Technology : underpinning collaboration with presence

 

There is no doubt that effective collaboration is a major influence on corporate performance. A Frost & Sullivan report entitled Meetings around the world: The impact of collaboration on business performance quantified this influence by factoring together elements such as collaboration technology and an open culture to create a collaboration index. The index contributed 36% to corporate performance compared to strategic orientation, which contributed a mere 16%.

 

The need for better collaboration and its impact on business is becoming increasingly clear to companies adopting flexible working practices. “You have mobile workers and home workers, and those that you don’t employ on a full time basis,” explains Clive Longbottom, Head of Research at analyst Quocirca. “You have to bring those people together in some way or another, and you’re going to need some form of technology to do that.”

 

 

Collaborative technologies break down into real-time and non-real time tools. Real-time collaboration technologies such as instant messaging (IM), advanced voice over IP systems and videoconferencing can all be tied together using a unified communications system that provides multichannel communication opportunities to groups of people who need to interact remotely.

 

The linchpin of real-time communications is presence information, which developed in the late 1990s as part of the consumer-focused IM sector as a means of telling whether a colleague was online or not. Presence as a basis for unified enterprise communications is still at the bottom of the growth curve, according to an Information Week survey published in February. Presence was widely used in just 13% of the 250 companies surveyed, and effectively used by a few employees in only a quarter of the respondents.

 

“Companies have two approaches to dealing with employee collaboration,” says Pierre Hanoune, Collaboration Strategy Director, Orange Business Services. “One is they can sit back, and let employees sort it out themselves, like what is often done today with Instant Messaging services and software telephony, or they can get proactive and design a collaboration infrastructure that does what the employees need it to do, but also addresses things like security, consistency, and interoperability.”

 

A number of solutions are now available that allow voice and other communications channels to be integrated into a unified communications system. These include Orange Business Services’ Business Together with Microsoft, which allows users to communicate over both synchronous and asynchronous channels such as a voice, instant messaging and email through a single interface.

 

Presence information is still evolving from its roots in the IM world, says Rob Gray, Product Manager for SharePoint Technologies within Microsoft. “We are still limited by the fact that you have to mark yourself as busy,” he points out. But things are changing as other collaborative software tools help automate the setting of presence information. “Do it by integrating things with your calendar, for example. If you’re in a meeting it will mark you as busy.” It is important to integrate presence across all channels to indicate that a person can be reached on one communications channel, such as a mobile phone, even if they are not available on another, such as IM.

 

 

While integrated suites help to solve the unified communications problem, the set of interactive tools commonly referred to as Web 2.0 is breathing new life into asynchronous collaboration. Traditionally, email was the primary asynchronous collaboration tool, but thanks to the development of new tools such as wikis, things are changing.

 

Wikis are easily-created systems of web pages editable from within the browser. John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox PARC and a speaker on Web 2.0 tools, sees value in their use as a grass roots knowledge management tool that can be set up at a workgroup or departmental level to quickly manage information for ad hoc projects.

 

“If you go back to the notion of creative projects as ways that many companies are organizing themselves, then what tool could be better than a wiki?” he asks. The same potential lies in blogs, social networking tools, social bookmarks and community ranking systems. Many of these technologies, which like IM-based presence have their roots in consumer-facing sites, are now being packaged into corporate bundles and in some cases pre-loaded onto hardware to create collaborative appliances.

 

But these tools are just the first steps in a more advanced set of collaborative technologies. The virtual world ‘Second Life’, today used mostly as a consumer-focused entertainment service, allows real-world participants to build and manipulate objects in a highly scriptable 3D environment, using 3D avatars to represent themselves. Now, people are exploring its potential as an environment for collaboration, hosting everything from online conferences through to design workshops.

 

Clearly, the technology and practice of collaboration is evolving. Smart companies will marry these tools with their own innovative processes to produce new ways of working together remotely that bring unimagined productivity benefits.