Right here, right now

The real-time collaboration tools enabling organisations to make decisions and resolve problems more efficiently. By Jessica Twentyman.

For conservation charity the Woodland Trust, managing costs is a top priority, in order that the bulk of its funds can be targeted at the important work of protecting the UK’s native woodland heritage.

But progress in that work, which is achieved through a mixture of acquisition, lobbying, education and fundraising, is only possible when its 230-strong team of woodland officers, project managers and administrative staff are able to collaborate closely with each other.

That is an exacting challenge: based in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the Woodland Trust looks after more than 1,200 disparate woodland sites across Britain, many in rural locations. A significant proportion of its far-flung staff work from their own homes on a range of activities, from organising and managing contractors to running budgets. Not only that, but the Trust also relies on a nationwide network of local fundraisers to organise the soliciting and collection of donations.

In recent years, co-ordinating these activities over such a geographically diverse area led to an expensive over-reliance among the workforce on phone mails and e-mail, says Richard Otter, network and systems manager at the Woodland Trust.

For the Trust, that was costly and time-consuming, with employees frequently playing ‘phone tag’ with each other or waiting for responses to urgent e-mails from colleagues who were not at their desks. Phone bills, meanwhile, spiraled.

The answer, the Trust decided, was to try to divert some of that voice and e-mail traffic into the real-time collaboration medium of instant messaging (IM). “We were looking for ways to extract the maximum benefit from our existing investment in broadband, and IM with presence awareness seemed a more effective way for our dispersed workforce to keep in touch,” he says.

With that in mind, the Woodland Trust implemented Microsoft’s Live Communications Server – a real-time collaboration server that supports a variety of synchronous collaboration technologies, including IM, web conferencing, presence awareness, application and desktop sharing, whiteboarding and voice over internet protocol (VoIP).

For the Woodland Trust, real-time collaboration using IM combines the spontaneity of a phone call with the written certainty of e-mail to create collaboration opportunities that just were not possible in the past. If the accounts department gets a call from a supplier about a purchase order, accountants can identify if the relevant signatory is at their desk and send them a message to ask if it has been signed, therefore dealing with the call immediately.

The use of IM has done much to reduce unnecessary phone calls and e-mail traffic, says Otter, and the deployment of Live Communications Server means that other kinds of real-time communication are also possible. “With such a geographically spread workforce, the idea of video conferencing has always appealed, but was previously out of our reach in terms of cost, but is now within our grasp for the first time,” he says.

Like the Woodland Trust, many organisations are also looking to tackle their real-time communication challenges. The reason is clear: at the root of any business encounter involving more than one human being is communication. The faster that communication can be achieved, the quicker decisions can be made and problems resolved.

At present, e-mail is by far the dominant collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools such as IM are creating a new communication dynamic within organisations – a phenomenon some analysts refer to as ‘communications acceleration’.

In most cases, this is achieved by the introduction of technology that can detect when a user is online and available and make that fact known to colleagues and trading partners. This is often referred to as ‘presence aware’ technology – and is typically seen by the presence of a green traffic light icon next to the name of an individual within an IM, web conferencing or voice over IP (VoIP) application.

“Even basic presence benefits you if you postpone contacting a person until his or her screen name reappears online. The presence function can also be expanded to convey the user's: availability (the user may be online but dialed into a meeting); connection type; device; level of responsibility; expertise; location; and other characteristics. These qualities make presence a valuable feature to integrate with other applications and the wider IT environment, where it functions as a human resource locator and access mechanism,” says Lou Latham, an analyst with IT market research company Gartner.

Whether the decisions turn out to be good is more related to the quality of the communication rather than the facility of instant interaction. But close integration of number of different real-time communications facilities is an increasing priority for many companies, says Latham. “Collaboration buying patterns are beginning to change from organisations buying or acquiring point products, to seeking a broader collection of integrated technologies and services. Buyers are specifically asking for a ‘laundry list’ of scenarios and technical functionality, including communications, shared work spaces and coordination services,” he says.

As a result, Latham claims, a market is emerging: the integrated collaboration market, which includes software products whose primary purpose is to support a broad set of collaborative activities – both synchronous and asynchronous – between any internal or external users.

Microsoft is one of the companies leading the charge to address that demand, as well as IBM with its Workplace platform (and more specifically the Workplace Collaboration Services tools) and Oracle, with the Oracle Collaboration Suite.

While a collaboration strategy should centre upon a collaboration platform, however, companies should first develop an enterprise collaboration strategy, says Erica Rugullies, an analyst at Forrester Research. “This helps avoid false starts, reduces the ongoing cost of the collaboration environment, potentially gives users greater functionality and creates the option for future benefits like collaboration with customers and supplier or rich contextual collaboration,” she says.

