Would you be more stressed by losing access to e-mail for a week, or getting a divorce? This was the question posed in a recent survey by storage vendor Veritas Software, which received widespread coverage when it was reported that a third of IT managers would be more traumatised by a week without e-mail than they would by a minor car accident, moving to a new home, or marriage breakdown.
In that survey, 68 percent of respondents said users get irate within as little as 30 minutes without e-mail. Think you'd do the same? Try going one day without checking e-mail. If you're like most knowledge workers, it will not only be hard to keep yourself away, but the backlog of unanswered messages will quickly cure you of the habit.
Love it or hate it, e-mail's domination of business communications has made it the de facto form of communication between workers. It's even used by many for other tasks: for example, as an informal filing system, a historical archive of correspondence dating back years, or a way of tracking work orders, progress reports, and the status of ongoing projects.
Despite its popularity, e-mail is far more limited than many companies believe. For one thing, its contents are highly unstructured, meaning that it's extremely difficult to extract meaningful information for any other purpose. Secondly, proliferation of data in e-mail systems across the company makes it hard to back up, inventory, or even know that certain data exists. Estimates suggest that nearly 70 percent of corporate data is distributed across workers' desktop and notebook PCs, accessible to nobody else--or, even worse, available in another version somewhere else.
In organisations that are heavily process-driven--government organisations, particularly--the situation has been remedied somewhat through the adoption of "groupware" applications such as Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, which pair messaging capabilities with a structured definition of ways to model the processes governing the internal flow of information between people.
Because it's based on a single centralised database, groupware improves the consistency and relevance of business data. Yet it has its own limitations, not the least of which is its tendency to believe it is the only application in the user's universe; this leaves other important business systems marginalised, or ignored altogether, without complex programming.
Building a richer portal
The need for a broader framework for access to enterprise systems has driven the rise of the enterprise information portal (EIP). Originally envisioned as a way of providing employees with access to all of the applications they needed through a single screen, portals are getting a makeover as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and other major vendors add collaboration tools that promise to change the way people work together.
In the new portal paradigm, the basic function of data representation--sucking screens from a multitude of back-end systems--is complemented by document management (tracking versions and changes as workers 'check in' and 'check out' documents), content management (the actual storage and indexing of documents, images, Web pages, and other content), and instant messaging (IM).
IM capabilities will be the glue that unify portals' other features, allowing documents to be permanently tied to the people that created them. That way, if an employee has a question about something another worker has done, or if they just want to call a quick conference to clarify some details, they can instantly see who's available for a chat; the click of a button will allow them to summon any or all of the relevant people.
This capability would, for example, be crucial if a travelling sales manager wanted to ask one of his or her sales representatives for clarification before signing off on a monthly sales report. Because instant messaging networks are already well established over the Internet, it becomes much easier to unify geographically dispersed team members to get the job done faster. There's no reason why that can't include contacting mobile phones or PDAs to reach workers that don't happen to be in front of their computer.
Improving collaboration makes sense for vendors keen to push the EIP deeper into their customers' collective psyches, says Jay Simons, Asia managing director for Plumtree Software, which this year jumped into the fray with its Collaboration Server package.
"Your classic portal as a presentation layer was just an intranet refresh," he explains. "It created an 'empty portal', but user requirements are generally broader than just getting access to an HR or finance app. Our customers have said they'd like the ability to search and manage content, manage workflow, build threaded discussions outside of e-mail, and interact with other people. They want to interact with data, and with the people responsible for that data. Collaboration has helped us build more value into the projects our customers were using it for."
With their eyes on the prize, enterprise application vendors have been on a feeding frenzy. IBM, for one, recently bought local company Aptrix to bolster the content management features of its WebSphere Portal software, which was in turn updated last month, and is also building close links between WebSphere Portal and Notes. Microsoft bought PlaceWare, an online collaboration company, earlier this year and is also rolling its SharePoint Portal Server into its flagship Office System applications to produce an integrated suite that lets Office users easily create their own Internet-connected collaboration spaces.
