The Importance of Collaboration

A Roundtable with Novell, Netop and EMC

What are the main drivers behind collaborative application growth? And how can these technologies help companies prepare for and navigate the current financial downturn? Business Management asks a panel of experts for their opinions.

“As users see new ways to collaborate and share information with friends and relatives, they also see ways that the same technology can be leveraged to advantage in the workplace.”
-Whitney Tidmarsh, VP of Marketing, Content Management and Archiving Division, EMC

THE PANEL:
Kent Erikson, SVP and General Manager for Workgroup Solutions, Novell
Kent Madsen, CTO, Netop
Whitney Tidmarsh, VP of Marketing, Content Management and Archiving Division, EMC

BM. According to a recent IDC report, collaborative applications were in great demand in 2007, generating US$6.3 billion in worldwide revenue. What were the main drivers behind this market growth?
KE. The convergence of business, technical and economic trends has driven the adoption of new collaboration systems in a flat world. Businesses increasingly rely on networked teams to produce their knowledge products: designs, plans, forecasts, analyses, marketing materials and more. Networked teams also cross organizational boundaries, with members coming from different departments and companies. This sort of mass collaboration requires a robust set of complementary collaborative tools.

In technology, faster and more affordable network connections make it possible for people to work together and collaborate. New kinds of software have emerged in this networked world as well. Concepts from consumer social networking tools are making their way into the enterprise, thus driving rapid innovation in collaboration technology. And in a more competitive global economy, companies have to innovate more quickly, produce more effectively and deliver value more concretely than ever before. Collaboration – the way users create, share, discuss and manage information – is key to this process.

KM. In today’s global economy there is an increasing importance of horizontal, collaborative relationships between employees, customers and business partners on a global scale. CEO’s have increasingly realized that the ability to communicate and collaborate with people inside and outside the business is becoming a key business differentiator in a fast growing global business environment.

Secondly, we have seen multiple proprietary multimedia applications converging into standardized suites that work seamlessly with enterprise applications, that support requirements for ‘online’ and ‘real-time’ business processes and increase employee productivity.

The new generation of Internet centric employees, is putting immense pressure on their organizations through the utilization of applications like Messenger, AOL, Yahoo and Skype as part of their native collaborative behavior to overcome a number of challenges. This individual deployment of rogue or unauthorized stand-alone product have increasingly become a major security problem for many organizations and forced responsible IT managers to deliver secure collaboration tools that are in line with newly formed IT communication strategies.

WT . Organizations are continually looking for new ways to be more efficient, deliver new products and services to market faster and always be more competitive. These are business behaviors that have existed since time began but until recently, the technology that was available for use has been limited to services such as email, file sharing and content management services. Combined with the growth of globalization and widely dispersed talent, and restrictions in travel spend, technology is needed more than ever to enable global collaboration.

Recent modernization and evolution of technology has made this a new world digitally. As users see new ways to collaborate and share information with friends and relatives, they also see ways that the same technology can be leveraged to advantage in the workplace. So we find ourselves at a period of confluence where new, flexible, browser-based tools such as wikis, blogs and team workspaces are available to address those traditional business needs to do things faster and more efficiently. To add additional incentive, this is now even more critical to organizations faced with financial belt-tightening in the face of new global economic challenges.

BM. In what ways are companies utilizing Web 2.0 tools and technologies to improve both internal collaboration between users, systems and departments, and external collaboration with suppliers, partners and customers?
KM. Web 2.0 technology is a business paradigm shift that will transform the global economy. Web 2.0 technology will eliminate previous barriers for communications and will enable true global collaboration.

We see BtC consultancy, where business models are based on Web 2.0 technology to support direct collaboration from the web. We see service organizations having the ability to offer their services exclusively on the web, where all data, voice and video is provided from a single transparent interface – basically making the consultant present at anytime that is convenient for the consumer.

We see BtB collaboration, where long-distance business partners from different continents collaborate on supply-chain requirements and agreements, to meet common business needs.

WT. Web 2.0 tools by themselves can provide a valuable way of quickly sharing and creating information. But when used alone, they only solve half of the problem. Companies can obtain the optimum benefit by utilizing these creative tools within an infrastructure that provides a secure, self-managed team workspace model. In this way, all the important tools and data are in one place, there is one location from which to co-ordinate all aspects of a team project and everything is securely managed in a way that addresses an IT departments needs for information governance.

These team or community workspaces are flexible enough to allow project co-ordinators to self-administer, lessening the burden on IT. They can be used in a mix of both internally and externally facing modes to meet a wide variety of business needs that involve any combination of employees, partners, suppliers and customers.

KE. Many of our customers have implemented company-wide collaborative forums to help employees share knowledge. These are also called Communities of Practice, and they're all about turning know-how into savings. If someone in North America has learned how to fix a braking problem on earth-moving equipment, for example, everyone around the world can benefit from that knowledge.

