Notes from "Creating a Collaboration Strategy: Aligning Solutions to Business Needs", May 18

Today I attended CollaborationLoop's Web seminar entitled Creating a Collaboration Strategy: Aligning Solutions to Business Needs. Eric Krapf from BCR was the moderator, and Larry Cannell, IT Researcher at Ford Motor Company, was the presenter. Note that the Web seminar was not a case study on Ford Motor Company, nor was Larry speaking as an official spokesperson for Ford.

Collaboration Tools are Proliferating
Larry began by saying that collaboration tools are proliferating within companies ... team workspaces, web conferences, email, wikis, P2P, audio conferencing, instant messaging, RSS newsreaders, online discussions, and many more. Contributors to this proliferation are, firstly, the IT department, and secondly, end users that bring tools into the enterprise without IT's help. Usually these are Internet-based services (eg, a Socialtext wiki, Instant Mesasging via AOL), or open-source applications that they download and install themselves. IT is charged with bringing order to the suite of tools, but the tools don't integrate too well. Also, within a given company, there are multiple competing tools that have overlapping functionality. The lack of integration makes it difficult to enable collaboration across the organization.

Is Technology-Aligned Classification Appropriate?
How should we classify the tools? Do we use traditional IT terms, eg, messaging, VoIP, real-time and non-real time, file sharing? This classification is okay for IT understanding how to manage the tools, but it doesn't work for end users because the terms don't align with the problems they face on a day-to-day basis. Another issue is how to align a technology within the classification to the actual business problem faced by a team? Larry's proposal: to use a new approach to collaboration tools, that is understandable by both IT and the end users. The IT department needs to view itself as the owner of the application, not just the operator.

Collaboration in the Business Process
Since collaboration tools are still immature, we need a framework that links business goals to the technology that is deployed. Larry's proposed framework is shown in the diagram below. The essential idea is that business goals and objectives drive a series of business processes, which generate tasks for people to do. Collaboration makes sense within the "Work Processes" box, where the work actually gets done. In addition, collaboration tools can also be used within a specific business process, eg, to coordinate work between people.

Technology for Team Collaboration
In terms of team collaboration, Larry sees five key technologies: email, online meetings, team workspaces, instant messaging, and calendaring. Presence and identity management provide foundational services that should work across all five key technologies. In drilling down, Larry further discussed:

• Online Meetings. Involves the sharing of voice (via the telephone or VoIP), and Web or data conferencing (for application sharing ... which is absolutely critical).


• Team Workspaces. This is a broad area, and there is a lot of variety in delivered products. Larry says that team workspaces should help a team to get their work done, not just to share files. Key capabilities include tracking issues, having discussions, and tracking tasks that team members are working on. A recent development is the tight integration of project management capabilities within a team workspace.


• Instant Messaging. There is a lot of integration taking place between IM and online meetings, to enable seamless escalation from one to the other.

These three tools are key and essential, as is reflected by the strategies from Microsoft (Live Meeting, SharePoint, and Live Communications Server) and IBM (Web Conferencing, QuickPlace, Workplace Collaboration Services, Sametime, etc).

Technology for Communities of Interest or Practice
With respect to communities of interest or practice, people collate around an area of interest. A key difference between teams is the lack of a tight focus on actual deliverables and tasks. The community provides a way for people with similar interests and practices to ramp up their skills for then applying those skills within teams. Key technologies are email discussion lists, self-managed web pages, blogs, wikis, and expertise locators (see my Pillar 7). The expert locator enables finding other people who could contribute to the community, and perhaps even pull them into the community.

Common Technology Requirements for Both Teams and Communities
Tools and technologies for both team collaboration and communities share four key characteristics: ease of use, self-management, global access (see my Pillar 2), and extensible (for integrating with information stored in other enterprise applications).

Next Actions for IT
Larry concluded with 6 things for IT to do:

1. Start small, learn what works, and become the expert on collaboration for your company. At a minimum, start using the tools yourself!


2. Build a network of influential end users, as soon as possible. This won't be too tough, because end users will seek out help from IT.


3. Test collaboration tools in the real world, eg, work with end users as they test the tools within their work processes.


4. Get IT operations involved early, eg, infrastructure support, help desk, etc.


5. Think about how to deploy the technology for organization-wide usage, so as to minimize barriers to adoption.


6. Work with end users to sustain growth of the platforms.

More Information
Larry covered more material than I've written about here, including contextual collaboration (collaboration within an application, within a platform, or within a workspace), and structuring work through repeatable processes (using collaboration tools instead of email for various processes). The session was recorded, so ensure that you get it to listen to the entire thing.

Interwise hosted the session, and its technology worked fine. The pre-event reminders again flowed well, ensuring that I didn't forget! Audio was streamed over the Internet, and it was perfectly adequate about 95% of the time. Interwise recorded the session, and it will be available for offline access from tomorrow.

Attendee Participation
The number of attendees was fairly consistent over the duration of Larry's presentation, meaning he held interest well. Here's the stats:
05 mins ... 45 people
10 mins ... 54 people
15 mins ... 54 people
20 mins ... 52 people
25 mins ... 54 people
30 mins ... 54 people
35 mins ... 55 people
40 mins ... 53 people
45 mins ... 54 people
50 mins ... 55 people

Comments

[Graham Chastney (oak-grove)]

That is a great post. It's great to see someone aksing the question "so what is this technology for?" rather than driving the "technology for technology's sake" argument.