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Do your far-flung users want to communicate as if they share an office? Here's how they can team over the Internet. By Ian Lamont E&Y team members, even if an ocean apart, can collaborate as readily as if they were sitting in the same conference room. They can exchange messages, share documents and jointly mark up whiteboards on their monitors using Lotus Notes and Sametime instant messaging applications. The old-fashioned way, namely using telephones and e-mail, is too limiting for the 70,000 E&Y employees, says John Whyte, chief information officer at the firm.  "Try coming to an agreement on the verbiage of a legal contract with a team of lawyers and engineers representing multiple interests using only the telephone and e-mail," he says. "You can spend weeks sorting through fragmented e-mail conversations or individual phone calls and voice mails."
Real-time chat is a fairly new means of collaboration for the company. E&Y considers Sametime's instant messaging features vital to the team-building and decision-making process, Whyte says. "We use chat to enable those 'Hey, I was just thinking . . .' spontaneous type of meetings that occur when people pass each other in the hall or wait for a hazelnut latte to brew," he says.
E&Y's ongoing Sametime rollout, which began early this year, was prompted by the growing popularity of AOL Instant Messenger among employees. "They were using AOL because it was free, easily downloadable and required little to no training," Whyte says. "This was a clear case where new technology enabled our business people to be creative in service delivery to our clients. We as technologists saw that and turned 'chat' into a fully supported, robust corporate solution."
Team players
While E&Y remains ahead of the collaborative curve, virtual teaming expert Jessica Lipnack is convinced we're at the brink of a workplace revolution. Improved Internet-enabled features of collaboration applications, combined with the frustrations of more traditional communication tools, will provide the fuel, says Lipnack, co-author of Virtual Teams: People Working Across Boundaries With Technology and co-founder of virtualteams.com, a management technology consultancy in Newton, Mass.
People need to be able to make decisions and resolve conflicts online, as well as provide leadership, assign tasks, exact accountability and facilitate meetings. "All the stuff we do naturally face to face, we have to be able to do online," she says.
Collaboration applications, besides allowing real-time communications among far-flung workers, provide for better organization of ad hoc information, Lipnack says. "It's possible to visualize the work that needs to be done, all the time, by everyone, regardless of where they are, so you are absolutely sure you are looking at the latest version of something. Without that kind of visualization capability, you are kind of lost," she explains.
 If you're thinking about introducing collaboration tools, carefully survey users beforehand, Lipnack says. "We put up a list of available technologies within [our client's] company, and say, 'What do you naturally use, what will you be willing to use, and where are you willing to endure a little bit of pain for a little more capability?'"
Once you've rolled out the collaboration tools, you've got to make sure employees use them daily, Lipnack emphasizes. "It's a discipline of posting and it's a discipline of checking," she says. "When we start to populate our online workspaces with need-to-know information, people will start to visit those workplaces, just the way they check their e-mail."
You've also got to have secure access to these collaborative applications. AOL Instant Messenger and other such applications that have grown out of the consumer Internet environment do not come with much security. On the other hand, Lotus and other enterprise-oriented vendors have done a lot to beef up security functions and to tie products into directory services for easier authentication, Hayward says.
Early problems with firewalls have also been fixed, Hayward adds. "Some of these [conferencing] protocols required the opening of different ports, and there was a lot of port-hopping going on as part of the initial handshaking. That makes firewall configuration pretty difficult and security officers uncomfortable," he says. To get around this problem, many vendors of collaboration products wrap communications as HTTP traffic to tunnel through firewalls, he says.
Implementing collaboration products at large corporations generally magnifies security issues. At E&Y, password administration is one of the most difficult challenges of keeping thousands of employees collaborating via Sametime, for example.
Bandwidth issues
Whyte notes the large number of users at E&Y also brings bandwidth to the fore. While a smaller organization might not mind a few employees installing a consumer chat application on their workstations, at E&Y a few hundred employees using AOL Instant Messenger makes an impact on network resources.
"There is no point for having the instant messaging traffic going out of our network, through our gateways and across our ISPs," Whyte says. "It's more effective to handle this internally, as we do with Sametime."
As for bandwidth-intensive collaborative applications, Whyte expresses cautious enthusiasm. "Videoconferencing and streaming multimedia are some of the most promising new technologies, but are being held back due to performance issues," he says.
Whyte notes that a mere 1-second delay can negate the effectiveness of videoconferencing. "We've all sat in those videoconference rooms annoyed by the time it takes for the camera and microphone to switch to the current speaker," he says. "These real-time collaboration tools must respond immediately to input to be truly effective."
The bottom line There is little question that companies stand to benefit substantially from Web teaming tools and techniques. Besides increased efficiency, there are significant cost benefits to be realized. Virtualteams.com's Lipnack describes massive expenditures by pharmaceutical companies, which she says typically spend $1 million per day during the production cycle of a new drug. "If the methods of virtual teaming can take one day off the drug development process, it will save them a million dollars and put them in the marketplace a day sooner," she says. E&Y's Whyte is unable to say how much his company has saved by using virtual collaboration tools, given the size and complexity of the organization. However, he is enthusiastic about the new technologies and urges other companies to see the benefits for themselves. "Should other people try this? Absolutely -- it beats traveling," Whyte says. "This stuff works," he continues. "Lifting a very broad number of people to do it is a little struggle, but our leading people work this way, and we're trying to lift a larger number of people. It's not that difficult to do, and from our point of view, it can work really well." Related links Let's work together: Some collaboration hintsNetwork World, 10/30/00. Instant messaging to grow annual 140% The corporate instant messaging market will grow from 5.5 million users worldwide in 2000 to 180 million in 2004, a growth rate of 140%, according to a report from market analyst IDC. Network World, 10/25/00. World Bank leans on Web for collaboration When an organization coordinates activities in 180 countries in an effort to foster economic growth and reduce world poverty, it learns a thing or two about the importance of collaboration. Network World, 08/21/00. Law and online collaboration Philadelphia law firm forges ahead with Web-based app despite IT staff's objections. Network World, 05/22/00. Sametime from Lotus PlaceWare Click on the link for Conference Center 2000 and you will see a free demo TeamFlow Centra Conference Caucus Virtual Teams Includes a quick tour Send this article to a colleague
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