denotes premium content | May 26 2012 
Feature
posted 11 Sep 2006 in Volume 3 Issue 3
Special Focus: Collaboration
Collaboration and the information worker
Ovum’s Chris Harris-Jones examines the technologies and processes required to support collaboration among information workers.
By Chris Harris-Jones, Ovum
How do you deliver the appropriate working environment so that information can be retrieved rapidly, exploited and shared effectively?
Today, multiple technologies are converging to create a more ‘joined up’ environment for information workers, one where they can find and retrieve information, exploit that information, and collaborate with colleagues to achieve objectives. But the functionality of the major relevant technologies overlaps considerably.
Key messages
Everyone is an ‘information worker’ now
Collecting that information from across the company, suppliers, customers, and potentially over the Internet, requires access to multiple software tools. Efficient exploitation of that information requires further tools. The technologies required to do this are gradually converging and we are now seeing software tools provide an increasingly ‘joined up’ environment.
People are more important than technology
Good practice is essential to ensure that information is used effectively. Organisations need to ensure that all electronic information is organised effectively – in the same way as good filing practices for paper documentation.
Developing a good ‘information worker’ environment requires planning and work
An effective environment for information workers can be developed by a series of incremental tasks which gradually improve the quality of the environment by improving business practices and implementing software tools in combination. Each stage will deliver added value to the organisation.
Existing technologies work well…
A core set of technologies can be used to support the information worker, including content management, collaboration, portal and search. They provide essential support for information workers. However, to maximise the benefit they need appropriate business practises put in place at the same time.
…but more is required
However, vendors still need to do more work. The most significant missing component is connectivity between the various elements – the people, the content and the activities.
Fundamentals for effective information management
The basics
Effective management of information requires a number of fundamental functions to be implemented in the correct order to be fully effective.
The best we can do today is to deliver a single logical view of the most important content. The following sections highlight the main fundamentals that need to be addressed.
Fundamental one: organise your information
Organisations have most of their structured data managed reasonably effectively in databases. Unfortunately the same cannot usually be said of their unstructured content.
Fundamental two: managing information
Managing information involves answering two major questions – who does it and how does it get done? Staff now have access to huge volumes of information on the web, as well as every piece of internal content via IT networks. The result is that everyone now has to manage content.
Fundamental three: locate and retrieve information
Content management does not reduce the volume of information, it just helps manage it. If you have one or more content management system (CMS) in place, then that may deliver a degree of order. However, it is rare for any organisation to have all its content managed in one system. Many have multiple systems across the organisation, often at a departmental level and these will only manage a subset of content.
Fundamental four: ‘joined up’ working
What do you share and how do you share it? How can you know the right people have seen it? All collaboration and sharing needs to be done in context – the context of the project staff are working on, for example. But getting people to work together effectively also requires the right culture. Providing technology does not mean it will be used well. The implementation of collaboration tools needs to be considered carefully and users need training, too.
Collaboration, content management and portals
There has been substantial evolution in collaboration, content management and portal technologies in recent years. And it is now difficult to understand where one ends and the next starts.
Collaboration consolidates
The technology has grown in scope in recent years. It was once represented by a small collection of technologies, often implemented independently. New components, such as instant messaging and white-boarding, simply added to the complexity. But we are now starting to see tools appearing in unified collaboration suites. These offer a common interface and some integration. Many provide portal-like interfaces to deliver a collaborative workplace.
Collaboration tasks usually require access to reference material and also generate new content. So, many vendors now deliver simple content management as part of their collaboration suites, while others provide strong links to external CMSs.
Content management expands
The content management library should be the pivot for all content collection, delivery and management. These provide a secure mechanism for managing, storing and controlling content, ensuring that it is not duplicated and that the correct version is immediately identifiable and accessible, and a single point of access. Fortunately, collaboration tools are increasingly becoming part of CMSs.
Portals become workplaces
Portals have traditionally been channels for aggregating and delivering content and functions from multiple sources. They are now becoming ‘workplace portals’ providing a degree of integration between the individual components to provide everything staff need to do their job. Workplace portals can also deliver substantial functionality of their own, including collaboration and content management tools.
Convergence of all three technologies
There is a high degree of convergence between collaboration, content management and portals and some vendors are starting to deliver all three to varying degrees of depth. However, this does not mean that they will eventually merge into a single piece of software – the result would be too big and complex. These suites are increasingly being offered as collections of software modules that can be delivered as an integrated unit, but with multiple options, depending on the needs of the organisation.
Search – the common component
Search technology is embedded in all three of the major components described above. While search tools should be able to locate any information, in practice it can help if content has been tagged accurately and well organised. If not, there is a real likelihood that search will return unusably long lists of results.
The missing elements: connectivity and context
The workplace portal can be much more than just an access point. It can, and should, deliver a virtual space, a collection of all the elements that are related to the task in hand. It connects documents, tasks and people and delivers context to the information and activities.
