Managers Guide: Measuring Collaborative IT
Managers Guide: Measuring Collaborative IT
Challenge
Shown to improve productivity, collaboration tools are proliferating. Problem
is, companies may soon have more collaborative tools than they know what to
do with.
As the old Irish proverb goes, "Many hands make light work." That, of course,
is the idea behind every collaborative technology, from two-man saws to Web
conferencing. Only recently, however, has the variety of networked software
aimed at corporations reached the point where it can be taken seriously.
Gartner Inc. defines collaboration as "a process, supported by a wide variety
of technologies, that occurs when two or more people take actions in pursuit
of shared high-level goals." Jared Spataro, director of collaborative solutions
with Open Text Corp., a Waterloo, Ont.-based vendor of enterprise content-management
software, says, "Business is the intersection of people, process and information.
Collaboration is nothing more or less than making sure people are tightly integrated
at that intersection." Those definitions are true enough, but may try too hard.
Simply put, collaborative software can be useful any time an exchange of information
is needed for people to work well together. It can improve coordination between
geographically remote sites, streamline specific processes and increase productivity.
"At the end of the day, collaboration is a productivity play," says Bruce Richardson,
a senior vice president with Boston-based AMR Research Inc. Superior collaboration
can translate into faster time to market, shorter cycle times, improved customer
responsiveness, regulatory compliance or any number of other corporate imperatives.
Collaboration tools can also eliminate delays common with other modes of communication,
such as the phone and e-mail, and create a place—say a Web site or an online
conference room—for people to work together toward common goals. Or, to
look at it another way, now that economists have unequivocally linked IT to
individual productivity growth, corporations want to extend those productivity
gains to groups and even entire organizations.
Take Chicago-based Grant Thornton LLP, a firm that provides accounting and business
advisory services to midsize companies. Four years ago, Grant Thornton began
exploring more cost-effective and efficient ways to keep its roster of 3,500
professionals, mostly consultants and accountants, up to date on frequently
changing regulatory legislation, and evolving accounting and tax assurance practices.
The goal: to improve the quality of work for clients, sure, but also to meet
a licensing requirement to provide a certain number of continuing-education
hours to its staff each year. This ongoing education requirement, as well as
volatile business travel costs, prompted CIO David Holyoak to investigate Web-based
alternatives to live training sessions that had been conducted all over the
country. After evaluating a dozen vendors, Holyoak went with Lexington, Mass.-based
Centra Software Inc.s Web-based learning software.
Today, Grant Thornton uses Centra for all manner of online meetings. It has
adapted its training content for online presentation and added interactive features
such as chat (which allows for more give-and-take among training participants
and trainers) and polling (which lets the firm quickly "take the pulse" of a
group of participants to see how well the information is being received and
understood). Holyoak acknowledges that while the cost savings and efficiency
are clear, effectiveness is more difficult to measure. "When users are sitting
in a remote location, we sometimes wonder: Are they paying attention? Are they
multitasking? We know the training is good, but is it being effectively received?"
Holyoak also recalls a conundrum faced by the firm in November 2001, when many
partners were reluctant to travel in the wake of Sept. 11, yet the firm was
obligated by its partnership agreement to hold an annual meeting so that partners
could tend to issues facing the company in the coming year. Grant Thornton held
the two-day meeting via Centras Web-conferencing software, thus satisfying
its obligation while respecting partners concerns.
For many CIOs, the key challenge now, and for the next two years, will be to
get a better handle on their collaboration assets. Says David Coleman, managing
director of Collaborative Strategies LLC, a San Francisco-based consultancy:
"The marketing guy brings in WebEx while the head of sales is using Open Text.
Multiply that by dozens of groups and the complexity quickly becomes unwieldy,
especially for the CIO ultimately charged with overseeing it all." CIOs should
start by taking inventory of the tools that have been brought in by individual
groups or business units over the past several years. Next, they need to understand
exactly how each of those tools is being used, and by whom. This is also a good
time for CIOs to look for business processes that might benefit from collaboration
technology, just as Holyoak did with Centra at Grant Thornton.
Check out eWEEK.coms VOIP & Telephony Center at http://voip.eweek.com for the latest news, views and analysis on voice over IP and telephony.
