Over the last couple of years, I've discussed collaboration technology with a number of large enterprise customers. Specifically, what it means to users and to IT.
I've captured the key points in a sort of Collaboration Manifesto. I don't claim that it's all original thinking. The idea of a manifesto I took from Paul Haverstock's 1998 (or thereabouts) "Sametime Manifesto" in which he laid out the business value of instant messaging to a sceptical IBM. The individual principles are not new either. Matt Cain, for example, has made much of "contextual collaboration," and disconnected use is a fundamental design point for Notes, Adesso, and Groove.
However, I haven't seen this stuff collected in one place along with a conclusion: "what does this mean for IT?" so, here goes with part 1 of 2:
A Collaboration Manifesto and what it means for IT
Three trends are driving the future of collaborative software:
n contextual collaboration, where collaboration happens in the context of a business task rather than as a standalone application
n collaborative services delivered in the OS or as a collaboration platform
n a rise in demand for inter-company collaboration – often in an occasionally-connected computing (OCC) environment.
Contextual Collaboration
Collaborative software is evolving from a set of purpose-built collaborative applications – like email, document management, workflow, conferencing and instant messaging – to a set of collaborative services.
Collaboration “Platforms.”
If collaboration is to become truly contextual, or integrated into most business applications or processes, then it needs to be provided as a coherent set of services, and also integrated into the most commonly-used applications.
There are base services, like user directories, public key infrastructures, presence, searching, and rights management that are central to any business application or collaborative environment. These base services should properly be delivered at the operating system or platform level. However, these technologies are so important to effective and secured collaboration, that they have often been integrated within collaborative applications like email, workflow or document management. Delivered this way, though, they duplicate system functions and were also islands of proprietary function.
There are also collaborative services, like email, instant messaging, conferencing, and shared workspaces, that should be delivered so that they can be seamlessly integrated into business applications.
Last, there are applications that are so pervasive – like the Microsoft Office Suite -- that they should support natural collaboration capabilities by exploiting the base and collaborative services of the platform.
Inter-company Collaboration and OCC
As businesses seek to manage their supply chain and customer relationships more efficiently and effectively, they are demanding technologies that allow better communication with those stakeholders -- from secure email, through instant messaging and conferencing and beyond. These stakeholders -- customers and partners, even employees -- are not permanently connected to the corporate network. Wireless connection is common but intermittent, and traveling users can connect only at network access points, wireless or wired. Advanced email systems have dealt with this problem, by intelligent use of background downloads, local caching, and so on, but this kind of capability is the exception rather than the rule. Should working on shared information be limited to the times we are network connected?
Even a simple task like sharing documents is complicated when a company firewall separates team members and prevents the use of shared workspaces. The industry doesn’t yet have elegant answers that blend central control of data (e.g. file shares and portals) with secure distributed access (e.g. with peer-to-peer tools like Groove). However, we do have blended approaches that, while imperfect, show what the future can, and should, hold.
What does all this mean for IT?
When selecting technology that will enable effective collaboration in a company, it is important to evaluate and select not simply the individual collaborative applications--- e-mail, conferencing, document management or whatever – but to consider the whole platform, which includes collaborative services. In addition to native features for collaboration, it’s important to ask how well the functions can be integrated into the various business applications that users need.
If we don’t consider this, then IT will likely select one set of applications (let’s say document management, team sites, or portals), and business divisions will implicitly select others (or none) when choosing their next SCM or PLMapplication. IT teams will be left with the job of managing multiple user registration, archiving, and recovery for each platform.
In evaluating a collaborative strategy it’s important to ask if the platform chosen includes a complete set of basic system services. In evaluating an application, does it duplicate system functions (like presence, PKI or directory) or integrate with them?
Collaboration platform and services should address the needs for ad hoc, secure and auditable inter-company communication, as well as support a range of user access models that work in an OCC environment. This means that the user should have access to shared data offline when necessary, and select a platform with a rich replication capability and a range of client modesl (from thick to thin).
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