Working Toward Working Together

Gartner analyst Betsy Burton noticed something unusual over the last six months: a significant uptick in the number of inquiries she was receiving from CIOs about collaboration. That seems odd, especially because collaboration software has been around ever since Lotus Notes was invented (and even earlier, if you count the demonized Authorware).

Burton started looking into why CIOs were working toward working together and found four fundamental shifts that are increasing the importance of—and interest in—collaboration. She outlines them in this Q&A.

Q: Collaboration has always been important within the enterprise. What's driving this new emphasis on the subject?

A: We're seeing four primary issues and two secondary issues put collaboration on the agenda of CIOs. First, there's an increased focus on external communication, with partners, suppliers, and other sourcing that may be in far-off places. Companies have intimate relations with partners, even though those partners may be in different locations.

Second, virtualization has increased dramatically, with employees either traveling to or working in remote locations. We talked to a company that has engineers in the U.S., Singapore, and Europe, and it was trying to find ways to be innovative and creative and still have them work together well. The company uses a Web conferencing tool that sits on the desktop of engineers, who can write on the whiteboard portion, so when someone from Singapore comes in, for instance, they can meet in that environment and keep dialogue open. It's a virtual watercooler. Virtualization is also being driven by the increase in mergers and acquisitions, where you have to work with the acquired company from a distance.Third is the growth of consumerization and consumer technology and their effect on the enterprise. Look at instant messaging—it was a consumer technology that came in through the back door, and now CIOs and business managers are saying, "What do we do with this?" Finally, people are looking for ways to make their companies more competitive. They're not focused just on cost savings. They're asking, how can we bring people together so they can become more innovative, creative, and competitive?

Q: What are the secondary issues?

A: CIOs are looking for a way to change their position within the company and how their position is viewed. If IT wants to be viewed as driving the business, collaborating is a good way of doing it. Also, the vendors are looking for new revenue streams. They want to augment the revenues of what they already have, and they can use collaboration to create an additional horizontal market. Microsoft is augmenting its strengths in Office by adding collaboration; IBM is doing the same thing with Notes, Domino, and SameTime; and Oracle is looking at how it can extend its database and applications revenues.

Q: I've always thought that there is no "next big thing," other than getting all the pieces of the "last big thing" to work together. Are we still in the Model T stage of connectivity?

A: I'd say we're only a little bit further along than that, but not only because the vendors don't have products that work together. It's also because of our own behavior. When you look at future workers, the average 18-year-old doesn't remember the world before the Internet. They text-message each other like mad. When those future workers start to come into the workforce, their behaviors and expectations will be different from ours. They use multiuser gaming technology like mad. When they play, they go into a virtual space. Why can't that technology be used to create a virtual workspace?Q: You mentioned IM as well. It seems that when it's useful, it's 100% useful, and that when it's annoying, it's 100% annoying. Will we just have to get used to it, just as we did with e-mail?

A: That's right—it'll be part of our evolution in behavior. I see presence technology [when software reveals your availability to others] becoming a backbone for many applications, because it can add information about you—what are your preferences for being contacted? There's much that needs to change and evolve.

Q: What are CIOs doing to drive the deployment of collaboration tools throughout the enterprise? That is, how do you get people to use them?

A: There are people I call innate collaborators, who bring changes within the company, so in a lot of cases, changes occur with or without IT support. IT's response should be to try to understand how collaboration should fit into the strategy of the company and how IT can encourage it. In a way, it's a lot like a grassroots movement. If you really want to leverage the benefits of collaboration, you need to motivate people to use the technology by giving them incentives. In a way, it's somewhat of a change in the role of IT—IT becomes not just a provider of technology but also a trusted adviser in its use.

Q: How do you measure success in collaboration?A: It's not easy. With most applications in IT, you can see where you are at the beginning, when you're at the end, and thus what you've achieved. Collaboration is almost inherently a recursive process, because each new form of collaboration creates another one. To measure it, you have to get more granular than you ever were before, such as saying, "If we hadn't pulled these three people together, we wouldn't have created this process."

Feedback question: Tell us your biggest challenge when it comes to getting collaboration to work, from either a cultural or a technological standpoint.