Real-time collaboration tools, such as instant messaging or videoconferencing, will yield the most value when integrated with asynchronous tools, such as e-mail, and with business processes. Plan your converged environment using the three ways to integrate real-time tools.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Evaluate new collaboration tools based on whether they add value to specific business processes. The real-time collaboration market remains volatile as the technologies evolve and converge. Although collaboration suite frameworks are in the making from several vendors, point solutions are and will continue to be useful. However, an enterprise collaboration strategy will improve interoperability and reduce costs.
STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTION(S)
By 2007, real-time and asynchronous collaboration tools will be combined in suites or will be interoperable through standard protocols (0.8 probability).
By 2009, 80 percent of tools that support collaborative work will incorporate asynchronous and real-time capabilities in the same application or suite (0.8 probability).
Line-of-business applications will routinely incorporate at least presence and IM functions by year-end 2007 (0.8 probability).
ANALYSIS
Instant messaging (IM), Web conferencing, voice over IP and other real-time collaboration technologies have recently entered the mainstream. Companies have tried them out for narrow purposes, but now that they're ready for wider deployment, many CIOs wonder how to select the right products and how to use them most effectively.
Don't choose products for real-time collaboration based solely on their own merits. Instead, you can gain a competitive edge by choosing products to support business processes. To accomplish this, the newer, real-time tools will need to blend with established tools for asynchronous collaboration, such as e-mail, file sharing, discussion boards and team rooms. Planners should analyze each business process and devise for it the best combination of real-time and asynchronous functions.
Three Ways to Integrate Real-Time Tools
Companies have begun to move formerly separate interactive tools, such as telephony and video, onto the IT infrastructure that supports e-mail and file sharing. This convergence enables the various technologies to support each other better, and allows users to interact more naturally in the context of increasingly network-centered business activities. Convergence will also overcome the difficulty companies have today in integrating collaboration tools with software-based workflows. Three types of consolidation will make this vision of convergence a reality:
- Real-time applications will increase the breadth and scope of their functions.
- Real-time and asynchronous collaboration tools will integrate more tightly.
- Presence and workflow interfaces will give these tools more hooks into content, transactions and business applications.
Breadth and Scope of Functions: With real-time collaboration maturing rapidly, you can commonly find offerings that bundle text chat, presentation delivery, screen and application sharing, co-browsing, and remote-control functions. More than one vendor has also added presence awareness and voice or video over IP. The lines between IM, Web conferencing, videoconferencing and the telephone are blurring. Some vendors combine these through full code-level integration, whereas others link them through a common interface – for example, by combining a Web-based presentation channel with traditional videoconferencing technology. As applications mature, linked and hybrid solutions will give way to full integration.
However, the value of combining real-time media in any given interaction eventually reaches a limit. The more functions you add, the more power, bandwidth, infrastructure and company resources they consume. At some point, the cost of adding richer functions outweighs the extra value they provide; at that point, the interaction has reached its optimum value. Similarly, new technology that does not meet human needs is a wasted investment.
Real-Time/Asynchronous Convergence: Real-time tools will converge with, not replace, asynchronous collaboration technologies, because the latter possess valuable qualities. Although it can take longer for a user to get an e-mail than an IM message, e-mail has higher persistence because the interaction is managed and logged within a server. By 2009, 80 percent of tools that support collaborative work will incorporate asynchronous and real-time capabilities in the same application or suite (0.8 probability). Presence, integration and the ability to move between media will become core characteristics. For example:
- An IM communication would be translated into a persistent discussion thread so that team members could use it for reference or comment later on.
- An audioconference could be transformed into a piece of information so that others could build on it over time.
This combination of real-time and asynchronous features reflects the way people actually work. 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 (see Figure 1). Institutional memory can expand beyond the formal document repository into the real-time arena as more collaborative activities are recorded and stored. This provides an audit trail for legal and regulatory uses and turns real-time interactions into content that can be mined for business intelligence and decision support. Real payoffs in this area, however, will occur only after effective audio and video search tools become available.
Presence and Workflow: IM's awareness of other users' presence online has not received enough attention outside the context of the narrow chat environment. Even basic presence benefits you if you postpone phoning a person until his or her screen name reappears online. The simple ability to have a direct phone conversation rather than leaving a voice mail will save time and money. 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 into other applications and the wider IT environment, where it functions as a human resource locator and access mechanism.
A workflow application can choreograph a complex business process – for instance, ordering tests for a hospital patient. Several different departments will be involved (radiology, accounts payable and so on), and a human will have to take action at certain points. At each point, the workflow system may have a choice of several people who could perform that action (say, reading the X-ray), and the presence function would allow the system to identify those people and alert the one radiologist who is in the best position to perform the task at that particular moment.
Obviously, presence and other real-time capabilities need to be integrated with domain-specific business applications, such as the hospital's clinical decision support system, financial applications and the like. In other companies, real-time tools may link with customer relationship management (CRM) applications and enable operators to find the right technician to solve a client's problem or get a manager's approval needed to complete a transaction. SAP, Oracle and other business application providers are already building these capabilities into their software, and line-of-business applications will routinely incorporate at least presence and IM functions by year-end 2007 (0.8 probability).
Using Real-Time Interaction to Support Business Processes
Most business processes will require more than one type of collaborative interaction, and they should complement each other. Some of the interactions will extend outside the enterprise, so you should take into account partners, suppliers and customers. Most importantly, strike a balance between the level of interaction and the degree of productivity needed for each process – for example, you won't need videoconferencing for every employee in every collaboration.
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 standardized processes or do ad hoc work? Use this information to set your goals for real-time collaboration.
- Choose collaboration tools that support the goals and functions of each team. Match the tools 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 don't 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 CRM. 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.
KEY FACTS
A high-quality audio and video interaction can provide much of the value of a live meeting, but combining the interaction with a shared repository of subject matter and putting it into a process context can push it beyond the value of an ordinary meeting.
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00125252, Lou Latham, 11 April 2005.
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