be chatting with you. Tell us about you and also Connect centric kind of work that you do.

So at Connect Centric, I'm a strategic growth leader. I am a learning scientist, so I work a lot in documentation training, how knowledge moves throughout your system, throughout different people sharing different concepts. And I connected well with Atlassian and their products and ecosystem as a content creator, a community leader, and an instructor for Atlassian intelligence and robo.

So I have very many hats. So you can wow. Subtitle me any which way you'd like.

It's depending on what I'm doing in the day. It's, it's exciting work. The world of it is changing rapidly and I gotta go along with the ride and help people, guide people along the way.

Interesting. So you have to have some connection and belief in the products that you're training people on. I, I think, what is it about why Atlassian?

Why, why was that a specialty for you? So I connected well with Atlassian because of their values, what they believe in, in knowledge sharing. So it's not just products, but it's products that solve specific problems and they focus around teamwork and how we're changing the dynamics of how teams function and how knowledge moves.

And in the IT industry, I like to categorize various different groups of partnerships that we have. And we have products that are very user friendly, very open to conversations and feedback with their end users. That is Atlassian.

Atlassian has those conversations and builds products based on demand. When people ask for different features, they take that into consideration and they incorporate it into their presentations, their products, and they say, Hey, we, we built you this really nice cool thing. There are also those larger players in the game that completely overlook the user and all about themselves and their inward focus.

And for me as a partner manager, as someone who works very closely with brands, it's very difficult for me to provide that a solution to others because if I can't engage with that product, with the people that work on it and build it, I can't understand your vision for how this product is going to solve user problems. And that's a challenge that I have is connecting with those larger brands and making them more approachable. Because the more approachable you are as a brand, the easier it is to sell the concept to the end users.

And so that is what attracted me to Atlassian. They're just very friendly. You can see it on their vibe, on their conference floor.

Yeah, you can talk to any leader at any level of the organization and they'll have a conversation with you. There's no filter there. Talk a little bit about how has, how we find and consume and use knowledge, information changed in your career.

Oh my goodness. I love this concept. That's big question, right?

It is a big question and I'll try not to philosophize it too much, but how we change and exchange information over time has changed drastically. So way back when early humans did a lot in orality, every piece of information was changed from person to person. And the challenge with that, it's playing a game of telephone.

So I tell you my story, oral tradition, you pass my story on, that's why we had songs to help us remember those stories. Then when technology came along, the printing press, now we can write things down and it can last from place upon time. As long as that p piece of paper existed, then the internet came along and took things out of time and space.

So you no longer had to pass this book around, but you have it all in your electronic device. But now with ai, it's time, it's place, and it's really speed that we're looking at how it's changed the world. It's making the information quicker and faster to achieve and to connect, to ask your questions, to easily use natural language processing, to ask it in plain language for an answer to a thing.

And it references all of this information and pops it back out to a answer back out to you. And yes, that takes a lot of computational power and we have an energy sort of problem when it comes to ai, but it's really a technological advance on how knowledge is transmitted quickly. It's gonna change a lot of how we learn, how we pass on information through time.

Whose idea gets to be the living throughout the space when AI and machine learning is making the decisions on what information is given to the receiver? It's interesting. Tell me if you think my premise, is it all on track you with, with digital technology, internet, et cetera?

The volume of information available to us to consume is grown so much, you know, exponentially. Um, so we're looking for smaller bits of information to be able to, to manage and consume. But it seems like when we squeeze that down to uh, smaller bits of information, we lose context, right?

Because we can't consume all the information around. It seems like that's an area where AI can help out, especially generative ai because the more context you give it, the better information it provides back to you. Is there any any, yeah, anything to my idea?

Or is it kind Of, I like your idea as a content creator. So I go around these conferences and I interview various different people and then I smash the information into a manageable bite of a one minute or two minute clip. And it's really a drop in a sea of knowledge, right?

Just a small drop. And in order to get my content, my information, my resources, you really have to know my name, you have to search my channel, you gotta follow with ai, you get to hone out. Um, there's a great book out there, signal in the noise.

So it takes out all the noise and it gets you to be able to focus specifically on the information that is relevant to you and your use case. That's why the ecosystem, Atlassian's ecosystem is so interesting because AI usually attaches to an LLMA large language model and there are a thousand different ais out there that have a thousand different LLMs. But in this ecosystem you have all of the sea of information that you use as a business.

Every document that anyone has ever created on your team and it analy analyzes that puts it in the chart and you're trying to find that one droplet of information and its context and you ask your question and sometimes we've gotta get better at asking those questions. But you ask the question, it gets you your droplet back and it gives you that context so it tells you where the sources came from and that's valuable. There's getting general information, like your chat to UPT gets you general information on the web, but when you can do that and hone in on your specific products and how your, your organization specifically uses information in your silos, it creates connectivity, connect, centric, all about connectivity, the human in that it process, it just elevates your ability to work and to do meaningful work.

Without all that noise, What do you, what do you think Atlassian's getting right about their approach with ai? Maybe what, what aren't they getting right? If there's anything, I think Atlassian is getting the ecosystem right?

So we have so many products out there. There's an app for everything. There's also an AI for everything.

And you can get bogged down after app, after app after app. Like do you want me to really download another app on my phone? I've got how many chat bots would you like?

I've got one for you, right? Yes. And then I have to remember which chat box and if we're working together, oh, are you using that chat box or are you using this chat box?