Our customers are also using workspaces – both within and across organizations – to manage projects more effectively. Workspaces provide a single place to store work in progress, team calendars and action lists. They also deliver Web 2.0 tools that facilitate team productivity. Blogs, for example, facilitate reports on project status and – combined with RSS readers – provide an excellent way for project sponsors to track progress. And wikis improve information sharing within and between teams while reducing document production and e-mail volume. Deployed within a single department or across multiple organizations, shared workspaces make it much easier to collaborate throughout the value chain.

BM. As these new Web 2.0 tools are introduced within an organization, what problems and issues typically arise and how would you recommend avoiding them in order to have the most successful implementation?
WT. For any organization, a ramification of using these new tools is that they bring their own unique challenges. The most common problem is the proliferation of information silos that these tools can create.

So, when considering the implementation of Web 2.0 tools, the first is to think long-term – what is my environment going to look like over time? Then think about the types of departments and individuals that you want to roll this out to. Consider security, the need for retention policies and define those up-front before you roll the tool out to end users.

Perhaps most important is a model for organizing and securing information meaningfully. A red flag for a lot of companies is the inability to search for, find and discover information. The EMC solution for distribution of Web 2.0 services is to ensure that companies have the infrastructure to manage and support these new tools while managing the content created with them – all in an environment that can support a company’s security and intellectual property protection requirements. These Web 2.0 tools then enhance the ability to reach out to partners, suppliers and customers easily and therefore become more productive and competitive.

KE. Organizations need to decide how they want to manage increased collaboration and networked teams. How much of it do they want, how do they want to control it, and how can they ensure security without stifling the results? We've seen our customers thinking through their policies for these new forms of collaboration and leveraging identity management technologies to produce the results they want.

It's also important to think about user adoption. How does an organization help users evolve their current work practices to more effective ones? The answer is usually that once you get critical information in these new tools, even the most conservative users make the change in order to access it.

Finally, the best long-term way to ensure successful implementation of collaboration tools is to participate directly in the development process. Open architectures that invite the contributions of a broad community of partners and customers not only produce the most rapid innovation; they ensure that the best ideas are implemented and shared by all.

KM. Company security and compliance is a major concern with Web 2.0 technology. Whether it is blogging, chat or collaboration, many of the more traditional control functions implemented by organizations are easily circumnavigated.

In the past companies placed quite stringent controls on official lines of communication, before it was passed along to the recipient or outside world. But, with Web 2.0 tools the ability to control and manage the flow of information can become more problematic. The need for revised communication and security strategies must be emphasized to avoid these types of scenarios, where company confidential information and other compliance requirements are more at risk.

Another major factor that must be addressed is the behavioral changes required to adopt new leapfrogging technology. It is essential to understand and implement transformation projects – which are clearly anchored at top-level management. If management doesn’t use the tool themselves – the organization will not use it.

BM. And given the current economic climate, how can such technologies and a greater focus on facilitating information-sharing help companies prepare for – and successfully navigate – the downturn?
KE. Current economic conditions create uncertainty, but managers in every economic climate know that they need to keep an eye on their markets and find ways to do more with less. Next-generation collaboration tools provide a way for companies to do this by increasing innovation while lowering costs. With these tools, people can collaborate more and travel less. Teams can tap into talent wherever it is. Self-managing teams can flatten organizations and reduce overhead. And communities of practice can share best practices and reduce the number of costly mistakes.

Today, new metaphors for collaboration are helping organizations take the next quantum leap. Leveraging these new, more productive ways to work together is even more important in challenging times than it is when conditions are flush.

KM. The current economic climate is driving most companies to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and maintain sales, all at the same time. The downturn in the economic climate mandates the use of more efficient business tools including Web 2.0.

With secure internal and external unified communication systems it is possible to reliably, confidently and cost effectively share all resources within and outside an organization in ways that were not previously possible. Benefits include lower travel costs and lost time due to reductions in physical travel with an anytime, anywhere presence through the internet as well as an increased level with the integration of voice, video, chat and desktop screen collaboration in real time.

WT. Every company is being asked to be more resourceful and this is never truer than in the IT department of most organizations today. Smart companies use economic downturns to invest in the business – to retool, automate processes, remove unnecessary costs from the company, and get ready to be one step ahead of the competition when the market turns around again. One important way for organizations to be more efficient with their own resources is to consolidate disparate tools and the information repositories they interact with. This helps reduce the issues discussed previously that organizations typically face when important information is scattered, such as duplicative effort and wasted time spent searching for information. It also helps reduce IT spend on over-lapping systems and the help desk support required to keep users running smoothly.

Once in place, a modern information sharing and content management system provides an ideal way for teams to quickly come together, ideate over new project details and quickly bring new products and services to market at a speed and with a co-ordination that would have been unthinkable in the days when companies were using e-mail as their primary means of collaboration.

Fast facts
A recent study by Coleman Parkes Research revealed the following data:

• More than 75% of companies worldwide admit that social networking will come into the business undetected if not proactively managed
• Only 18% of respondents currently have any kind of strategy in place to integrate these technologies within the company for employees
• 58% of companies agree that senior managers do not understand the potential that social networking offers both for employees and customers
• Two-thirds of companies see improved customer satisfaction from the adoption of social media and 64% report an improved reputation in the marketplace