It's not only the big names that are spending up big to get into this market. Document management vendor Open Text recently purchased Portal player Corechange; content-management company Interwoven last month spent $US171 million on collaboration company iManage; and content-management provider Documentum recently upgraded its platform with the fruits of its earlier purchase of collaboration company eRoom.
"The portal model of interfacing is a very powerful story, particularly for customers that run multiple systems," says John Banks, manager of portals with IBM Australia. "Portals are about people dealing with systems, but collaboration is really about people dealing with people. It's much more real-time, and when you start talking about this its benefits become quite obvious.
Building an instant business case
Collaborative portals will lessen workers' reliance on bulky and parochial groupware systems, helping integrate people as well as applications into the portal-based environment. Rather than just using a portal to access applications, workers will use it for collaborating with each other. E-mail will also be put in a more appropriate place, being used as a means of notification but not as an engine for collaboration.
What's this worth to the business? There are no hard and fast rules as to how much online collaboration will save, but anecdotal indications are that the ability to seamlessly interface with people and documents through a single portal provides a more intuitive, flexible, and accessible user interface that improves worker productivity. Travelling executives, for example, can participate in portal-based workgroups from any Web browser they happen to be near. This approach has been used by early adopters to, for example, allow board members to collaborate when producing regular financial reports, no matter where they're travelling.
Even more of the benefits, however, come from the portal's ability to unify data sources--whether by leaving applications to run on separate servers but storing projects in common areas, or integrating everything into one far-reaching system with a common database. This latter approach can fundamentally change the way people work, but it's also a solid IT strategy because it reduces the cost of managing many copies and versions of data stored on various workers' hard drives.
"If people don't have access to internal systems, the only way they can [participate] is to e-mail documents in and out of the company," says Peter Thomas, Asia-Pacific senior director of technology marketing for Oracle, which recently updated its Collaboration Suite in an effort to strengthen its position in the collaborative portal space. "By using a portal, they end up with file storage, version control, and can work on documents without e-mailing. It's a jumping-off point, from which you plug in the pieces that provide workflow, e-mail, and other applications."
Forcing users to abandon their groupware and e-mail clients in favour of a Web-based, collaborative portal won't be a walk in the park, however. Power e-mailers are very attached to their current way of working, a point that John Brand, vice president with research firm META Group, believes will keep e-mail relevant until collaborative portals can make it irrelevant by providing a different way of working.
In other words, push users from e-mail to the portal--but don't tell them that's what you're doing. "E-mail has become the major application for knowledge workers," he explains. "So to try to get them out of that environment into the portal interface, and in many cases giving them less functionality than they previously had, is proving to be a challenge."
As workers come to embrace the value of real-time communication, however, Brand warns the pendulum can easily swing too far the opposite way by making collaboration too widespread and unstructured. Microsoft, for one, reports that its 40,000-odd employees have created more than 24,000 independent workspaces since it began using the SharePoint-enabled Office System application internally.
While this may sound like a testament to collaborative portals' ease of use, it can become a policy nightmare. Poor management of collaboration can lead to what Brand calls 'collaboration anarchy': "[through the portal] you want to get reuse of existing material, location of experts, and so on. But if I don't understand the roles of the [teams] and how those team spaces fit together, it's like having 24,000 offices in the building but not knowing what's coming out of them."
Clearly, collaborative portals can be a double-edged sword. By focusing on a single application with clearly defined business benefits, it's possible to realise process improvements that facilitate collaboration and improve productivity. Yet a staged approach is clearly the way forward, for now.
And, in time-honoured tradition, Brand points out that it's important not to be pushed too far without doing your groundwork. "There are a lot of outcomes that organisations should be looking for in using collaborative technologies, but just because vendors provide those technologies doesn't mean you should be using them that way."
This article was first published in C|Level.
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