Collaboration
by David Senf

Changes are coming to the way we work and collaborate. But Canadian organizations might not be as ready as our southern neighbours to take advantage of them. In what is increasingly becoming an information economy, how we work, how we communicate and the quality of the tools we use help determine the level of our productivity and competitiveness.

Canada trails the United States in productivity - and the gap is getting wider. One of the core reasons for Canada's unfortunate position is a lack of investment in IT.

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Specifically, more money must be invested in accelerating the creation, distribution and monetizing of knowledge. The $160-million a year spent on collaborative technologies isn't enough. But we've begun to employ emerging tools and technologies such as instant messaging, Web conferencing, wikis (collective on-line content creation), VoIP and SOA (services-oriented architecture) to increase productivity.

Standalone collaboration and knowledge-sharing tools such as e-mail, teleconferencing and scheduling are considered in many quarters to be "good enough." The telephone has served us well for 125 years; while e-mail is indispensable to most people. And isn't blogging (on-line journals) for the vain, podcasting (on-line audio distribution) for geeks and instant messaging for teenagers? Although the early adopters may well slot nicely into these descriptions, tools that point away from the individual and toward communities have business value.

Extracting knowledge from colleagues' heads and hard drives as quickly as possible and getting it in front of those who need it is a key value proposition of new collaborative technologies. Research by IDC Canada shows business users of instant messaging rate it faster than e-mail at providing access to people and information. The ability of a salesperson to send an instant message to a colleague about a sales call that has been automatically located on an on-line map - a service now available from salesforce.com using Google maps - is just the start. Further, imagine being able to highlight a negative growth number, see that the P&L (profit and loss) owner is on-line, and be able to strike up an immediate conversation around a virtual whiteboard. Then there's the power to bring together colleagues from around the company in order to arrive at a solution without having to take the time to assemble face to face.

The power of the future of collaborative technologies is found in helping an insurance broker navigate competing policies, an IT administrator fix a network problem or a parts order manager in manufacturing negotiate with multiple suppliers. This is accomplished through integration of collaborative technologies into existing applications - such as Microsoft Office or IBM Workplace. Nobody can be expected to easily make dramatic changes to how he or she does a job. But having a feature in Microsoft Excel through which a person who last entered data into a cell can be contacted, from within that particular data point, by someone else viewing the spreadsheet is useful yet unobtrusive.

A large cross-Canada study into the adoption and use of collaborative technologies, conducted by IDC Canada, found that employees value their time and consider how technology equates with efficiency and productivity. Web conferencing and instant messaging users said the top benefits were reduced travel time and the ability to contact co-workers located in other time zones more easily. The use of these technologies is surprisingly broad: Web conferencing is being used for ad hoc meetings (among 72 per cent of users) and instant messaging for collaboration with partners and suppliers (among 55 per cent of users).

The study also pinpointed a downside. It found that security issues and lack of demonstrable business value plagued these same technologies. These hurdles are less daunting, though, than the fundamental challenge of bringing business managers, workers and IT in line regarding which technologies to use (Web-based or packaged software), how they're to be used (regulatory compliance) and deciding where the budget is going to come from.

Additionally, desktop collaboration tools aren't enough. Untethered, mobile devices should be considered. And underlying infrastructure including VoIP (for voice/video integration into applications) and SOA (for bridging information islands) should be in place as well. Without the larger investment in IT infrastructure, collaborative technologies are limited to managing knowledge for an individual rather than for the whole organization.

Interestingly, challenges facing the business adoption of collaborative technologies will likely be overcome from the outside in. IDC Canada expects that collaborative technologies such as instant messaging will be adopted, in many cases, first by the consumer and work its way into the business. This is analogous to cellphones and PDAs gaining traction as a consumer purchase, and subsequently becoming indispensable in a business context.

This means a lot more activity for Web-based portals that consumers flock to, such as Goggle, MSN, Yahoo and AOL. But, as it did with the cellphone or PDA, the IT department took notice of the risks associated with employees doing their own thing. IT needs to secure the data, ensure applications work across devices and help set controls for regulatory compliance. Web-based portals go only so far - they can't offer the same level of security and control that packaged software can. Moreover, collaborative technologies need to work within the processes of your company, whereas Web-based portals tend to require your company to work within their processes.

What remains to be seen is whether emerging collaborative technologies will save time at work, leaving more time for family life, or whether they will merely create an even longer but more productive workday. Unquestionably, over the next 18 months, these technologies will become more infused with the tools we currently use to complete our daily tasks. Unfortunately, thanks, in part, to those very technologies, that pile of tasks before us will likely continue to grow.

Although Canadians face productivity challenges, work across multiple time zones and in what is increasingly becoming an information economy, collaborative technologies - outside staples such as e-mail and the telephone - are just now taking hold. Whether chatting over instant messaging, conducting a Web conference or using a portal to manage knowledge better, Canadian organizations should start ramping up investment in collaborative technologies to generate a variety of cost-savings and revenue-generating opportunities.

The switch won't be an all-or-nothing big bang, though. E-mail and the analog telephone aren't going anywhere soon - video didn't kill (it only maimed) the radio star - and new collaborative technologies will build on the old.