By Dawne Shand
IntraNet, 2/23/98

So much for your company intranet serving as a simple document repository. If it hasn't already, it'll soon be tackling bigger and better things, such as a collaborative teamwork.

Talk of bringing collaborative applications into the enterprise is far from new. It's just that intranets elevate such discussion to a higher level.

That's because intranets can foster truly participatory environments that provide business users access to all the information they need to do their jobs, as well as access to each other. It doesn't matter if the collaboration is unstructured, allowing people from different functional areas to share ideas; voluntary, encouraging employees to contribute their thoughts to affinity groups; or targeted, facilitating communications among geographically dispersed team members. Intranets can handle it.

New products, complete with interactive features such as those typical of Internet-based newsgroups or America Online chat rooms, make the intranet increasingly capable of meeting the wide variety of collaborative needs within a corporation. The products allow you to bring shared observations, discussion forums, chat capabilities, conferencing and team workspaces onto an intranet.

Collaborative packaging

Vendors are packaging these five basic collaborative techniques as separate tools or integrating them into business-focused applications. Here's a breakdown of each type of collaborative capability.

Shared observations

Because an intranet can potentially reach so many users inside and outside the company, adding features that structure a dialogue between different groups is a powerful means of soliciting input. Hewlett-Packard Co., for example, used this collaborative function to revamp how sales and marketing folks relayed information to each other.

Through its Electronic Sales Partner (ESP) program, HP provides salespeople with a structured template to fill out on the quality of each marketing piece. With this feedback, product marketing can continually improve its work based on inputs from the field, says Steve Baker, who manages ESP for HP, in Cupertino, Calif.

"Before, if salespeople had comments on marketing collateral, they would have no idea how to route that information among 700 marketing people," Baker notes.

Adding a shared observation feature often requires that a company define new business processes to support these interactions.

Such was the case at one large telecommunications company when it decided to bolster a sales-support intranet with information on competitors' claims and counterclaims. The application required processes for routing inputs to a newly defined specialist who would be responsible for analyzing the information and distributing alerts to field sales. The development of this collaborative intranet forced the company to think through the source, routing, validation and distribution of what is simply an e-mail-enabled form.

Discussion databases

In a joint survey with Network World (see sidebar), we found that discussion databases are fairly popular on intranets. Twenty percent of survey participants said they make significant use of discussion databases on their intranet, while 42% indicate that they make limited use of the feature.

Discussion databases let people contribute thoughts on a particular topic at any time and from any place. Within a discussion database, the topic, subtopics and user responses each have headings and the dialogue is structured as an outline of different headings. Users then can drill down into the responses of particular interest or search across the database.

Buckman Laboratories International, Inc., a specialty chemicals firm in Memphis, Tenn., identified discussion databases as a way to improve customer service. Its idea was to form communities of experts dedicated to finding innovative solutions to customer problems.

At any time, a Buckman Laboratories employee can post a question to a discussion database on an intranet, called K'Netix, and get a response from anyone within the organization, including President Bob Buckman. One person converts discussion threads into documented solutions.

Unfortunately, well-managed discussion forums, as at Buckman Laboratories, tend to be an exception. It is easy to let discussions continue without ever coming to consensus or drawing a conclusion. Rarely is anyone assigned the task of culling through and synthesizing comments. The value of this feature declines if users see that nothing comes to fruition from their inputs.

Rather than assigning a person to handle the threading task as Buckman Laboratories did, you can use niche discussion database products, such as Soft Bicycle Co.'s Consensus @nyWare, and team workspace applications that merge survey and decision-support features within discussion databases. These products allow users to review everyone's comments and then cast an informed vote.

Chat

Chat allows users to exchange text messages almost instantly, simulating dialogue that happens during face-to-face meetings. This feature, based on the open Internet Relay Chat protocol, also is known as "instant messaging.''

In our survey, 53% of intranet managers said they plan to implement some degree of chat functionality. Most companies bring chat onto their intranets so virtual teams can meet.

Management consulting firm Booz Allen & Hamilton, Inc., for example, uses chat to bring together experts discussing emerging topics of interest to clients. The Financial Service Corp., which provides services to a network of 1,400 independent financial consultants throughout the U.S., is experimenting with chat to document meeting proceedings for legal purposes.

One drawback to using chat on an intranet has been that these online events have had to be scheduled in advance. AOL-like, spur-of-the-moment chats weren't possible, as there was no way to know who was logged onto an intranet and available for question or comment.

But new products, such as Ding! Enterprise from Activerse, Inc. and ichat, Inc.'s Rooms, now package the AOL "buddy list'' concept as a feature for intranets. Pristine Capital Management, for example, uses Rooms to provide a continuous stream of investment advice to customers over an extranet.

Conferencing

Conferencing is differentiated from other collaboration tools by its ability to provide disparately located users a way to interact in real time. Conferencing tools package collaboration features, such as chat and discussion databases, with audio or video capabilities and a whiteboard. A whiteboard lets different users mark up a document and share comments and revisions.

