December 5, 2008

Collaboration is one of those fuzzy terms, such as “eBusiness” or “knowledge management.”

As a result, discussion about collaboration can easily result in misunderstandings and confusion.

Forrester’s definition of a collaboration platform has evolved as the market evolves:

A unified, integrated electronic platform that supports synchronous and asynchronous communication through a variety of devices and channels. Collaboration platforms deliver a set of software services that enable individuals to find each other and the information they need, and communicate and work together to achieve common business goals. The primary pieces of a collaboration platform are messaging (email, calendaring, and contacts), team collaboration, realtime collaboration (e.g., instant messaging, conferencing), and social computing (e.g., wikis, blogs,tagging, social networking, and shared bookmarks).

Promote and build communities

Sparks of innovation & product development

Connecting virtual teams

Use of My Sites and community of “experts” and colleagues who are experts

Blogs & Wikis MORE!!

Collaboration – structured recursive process where two or more people work together

Phenomenon defined by linking people together in some way

Conference CallsConference Calls

DocumentsDocuments

Video ConferenceVideo Conference

Face to face meetingFace to face meeting

Common GoalsCommon Goals

Facebook / MySpace / LinkdinFacebook / MySpace / Linkdin

EmailEmailChat / IMChat / IM

File SharingFile SharingVideo ChatVideo Chat

Discussion GroupsDiscussion Groups

Your work “team” teamYour business/corporate teamYour social networkYour sphere of influenceYour customer

An Information Workplace (IW) is a next-generation digital workplace based on portal, collaboration, content management, and office productivity technologies, plus many emerging technologies in the Web 2.0 and Social Computing space.

An IW is quite different from the collaboration, content, and portal products in use in most organizations today because it provides a role-based, contextual, seamless, guided, visual, multimodal work experience for the user.

Think about these important words for a moment. Role-based. Contextual. Seamless. Guided. Multimodal.

How many companies can actually say that the tools their information workers use every day can truly deliver this functionality? Very few.

The IW isn’t just about people at traditional desk jobs getting information and collaboration tools. It’s about empowering information workers of all types — even people in non-desk jobs.

An IW is a next-generation digital work environment that leverages portal, collaboration, content management, office productivity, unified communications, business intelligence, learning, and other technologies to deliver a seamless work experience — and, ultimately, higher levels of information worker productivity and creativity.

It’s the way it works that makes an Information Workplace special. So what differentiates an IW from, say, an enterprise portal? Not features and functions. Both an IW and a portal may deliver document management, calendaring, a blog tool, task and project management, or access to records in the customer information system.

The difference is in the way the system works. The seven tenets of the Information Workplace are: contextual, seamless, visual, multimodal — and now, with Web 2.0 — individualized, social, and quick.

Seamlessness means that people get the information and tools they need when they need them with minimal manual effort. A person can easily move from one task to the next without using ALT+TAB to switch contexts and without having to search all over for the single piece of information she needs to complete a task

Rich Internet apps (RIAs), which provide easy flow through a business process. An RIA is an application that combines the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications with those of Web applications. RIAs provide advantages over HTML-based Web applications like greater control, direct manipulation, instant feedback, effective error handling, and efficient task flow.

RIAs can be used in enterprise scenarios to create an immersive, guided experience that allows people to remain within the context of the business process in which they are involved.

In an RIA used to help manage telecom expenses, for example, the system might generate workflow driven alerts like, “The following five items appear to be wrong,” thereby guiding a business analyst directly toward items that require attention.

Social MediaKickAppsNingFacebookLinked-In

CMS/Facilitation SharePoint Wordpress Joomla Drupal

Introduction Enterprise 2.0 Evolution are the automation and accelerate the

way people work, find information and interact with each other regardless of their location

Changing face of the work place. The young work force have certain expectations of the kind of tools that they’re going to see when they join the workforce

Businesses will leverage blogs, wikis, mashups and social networking tools to help make their employees' collaboration efforts more efficient and productive in 2008, according to a Forrester Research report released Jan. 28. – From Eweek…

Using metaphors like “Facebook for the Enterprise” certainly helps tech marketers fuel hype for their enterprise technology. But they don’t help pros help their businesses become more successful.

“Notifications” and “tweets” assume more connectivity is better. In truth, networks create relational demands that sap people’s time and energy

and can bog down entire organizations. It’s crucial for pros to learn how to promote connectivity only where it benefits an organization or individual, and to decrease unnecessary connections.

Interruptions sap information worker productivity. Research suggests it takes workers 25 minutes, on average, to return to what they’re working on after an interruption. So, mimicking these services on corporate networks may actually reduce the productivity of your workforce rather than improve it.

Professional capital needs identity, reputation, and objectivity. In consumer social networks, identities can be assumed, reputation can be gamed, and objective measures of a person’s accomplishments are nonexistent.

These will continue to be defining differences between consumer and corporate social networks. While some companies experiment with actually using the Facebook site for their corporate intranet, we believe far more value will be had through the thoughtful use of enterprise social networking technologies.

Enterprise Content ManagementMake it simple to author and manage

content and documents

CollaborationKeep co-workers, partners

and customers in sync

Knowledge Discovery and Insight

Make the right informationavailable to more people

FrameworkThe core

Personal Productivity

Increase employee self-sufficiency and

effectiveness

InformationWorker Solutions

Build client and web-basedapplications with workflow and line-of-business interoperability

Search – the necessary tool for the enterpriseCan you find what you’re looking for?

Is your company agile? Can find the “expert” who has the data on the next

big innovation? Is your Sales force have the right tools to do the job?

Integration of Siebel data in a custom dashboard providing essential information and being more productive

No training required because all data is now available within SharePoint

Using Search to query information from desperate systems, web sites, intranet / Internet site

Looking at the entire solution – how far can you take it?

How to take what you’ve built and enlarge to work with all business units?

Stakeholder meetings to ensure we’re on target throughout the entire process.

Form a team that includes a project manager, development lead, business analyst lead and test lead.

Don’t forget about the business to and make sure you’re within scope.

Feedback session with stakeholders.