Ask your CFO:
How much could we save on travel and phone costs through better collaboration?
Ask your business unit managers:
Ask your COO:
The Market
The market
The market is at once expanding and maturing, consolidating and converging.
Stay focused on your own strategy.
The market for collaboration technologies is really two markets, at least for
now. The first involves synchronous, or real-time, tools (such as Web conferencing),
which typically bring people together over the Internet for a particular event—say
a strategic planning session, sales training or a project kickoff meeting—and
provide all of the communication tools necessary to support the event. The other
market includes whats known as asynchronous tools. These include electronic
workspaces that allow people to share documents, files, project plans, calendars
and the like in the same online place, though not necessarily at the same time.
Bulletin boards and blogs, which allow people to share thoughts and ideas on
a particular topic over the Web, are further examples of asynchronous collaboration
tools.
Over time, these two categories of tools will converge onto a single platform
and will be served up in different flavors by a handful of vendors. Some of
this convergence will take place through consolidation. Smaller vendors with
a particular specialty, a two-year-plus development lead and a loyal user base
will prove attractive targets for large vendors looking to kick-start their
collaboration play or fill out a platform or suite.
Meanwhile, a number of previously separate markets, such as those for document-
and content-management systems or project lifecycle management systems, are
now being recast as collaboration technologies. Vendors within these multitudinous
segments bring their respective biases to the table. As Mark Twain said, "To
a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." While vendors such as Open
Text and FileNet Corp. view collaboration tools as a opportunity for pounding
on document-management issues, Oracle Corp. takes a "big picture" approach,
emphasizing the importance of databases in collaboration. Enterprise application
vendors view collaboration as a way to hammer out exceptions and problems that
arise from otherwise automated production processes. CIOs, faced with a growing
blitz of collaboration marketing hype, need to be ever mindful of these biases
and stay focused on bringing in only those collaboration tools that satisfy
the needs of specific groups of users and business processes.
Barclays Global Investors, a San Francisco-based asset-management firm, is typical
of organizations trying to strike the right balance today. In 2001, BGI began
using the CollabNet Inc. environment, a collaborative software development platform
from Brisbane, Calif.-based CollabNet Inc., in order to bring together IT developers,
project managers and business users from around the world. CollabNet helps BGI
manage its extensive internal software development effort, from defining requirements
to version control of source code to quality assurance and change management.
According to Paul Stevens, global head of technology for BGI, "Having a collaborative
platform for all of our stakeholders has sped up software development. It improves
communication. It improves understanding." BGI also uses other collaboration
mechanisms, including Intraspect (since acquired by Vignette Corp.), which allows
users to set up online workspaces for sharing and storing documents and other
unstructured data.
For now, however, these various tools, all of which can be used by a single
employee, remain separate and unintegrated. At some point, Stevens would like
to link these different collaborative spaces together, but hes not just sitting
around and waiting for that to happen. "We began using these tools and standardizing
on a small number for now. The convergence will be easier because of the knowledge
weve gained along the way." Meanwhile, BGI users are left to sort out when
to go where for what, with some help from IT. "We have to clarify what we put
where and train people to use different tools for different situations," says
Stevens.
Ask your enterprise architect:
Ask your current vendors:
Ask potential vendors:
The People
People
Worst-case scenario: You build it and nobody comes. Take it slow and sell
the technology to all prospective users.
Says Collaborative Strategies Coleman: "Eighty percent of collaboration issues
are people related. CIOs need to understand that. Collaboration is a behavior.
The CIO can provide the infrastructure and the applications, but it is the behavioral
changes that will present the most challenges."
Honeywell International Inc. tackled those challenges head-on two years ago,
when it began looking around for technology to help groups of employees collaborate
more effectively on specific projects across time zones and geographic locations.
The company chose Microsoft Corp.s SharePoint, which allows employees to create
Web sites, invite coworkers to join discussions and post documents. According
to Ramon Baez, CIO and vice president of IT for Honeywells $8 billion automation
and control solutions group, the groups 27,000 information workers—located
in 700 offices around the world—now rely on SharePoint for collaboration.
