The future lies in Digital Collaboration
Digital collaboration is going to be vital to business success in the next five years. By Ashish Kumar
Digital collaboration—using technologies to enable efficient, valuable connections between people and information—will become increasingly vital to business success and represents the area of IT with the greatest potential for improving business performance in the next five years.
In a global economy that is increasingly service-based, information is a vital asset, and collaboration is the engine that generates value from this asset.
At a microeconomic level, in today’s ultra-competitive business environment, enterprises need to achieve and sustain a best-of-breed position in order to survive. The specific path to best-of-breed varies, but there are several common factors that are fundamental for a best-of-breed position, which are enabled and improved by collaboration:
* Innovation: Collaboration between employees (and third parties) generates ideas and reduces the cycle time for innovation.
* Customers: Collaboration on customer-driven products and services increases sales and customer loyalty.
* Suppliers, Channel Partners: Synchronisation and quality control of suppliers and channel partners improves the end-to-end customer experience.
* Stakeholders: Collaboration creates richer interactions with external stakeholders to whom the organisation is accountable.
* Employees: Creating a workplace that allows employees to participate in dynamic project teams, empowers them to create active communities of interest, and fosters an environment of continuous learning is a tangible differentiator for an employer.
* Operations: Collaboration both speeds execution of an organisation’s core business processes and improves quality.
Digital Collaboration: The Current Landscape
The use of virtual workspaces to share documents, discussions and calendars with colleagues takes collaboration one step beyond messaging and conference calls and is becoming increasingly popular with project and department teams. Virtual workspaces provide a good foundation for collaboration, especially when well integrated with common IT infrastructure services like identity management, authorisation, messaging, search, et cetera. However, the typical workspace today does not integrate information in related workspaces with production data in back-office systems like SAP and custom applications and databases.
Search has dramatically improved personal productivity in recent years through faster and targeted navigation of the Internet, enabling an advertisement-driven business model that further perpetuates the usage and value of search. Desktop search tools are very effective at finding relevant content on individual user’s computers, cutting across the applications and formats that house that information. Enterprises are exploring ways to apply the same productivity benefits of desktop search to information stored in corporate repositories, but thus far have not succeeded on the same level.
Even more recently, a new set of collaborative concepts and technologies have been driving spectacular growth in blogs, social networking and user-generated content sites on the Internet. Some of these tools are very relevant to digital collaboration in the enterprise as fundamental ways to increase individual contribution and maximise the value derived from communities of interest.
Technology Services for Digital Collaboration
Digital collaboration in the enterprise is built around three areas: tagging services, user-driven content and communities, and integration of the knowledge worker with their operational environments.
Tagging Services: Tagging is a simple mechanism to connect information and people by attaching descriptions about an entity to its digital representation. The entity in question might be a person, a physical asset that can be tracked through mechanisms like RFID, or content that is born digital, like electronic documents. Tags are used to describe the entity, enabling its discovery and use. The most common example is the use of keywords to describe documents, but tags can also be used to describe a person’s location, availability, participation in a business process, or relevant skills.
These services are combined using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach in order to maximise flexibility in usage scenarios and the ability to change the underlying technology implementation as needed.
User-driven Content and Communities: Many collaboration constructs from the Internet can be applied in enterprise environments to increase employee engagement and develop vibrant communities of interest. These constructs have the strategic effect of moving valuable ideas and information from the heads and laptops of individuals into centralised and reusable formats that can benefit the entire enterprise.
In most organisations today, electronic communities provide a convenient forum for people with common interests to network, share content and occasionally transact business. However, as shown by eBay, Amazon.com and Wikipedia, once critical mass is achieved, the real power lies in the aggregated views and expertise of the community.
Technology services are needed to allow users to create and maintain personal pages, blogs, wikis, workspaces, and community forums in a self-serviced manner. These constructs need to be integrated with authoring and communications interfaces to provide a seamless user experience. They leverage infrastructure services like access control and backup as well as services like tagging, subscriptions, and alerts, which automate the creation of information pathways and people connections. Enterprise Intranet taxonomy and search interfaces need to be updated to account for these constructs.
Integration of Knowledge Worker and Operational Environments
Knowledge workers need the most accurate operational data available to make decisions and complete their tasks. This data should be delivered to them at the point of need, as opposed to requiring them to go to a separate application interface. They should also be able to update back-office systems from their preferred application interface. Digital collaboration relies on breaking down the barriers that have traditionally separated the decision support systems and the transactional systems in an enterprise.
SOA-style services are the backbone for this integration. Most commercial applications and increasingly in-house applications have invested in services that programmatically expose data and functions from back office systems. Commercially available or custom integration layers are needed to invoke these services from within the documents and applications used by knowledge workers. This integration layer should coordinate with the broader use of tags in the enterprise, as well as core infrastructure services like identity and access management.
Digital Collaboration: The Road Ahead
Digital collaboration will enable three types of services for the enterprise: knowledge services, coordination services, and infrastructure and communication services.
Knowledge Services: The enterprise is poised to develop higher-order knowledge services, building on core infrastructure and communication services as well as the tools discussed above: tags and content-based search to better connect information and people, the critical mass of content in user pages, blogs, communities and workspaces, and an integration mechanism for back-office information. The combination of these technologies will deliver powerful enterprise-wide searches, automatic content updates, and even look for hidden connections between content and people.
Coordination Services: Coordination services is another example of a higher order service that combines calendaring, presence and location information to determine the availability of an individual and the best communications mechanism to contact them.
Calendaring services provide information about a person’s schedule. Location services use GPS-enabled devices to provide information about geographic location information along with real-time speed and direction information of people or physical assets.
Infrastructure and Communications Services: Infrastructure and communication services are not covered in this paper, but they are pre-requisites for digital collaboration. In particular, authentication, access control and audit are paramount to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations and to secure the sponsorship necessary for this style of collaboration. IP-based unified communications is an essential building block and the first step to the business benefits of digital collaboration.
To conclude, in order to realise the full potential, IT departments will need to provide some new service offerings and take a holistic and proactive view on the enterprise architectures and tools required for digital collaboration.
The author is the CTO of Avanade.
He can be reached at ashishk@avanade.com
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.