At the root of any enterprise or encounter involving more than one human being is communication. It is the primary source of ones and zeros that traverse networks, with exponentially increasing volume as companies are driven to communicate and collaborate across time, space and cultural boundaries.
E-mail is by far the dominant collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic within organizations. I call it communications acceleration. Real-time collaboration, such as instant messaging, live Web conferencing, and screen or document sharing, creates an environment for faster decision making. Whether the decisions turn out to be good is more related to the quality of the communication rather than the facility of instant interaction.
One of reasons real-time collaboration has significant advantage over asynchronous mode is the higher bandwidth of the communications. In my interview with collaboration guru Simon Hayward, a vice president and research director at Gartner, he talked about how real-time collaboration recaptures the immediacy of face-to-face communication and more easily establishes trust and rapport among team members.
With video conferencing, you receive body language and facial expression input. Instant messaging and e-mail don't offer the same visual cues, but they have other means of accelerating communications. Instant messaging and chat services, for example, foster a kind of shorthand communication, replete with emoticon faces to express various states of being. Messages are typically more concise and allow for rapid back-and-forth dialog. For many companies, instant messaging has become a vital communication link as a first line of defense for communicating alerts as well as for group collaboration. Instant messaging also serves as a presence and identity platform, indicating who is online and possibly providing other information about participants.
In many cases, instant messaging isn't the most appropriate medium for resolving issues, especially those that require deeper consideration. The phone still offers very high bandwidth communication and e-mail is more appropriate for longer online dialogs if face-to-face contact isn't possible. According Hayward, instant messaging is growing deep roots in corporations--70 percent of employees in corporations use it, much of it unsanctioned by management. Some companies have instituted policies to ban instant messaging. The problem has been the lack of security, archiving and manageability in the consumer versions of instant messaging applications from AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as abuse of the tools that results in lost productivity. Your friends and family are a mere click away, which isn't much different than the telephone, but it can be far less obtrusive than voice communication within a corporate setting.
Over the last several months, AOL, Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo have revealed plans to sell enterprise versions of their instant messaging services that match the capabilities of business-oriented products like IBM's Lotus Sametime and a host niche enterprise instant messaging products. Sun Microsystems plans to release a standalone instant messaging server product within the next few months.
However, broad adoption of enterprise instant messaging will be held back by a lack of interoperability among the various services. If you deploy Yahoo's instant messenger, for example, you won't be able to communicate with partners and customers who have adopted AOL's or Microsoft's. AOL has started testing a connection of its enterprise edition with Lotus Sametime, including software that allows a company to monitor and control its use among employees.
Solving the interoperability question, especially among the big three, is a business issue, not a technical one. They don't want to level the playing field, but locking in customers to proprietary formats isn't a way to help users. Instant messaging is an application that should be built on open standards and Web services.
Beyond all the teeth gnashing and political battles around instant messaging, Hayward pointed out that real-time collaboration features are being integrated into collaboration suites. The suites, which are built around e-mail and calendaring, now include real-time tools such as instant messaging and Web conferencing. Microsoft is developing Greenwich, which will include instant messaging, peer-to-peer voice and video conferencing, and voice over IP. Oracle is pushing its Collaboration Suite as an alternative to Microsoft and IBM/Lotus offerings, and portal vendors view instant messaging and Web conferencing as core features in their offerings. IBM's WebSphere Portal includes Lotus Sametime portlets, for example. In addition, newcomer Groove Networks provides real-time collaboration in its virtual workspace.
However, Hayward believes that the current crop of collaboration suites is destined to undergo radical change in the next few years. "By 2007, service-oriented architectures using Web services will emerge as the mainstream software architecture, signaling the end of the 40-year domination of the monolithic software application," Hayward said. The idea is that you will be able to build your own collaboration suite by combining components from a variety of vendors. I don't buy wholly into that scenario. While Web services will provide more flexibility and interoperability, you'll still look to a single vendor for licensing, support, and a better chance that the components you deploy continue to work through upgrade cycles.
Hayward cautioned that the bigger issue around collaboration for enterprises is cultural. Collaboration brings teams of people together from different regions, departments and even companies. They also bring different skills, perceptions and capabilities. You need to have a formal collaboration strategy that helps create the right environment, as well as the right applications and team members. Training is essential for breaking down barriers and setting expectations. Guidelines -- such as a general idea of what constitutes an urgent message --need to be established.
However, creating too much of a formal environment can stifle team dynamics, Hayward said. That's a key point. The tools may be very capable, but creating an environment that motivates people to collaborate is the challenge. It means the difference between teams that succeed and those that fail.
Tune into the Webcast of my conversation with Gartner's collaboration expert Simon Hayward. Tell me about your experiences in using enterprise instant messaging and real-time collaboration. Leave a message on ZDNet's TalkBack forum or e-mail me at dan.farber@cnet.com.