Real-time document collaboration rates high on priority lists for the next 18 months, according to our survey. It surpassed push, intelligent agents, content agents, chat rooms and wireless broadcast.

Distance learning has fueled the use of conferencing tools such as Symposium from Centra Software, Inc. The University of Tennessee's College of Business, for example, is using this Web-based training tool on its intranet to provide courses for a new Physician Executive MBA program. Symposium combines audioconferencing with intranet collaboration so users can hear a teacher's instruction, use a shared whiteboard and check their progress.

Some conferencing products, such as Conferease from Outreach Technologies, offer an intuitive way of scheduling and conducting conferences so users don't need IT's help. Conferease, for example, integrates audio communications with real-time document collaboration over an intranet.

Many intranet managers find that videoconferencing is not a critical application, especially if the audio and data collaboration capabilities are adequate. That's a good thing, because videoconferencing over the intranet is still too expensive and complicated for most companies, experts say.

Shared workspaces

Shared workspaces enable electronic teaming by integrating collaboration features, such as chat and discussion, with document management tools. These applications allow a defined team with set objectives to manage all of its interactions and documents in one place. The result is a comprehensive archive of a project's evolution. As project-based teams made up of mobile employees become more common, these tools become the glue for making this work style feasible.

Integral, Inc., a Boston-based firm that provides product development consulting to a global clientele, standardized on a Lotus Notes platform because it saw the potential of its shared workspace, TeamRoom, to jump start a knowledge management initiative. At any one time, Integral employees were engaged in 10 to 15 concurrent projects dealing with related problems across industries.

"We knew that any one team would benefit from understanding what other teams were doing in similar areas. By providing teams with a way to manage documents and facilitate group discussions, we knew we could look at work across teams to extract and publish best practices more easily,'' says Jeff Elton, a principal at Integral.

But Integral ran into several problems. Intuitively categorizing the mountain of documents that every project team generates proved difficult and some users resisted using the technology, for example.

Shared workspaces do not necessarily require complicated technical training. However, most businesses find that electronic teamwork is very different and requires a commitment to instituting new processes and support roles.

Many companies find that an upfront investment in training on effective work practices is crucial. The American Association for Retired Persons (AARP), for example, developed collaboration methodology, user training and named "process advisors'' to support virtual teams as they used Changepoint Corp.'s involv Intranet, says Tony Habash, IT analyst for the AARP, in Washington, D.C.

Managing the implementation

For intranet collaboration to improve business performance, it needs to be built on a foundation of clearly defined business objectives and a design and implementation approach suited to achieving those objectives. Collaboration can foster a fairly random exchange of ideas between two functional areas, such as sales and customer service, or purposely support global teams. Implementing the correct tool does not ensure that collaboration will happen seamlessly.

Managing the new information flows that stem from intranet collaboration means paying careful attention to support requirements and incentives for sharing this information. HP attributes the success it has had with ESP in large part to the fact that the support group responds to requests and feedback within 24 hours. With-out defined roles and processes, this information would never be acted upon effectively.

In many cases, companies find it necessary to establish new support roles in the business unit. These rarely require additional staff. In Integral's case, for example, providing a team workspace coincided with the introduction of new knowledge management roles. Knowledge center managers became responsible for helping teams use the tool and being aware of other teams working on similar projects.

Collaborative intranet tools make it possible for team members to contribute from any place and at any time. However, it also requires a commitment to using each feature to perform specific tasks. Discussion databases serve a different communications goal than a conference whiteboard. Helping users make this distinction requires forethought and training.

Technical trends

Leading-edge computer solutions provider Olivetti Ricerca, in Ivrea, Italy, was among the first companies to create a collaborative intranet application. In 1995, Olivetti integrated highly structured software project documentation libraries with topical discussion groups. Its intranet provides an environment in which 600 engineers can learn about project innovations and discuss emerging trends in IT.

As tools such as Ding! or Consensus @nyWare are integrated into intranet applications, companies will be able to create increasingly sophisticated applications as Olivetti has done.

At the other end of the spectrum, the same collaborative features are rapidly becoming available in prepackaged intranet applications. A shared workspace is a combination of collaboration tools packaged with a specific business goal in mind: the support of electronic teaming.

This trend will enable companies to take advantage of intranet collaboration potential much faster. For example, Changepoint's involv Intranet met 90% of the AARP's collaborative needs out of the box, Habash says.

Another trend boosting intranet-based collaboration is the increasing availability of rentable and self-service applications. These services, by easing IT's burden in setting up and maintaining the applications, make collaboration more accessible to the general user population.

Among the collaborative services available for rent from Internet services providers is Lotus' Instant!TeamRoom, a scaled-down version of TeamRoom. Self-service applications include Changepoint's involv Intranet, Instinctive Technology's eRoom and Outreach Technologies' Conferease.

But be warned: Though the range of options available for integration or for packaged collaborative applications will increase, IT groups will face implementation problems outside their immediate control. Intranet collaboration engenders a greater need for supporting business processes. Defining these and making it clear how best to leverage the technology will remain the biggest obstacle to making intranet collaboration a reality.