Try this one. Atlassian gets it right on having the ecosystem that talks to each other like I don't, JIRA and Confluence and JSM all work together as one unit and they can standalone and work individually. The fact that they made that API of, if you are a person who loves to download your 2 million apps, we have an API that can talk to those 2 million apps.

But I like the fact that the ecosystem knows itself very well. So I can, when they made their announcements today, I was like, Ooh, so many marketplace providers have now gone obsolete because their focus apps puts a lot of our plugins out of out of work because they, there's now a product that they can purchase that is native to the ecosystem that is going to work, right? And have a support system behind it if it doesn't work right?

What I think it could be doing better is understanding and clarifying the identity of their AI versus others. And I think that's a challenge that the industry has in general is there's 2000 AI apps out there. How are people actually using them in their workflow?

And it is an ongoing conversation. As a creator and a community leader, I have a lot of conversations with Atlassian of, we're phrasing it this way. Can we phrase it this way?

I know this sounds really cool to say and it sounds super smart, but when AI is a new thing to a lot of people and it can be scary and I had someone say the boogieman of AI today, when there's the boogieman of AI out there, we really need to keep the language and the messaging simple. So people give it a try and once they give it a try, they're gonna be very pleasantly surprised. And so form those identities, make them simple identities so that people can grab onto 'em, use them and see, oh wow, RO can do a lot.

Prompting the ability to ask a nice clear question, people over or underestimate it all the time. But if you can ask the right questions, which you're a pro at, you can get so much information from your AI and valuable quality information. So some of the challenges we get is dirty data, but with the right ai, it could help you keep your data clean.

So some things to consider Compliment like that we're colleagues for life. So thank you very much. I Love it.

Um, there's a lot of questions about can we, how can we use the output of ai? Can we claim it as a part of our own work? Can you copyright it?

There's lot, so many questions still unanswered. Um, you know, Atlassian is kind of like, that'll figure that it'll figure itself out. We're gonna give you back your data, your information, you know, through the AI agent largely supposed to looking up other stuff.

It seems like that's helped kind of, I dunno if avoid, but make it not as relevant as far as how they're using ai. You, would you agree with that? I would agree with that.

I think intellectual property and ai, especially when you're building, um, agents themselves is very interesting. Like if a marketplace app provider creates an agent, is it their agent or is it Atlassian's agent? Now I know the official response, and I'm not gonna say it here because I that should come directly from someone that works at Atlassian, but working in intellectual property and copywriting in my past, I understand everyone's concern.

And yes, it will work out. But I also wanna encourage people to be knowledgeable about intellectual property and the amount of effort you dedicate to making any type of custom agent within someone else's platform. So if you're spending tons amounts of your resources making this specialized agent in robo, consider if that's something that you really wanna do, knowing that, that that agent can only be used on that platform unless you make it in Forge or some kind of code writing engine like GitHub, something that you own that co code, right?

Once you own that code, then you do have to go into the copyright procedures and the patenting procedures of whatever nation you claim. And then this is not legal advice, but we live in a global workplace, so be knowledgeable about the laws and policies of other countries as well because nothing stays in the land in which it's created anymore. Very true.

And Copyright does change and copyright violations change abroad and, and some violations, yes, it's technically illegal, but there's no way to recoup any injury or funds from that. So keep those in mind. Like what information do you share?

Do you share it all? Do you share a portion of it? I got it.

Um, in a different career, I got into a dispute between two countries that had copyright and who's gonna, who's gonna own it? How is the information gonna? And it gets very detailed and tiring.

And you don't wanna be involved in any that, that's Fast. Yeah. Yes.

Well, so they're, they're gonna turn, turn off my power here and cut me off here in a minute. There's this guy, Andy, behind the microphone. He's really tough on me, but he's a good guy at heart.

I like him. Uh, what are you hoping to see for the rest of the conference? Woo.

So if I had some favorites, I really want to dig into more of the language functionalities and tools. They get overlooked all the time, but we're in teams 24 Barcelona. We have people from various different countries coming together in one spot.

I wanna see localization tools that bridge the gap between different languages and countries so we can all share our innovations globally. I also want to learn more about focus. So Atlassian announced this new product called Focus that is going to be huge when it comes to change management.

Everybody hates their change management boards where they have to get this long little process to do any type of deployment because all of their systems have different dependencies. So I think focus could be used leverage for that use case. Don't tell Atlassian that they don't know it yet.

Okay. And then second, agile at scale. It's very big in the US and European countries.

Not everywhere though Agile we like to think is everywhere. It's not really everywhere, but everyone does have to scale to different sizes of their organizations. We all can't work in small little shops.

And I think focus is gonna allow people to sh scale their knowledge, their idea, and their goals and get all in one page, which is gonna be huge. So I'm gonna learn more about that. Very good.

Enjoy the rest of the conference. Thanks for sharing with our audience. Absolutely.

Area of expertise and, and work that you do. Dr. Dr.

Valerie Colon. Doctor, correct me. Uh, my, my, my stepson is Dr.

Bji. Oh, that's his nickname. So he likes that.

Great. It's nice talking with you Valerie. And, uh, enjoy the rest of the conference.

Thanks for being on, uh, text Wrong TV with us today. Absolutely. Thank you for having me and I hope you get to rest your voice later and enjoy the conference.

It's been, uh, a lot of fun keeping that voice going. So too many talks, too much talking. So thank you much.

We'll be right back. We've got another, uh, interview coming right up. I won't tell you the topic yet, but you'll hear in just a minute.