The marketing department uses SharePoint in order to work outside the firewall
with customers, while the global IT team uses it to coordinate its technology
efforts. While Microsoft may tout the fact that users dont need to involve
IT staff to set up a SharePoint site, Baez recognized that without an awareness
campaign, followed by education and training, few would use the new system.
For starters, Honeywell chose the name "TeamRooms" because it sounded friendly.
"We thought it would make more intuitive sense to business people," says Baez.
The company generated interest in TeamRooms by sending out an internal "press
release" that included a call to action: "Click on this link to start your own
TeamRoom today." The sign-up process was simple, and the browser-based interface
provided a familiar look and feel for anyone using a Web browser. Honeywell
also set up a special hotline with people who were knowledgeable about TeamRooms.
The effort paid off: Within a month, Honeywell employees created more than 500
TeamRooms. Today, roughly 2,000 are in use.
So far, most CIOs are taking a measured approach to new collaboration tools.
This helps mitigate the risks involved in deploying an expensive piece of software,
and gives users plenty of time to adjust their behavior. "Its all about graceful
escalation," says Spataro of Open Text. "You might start by giving the user
IM," he says. "Then move into shared workspaces, followed by Web conferencing
and so forth."
Thats especially true where older workers are involved. Despite the overall
success of TeamRooms at Honeywell, Baez acknowledges that not all information
workers approach them with enthusiasm. "People who arent tech savvy arent
going to go to a TeamRoom. But they are a dying breed. You have young people
coming into the workforce now who grew up with computers in their bedrooms.
Computers are second-nature to them." Collaboration tools may be only the most
recent example of a technology that highlights the workforce generation gap,
but CIOs and business managers alike would still do well to adopt the "graceful
escalation" approach, allowing workers the option of participating in trials
with new tools.
Ask your HR department:
Ask your IT staff:
Ask your CFO:
The Technology
Technology
Dont wait to pick the low-hanging fruit.
Most experts believe that collaborative technologies will have settled into
a new state of equilibrium within three years, with more clearly defined segments,
more mature infrastructure, and tools and applications that deliver more measurable
value. Jim Lundy, a Gartner vice president, predicts that a few dominant suite
vendors will provide the overall platform both for popular collaboration features
such as Web conferencing and workspaces, and for newer technologies such as
presence engines, which let people know instantaneously who is reachable via
instant messaging. In turn, those common platforms will be useful to in-house
developers and to enterprise-application and other software vendors, who will
embed collaborative features into their industry- or process-specific applications.
Convergence will continue along multiple lines, according to Coleman at Collaborative
Strategies. First, synchronous and asynchronous tools will be more commonly
combined within an application or through a portal. Although workers might rely
on workspaces much like Honeywells TeamRooms for sharing documents and files
asynchronously, they may occasionally wish to chat while there. Workspaces that
include presence engines (e.g., Beverly, Mass.-based Groove Networks Inc.) permit
that today. In fact, presence engines are emerging as a powerful way to consistently
embed time-saving, real-time communications into otherwise asynchronous or automated
business applications, from logistics management to sales and customer service,
notes Jeanette Barlow, market manager for IBM workplace client technology.
Audio, video and data conferencing will also continue to converge. Many more
organizations will rely on in-house Web-conferencing systems, drawn by the control
and cost savings they will afford compared to hosted models, especially once
these systems support Voice over IP as a standard feature. VoIP may be the development
that causes companies to go from piloting Web-conferencing systems to fully
deploying them. Says Jim Freeze, a senior vice president at Centra: "Today,
the majority of Web conferencing uses IP to control sessions, push slides and
keep everyone in sync. But the audio conference is a separate hookup. Over time,
most of the audio will take place over IP. The cost savings will be enormous."
Meanwhile, CIOs will be faced with some difficult decisions as they work to
rationalize their current collaboration tools while building a more useful and
standardized platform for the future. Gytis Barzdukis, director of office system
product management at Microsoft, thinks individual productivity may suffer,
at least in the short term. "Personal productivity has been improved through
technology. Now were looking at team and organizational productivity."
Ask your IT staff:
Ask your business managers:
Ask your telecom staff:
Karen S. Henrie has been researching, analyzing and writing about information technology and business strategy for nearly 20 years.