Beyond search
Search enables staff to find information – if they know what they are looking for and are able to recognise it when they see it. Unfortunately, relevant information may be buried deep inside projects or collaboration activities and may not be revealed by some search engines.
The core components
There are three major components to be found in any working interconnected environment. Typical information available to the workplace should include:
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The identity of individuals – often supplemented by ‘yellow pages’ built into corporate intranets;
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Content provided either directly within the workplace or linked into the workspace;
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Process information, such as that stored within workflows or planned activities managed by project management.
All this information is often present, but not explicitly available in a format that can be used directly. For example, it can be very difficult to locate all content created by a specific person on a particular topic, or identify all of the currently active processes in which that person is involved.
Integrating content
Taxonomies
The core approach to connecting content items is through the use of metadata associated with the content items structured with taxonomies. These can be used to organise content through tagging. This enables you to create ‘virtual’ connections between items with the same tags, then go one step further to identify content items with related tags. Taxonomies are increasingly being used within CMSs to support the organisation of content.
Ontologies
Ontology creates more sophisticated structures around information than can be achieved using taxonomies. They can be used to create connections between items that have meaning rather than simply ‘connecting’ them by common metadata items (ie: the same keyword appears in both). An example of meaningful relationships that might be encoded are ‘O2 is a UK-based telecoms company’, and ‘the
Integrating activities and processes
Activities and processes are connected
at the high end of the scale through project planning tools that show the relationships between your activities and those of others. However, collaboration also needs to be supported at a finer-grained level by identifying and exploiting the activities that individuals are executing within their working environment.
Integrating people
One technique used for understanding the connections between people is social network analysis (SNA). However, the connectivity is usually identified manually and technology is used to understand the implications of the connections identified. To be of real value in the workplace context the connections need to be identified and analysed automatically. There are some pieces of software that are starting to do this – for example, by examining e-mails – but it is still immature.
Delivering the information worker workplace
Organise the information
The first task is to identify what content is maintained in the organisation via a content audit. This will help in understanding the range of content and the lifecycles of the content it manages. This should be followed by a cleansing task, involving the removal of duplicates and identifying the authoritative version of each base document.
This cleansing process is an essential prerequisite to the implementation of any CMS. While the main activities will be carried out by the people ‘on the ground’, the basic principles of what content is retained, where it is stored, responsibilities for content and so on, all need to be established at a high level before cleaning up activities are started.
Once this has been achieved, appropriate processes need to be implemented to ensure that content is controlled and recorded effectively.
Managing information
The second stage involves procedures to ensure that content remains well managed. Check-in/check-out guarantees that only one person can edit a piece of content to ensure its integrity, while version control ensures that readers can be confident that they are using the latest version of the content or, if necessary, that they can access a version as it existed at a particular point in time. The third element is archiving of content once it has passed the end of its useful life, to retain it for future reference.
Finding information
All content, regardless of type or location, needs to be retrievable and usable as though it resides in a single logical repository. This stage takes the cleaned and managed content and provides the user with a view of a single logical repository through the implementation of search technologies. The output of this stage is to have content that you can find quickly and easily. This is really the starting point for effective collaboration.
‘Joined up’ working
The ultimate goal for collaboration is to turn the network into a shared space where people can work together and exchange ideas in a ‘friction-free’ environment. Collaboration software provides lubrication through the delivery of working spaces for projects and tasks, and communications via e-mail, discussion groups and instant messaging.
Collaboration tools don’t collaborate
A major difficulty with using tools from different vendors is that they do not interoperate. While items such as documents can be exchanged easily through e-mail, it is not possible to connect collaboration workspaces together in a simple seamless manner. In some cases, it is possible to exchange content, perhaps by building specific connectors, but in general, collaboration tools remain ‘islands’. As a result, wherever possible, you should fix on a single collaboration tool for use organisation-wide.
The workplace
The user interface
The consolidation mechanism of choice is the workplace or portal. The latest portal software delivers a mechanism for moving into the next-generation working environment – the workplace, a home for all the functions staff need to do their job. A workplace delivers a location that you log into on arrival at work, remain logged into all day and log out of on leaving work.
The workplace portal needs to integrate all the business information and tools that support a user’s role. The architecture must provide broad access to a range of information sources and application services, as well as sophisticated value-added functions, such as unified search, categorisation, and security, among others.
Delivery mechanism – portal or intranet?
A number of organisations have built intranets for managing and distributing content. Some have also implemented portal software as the controller. However, most don't yet have a coherent focal point that can be used to deliver all content and capabilities.
Delivery of the information worker environment initially started to coalesce around the intranet, but in many organisations this did not get far – there was just too much development work needed.
If you have a choice, then portals offer most opportunity. This delivers a more generic set of tools that are usually more comprehensive than those available from either CMSs or collaboration suites. Although the leading portals are from large vendors that also offer all the other components, the structure of portals usually means that they are (at least marginally) more open than other components.
Chris Harris-Jones is research director, information management, at analyst group Ovum. He can be contacted by e-mailing christopher.harris-jones@ovum.com
