Collaboration: All Together Now - ' Page 2 '
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The market
The market is at once expanding and maturing, consolidating and converging.
Stay focused on your own strategy.
The market for collaboration technologies is really two markets, at least for
now. The first involves synchronous, or real-time, tools (such as Web conferencing),
which typically bring people together over the Internet for a particular event—say
a strategic planning session, sales training or a project kickoff meeting—and
provide all of the communication tools necessary to support the event. The other
market includes what's known as asynchronous tools. These include electronic
workspaces that allow people to share documents, files, project plans, calendars
and the like in the same online place, though not necessarily at the same time.
Bulletin boards and blogs, which allow people to share thoughts and ideas on
a particular topic over the Web, are further examples of asynchronous collaboration
tools.
Over time, these two categories of tools will converge onto a single platform
and will be served up in different flavors by a handful of vendors. Some of
this convergence will take place through consolidation. Smaller vendors with
a particular specialty, a two-year-plus development lead and a loyal user base
will prove attractive targets for large vendors looking to kick-start their
collaboration play or fill out a platform or suite.
Meanwhile, a number of previously separate markets, such as those for document-
and content-management systems or project lifecycle management systems, are
now being recast as collaboration technologies. Vendors within these multitudinous
segments bring their respective biases to the table. As Mark Twain said, "To
a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." While vendors such as Open
Text and FileNet Corp. view collaboration tools as a opportunity for pounding
on document-management issues, Oracle Corp. takes a "big picture" approach,
emphasizing the importance of databases in collaboration. Enterprise application
vendors view collaboration as a way to hammer out exceptions and problems that
arise from otherwise automated production processes. CIOs, faced with a growing
blitz of collaboration marketing hype, need to be ever mindful of these biases
and stay focused on bringing in only those collaboration tools that satisfy
the needs of specific groups of users and business processes.
Barclays Global Investors, a San Francisco-based asset-management firm, is typical
of organizations trying to strike the right balance today. In 2001, BGI began
using the CollabNet Inc. environment, a collaborative software development platform
from Brisbane, Calif.-based CollabNet Inc., in order to bring together IT developers,
project managers and business users from around the world. CollabNet helps BGI
manage its extensive internal software development effort, from defining requirements
to version control of source code to quality assurance and change management.
According to Paul Stevens, global head of technology for BGI, "Having a collaborative
platform for all of our stakeholders has sped up software development. It improves
communication. It improves understanding." BGI also uses other collaboration
mechanisms, including Intraspect (since acquired by Vignette Corp.), which allows
users to set up online workspaces for sharing and storing documents and other
unstructured data.
For now, however, these various tools, all of which can be used by a single
employee, remain separate and unintegrated. At some point, Stevens would like
to link these different collaborative spaces together, but he's not just sitting
around and waiting for that to happen. "We began using these tools and standardizing
on a small number for now. The convergence will be easier because of the knowledge
we've gained along the way." Meanwhile, BGI users are left to sort out when
to go where for what, with some help from IT. "We have to clarify what we put
where and train people to use different tools for different situations," says
Stevens.
Ask your enterprise architect:
Can we wait for the enterprise suites to get better, or should we go for the
best-of-breed packages now?
Ask your current vendors:
How does your technology support collaboration today, and how will that change
over the next three years?
Ask potential vendors:
How will your applications co-exist with dominant players entering this market?
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Enterprise Technology 