That will involve the recognition that real-time collaboration is not, in itself, isolated from other activities – in fact, it underpins and (potentially) accelerates them. Because of that, companies need to integrate real-time collaboration capabilities into business processes where there is a perceived need or process ‘bottlenecks’.

That was certainly the case at Australian construction company, JWH Group, where travel costs have long been a bugbear for managers. The company has deployed Oracle Collaboration suite, which includes web-conferencing tools to enable employees and managers to conduct instant, online meetings from their desktop PCs instead of physically traveling around a far-flung network of offices and construction sites. It is also used by the IT team for fixing technical problems in remote locations.

Not only that, but it also promises to take much of the strain and cost out of the company’s employee training programme. “Training can be very expensive,” says Nigel Kirkby, chief information officer of JWH Group. “Web conferencing enables us to offer more online training, save the cost of bringing people to our head office in Perth, and ensure training is delivered in the workplace context where people actually need to learn those skills.”

The company is also exploring the integrated IM features built into Oracle Collaboration Suite. “This feature will be of great value to us. An internal IM service will save money in phone call costs and further improve our collaboration,” says Kirby.

Real-time collaboration products should efficiently support business processes. They also need to blend with established tools for asynchronous collaboration, such as e-mail, file-sharing discussion boards and tam rooms. “Planners should analyse each business process and devise for it the best combination of real-time and asynchronous functions,” says Lou Latham of the Gartner Group. 12.0pt">

By 2009, he claims, 80 per cent of tools that support collaborative work will incorporate asynchronous and real-time capabilities in the same application or suite. For example, an instant message could be translated into a persistent discussion thread so that team members can use it for reference or comment later on. Or an audio conference could be transformed into a document stored in a team space that others could edit or add to over time.

“This combination of real-time and asynchronous features reflects the way people actually work,” says Latham. “Typically, people meet — face to face or via messaging and conference tools — to set goals, inform each other, establish a schedule and assign tasks; then, they work by themselves within a set of portals, forms and documents established for the collaboration.” To be optimal, the meetings and the individual efforts should take place in a shared environment with common resources, business logic, documents and workflow keyed to the project or the team.

That is extremely difficult to achieve without a seamlessly integrated collaboration environment, argues Chris Harris-Jones, principal analyst at Ovum. “If, say, IM is the initial thread of a real-time collaboration session, then the users need the ability to progress from an IM session to full multi-party audio conferencing, with comprehensive document or application sharing – perhaps even video in future cases,” he says.

One thing is clear, however: The strongest psychological benefit of synchronous collaboration tools is seen in the context of co-operation between people who would not otherwise meet. The richer the experience shared by two such employees or business partners, the stronger the bond between them.

The strongest psychological benefit of synchronous collaboration tools is seen in the context of co-operation between people who would not otherwise meet. The richer the experience shared by two such employees or business partners, the stronger the bond between them.

And that underscores the complexity of business collaboration. The application of synchronous collaboration needs to ensure it retains a sense of team membership, fluid discussion and personal interaction. And when people are both comfortable with the environment and can pick up on those subtleties, then the business benefits can be immense - however they are measured.

Real-time imperatives
Real-time collaboration tools, such as IM or video conferencing, will yield the most value when integrated with asynchronous tools, such as e-mail, and with business processes. That is a complex task, but Lou Latham of the Gartner Group offers the following recommendations:

Survey users to see how they collaborate in support of business processes. For example, does a team need to interact more, or does it mainly collaborate around documents? Does the team engage in standardised processes or do ad hoc processes work? Use this information to set your goals for real-time collaboration;
Choose collaboration tools that support the goals and functions of each team and match them to the tasks they must perform. Buy the type of collaboration tool that uses the least amount of bandwidth and resources to get the job done;
Look for collaboration tools that do not conflict with each other. Try to leverage systems that are already in place instead of duplicating functions;Mix and match real-time and asynchronous tools to support various kinds of interactions. Don't focus on generic collaboration suites alone, however broad their functions. Important processes will require users to tap domain-specific applications as well, such as customer-relationship management. Content and processes must reach users wherever they are, so your collaboration environment should support multiple devices, both mobile and desktop, and should provide for alerts to bring key personnel into the process when needed;
Look for opportunities to exploit presence where it fits with your culture. Start with easy-to-use, high-value, internal IM applications. (Don't rely on consumer IM services; deploy an enterprise-IM application behind the firewall.) Then extend presence awareness beyond messaging.