One of the most fundamental advances in the IT landscape during the 1990s was the emergence of integrated enterprise applications like SAP, Peoplesoft, more recently Oracle Applications, and so on.
For the first time, companies could design their core business processes in such a way that they were integrated yet flexible. Basic work processes were automated.
Yes, we all spent an enormous amount of effort getting these environments in, and they still present issues to this day, but I saw this shift as unleashing an enormous amount of productivity and competitiveness from the companies that made the investment.
As we sit today, you wouldn’t try any run a good-sized company without an enterprise application suite that implements your core business processes. It’s table stakes.
But the world has changed in the last decade.
What’s the next "enterprise app" that will unleash the next order-of-magnitude productivity from our companies, and how will it change the competitive landscape?
Some would say it's the SOA versions of what we're doing today.
I have a different perspective.
How We Work Has Changed
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but how most of us work has fundamentally changed. For the most part, we and those we work with are knowledge workers, not process workers.
Anything that can be made into a process has been largely automated, outsourced or off-shored -- or will be very soon.
We live in a flat world.
If someone elsewhere in the world can do a task better (or cheaper) than us, we’re forced over time to make them part of our business model, or risk a competitive disadvantage from failing to do so.
What do we do today?
We think.
We collaborate.
We analyze.
We discuss.
We organize.
We communicate.
We work as teams of experts and decision makers.
Today, the working model seems to be layer upon layer of value-add on top of facts.
Someone runs a report, and adds their commentary.
It goes to several people to drive a discussion of what to do. More information is needed, more reports and more interpretation and commentary.
A team is assembled to look at the recommendations, and suggest a plan. The plan is discussed at different levels, with a different kind of collaboration. The plan is approved, the team is assembled and work begins.
Status reports are shared. Different members of the team are tapped for expertise. The group of people grows or shrinks depending on where the project goes. More frequently, outside vendors are brought in who are now part of the mix.
While all this is going on, there are people who want to know status, current activities, outstanding issues, and so on – who may not be direct members of the team.
After a while, the team develops organizational learning about what it found out, and wants to share that knowledge for future efforts.
This is work in the 21st century.
It’s a very different style of work than we saw in the last decade. And we’ll see more of it going forward.
How We Use Information Has Changed.
Ten years ago, gathering and analyzing the data was the primary focus.
Today, collaboration and workflow is the primary focus.
The value-add has shifted to what we do with the facts, rather than the facts themselves.
Drilling down a bit, we notice a few things.
First, the information types we are using are mostly rich content: reports, presentations, memos, emails, spreadsheets, meeting notes, status reports, and so on.
They’re usually not neat little rows sitting in a transactional database.
Second, there are workflows, but they are a mix of informal and formal processes.
They morph, change and evolve depending on where the journey goes. I call them collaborative workflows. They’re not neat and nice flowcharts that you might see around how you process a purchase order, or buy a box of paper clips. They’re fundamentally different.
Third, the group of people involved will change and shift as the effort grows, shrinks, evolves, and maybe takes on a different focus. There’s not a defined roster with clearly delineated roles. Team participation and roles are entirely situational and very dynamic.
This isn’t last decade’s ERP and enterprise apps. And it ain't SOA.
This is a very different style of value generation in modern organizations – one we’ll see more of in the future.
And IT will need to think about things differently.
The Beginnings – Email and Shared File Systems
We all started out that way. We communicated via email. If we needed a place to put things, we got a shared file system we all could see. If IT couldn’t help us, we went outside the company.
Nice, but it felt like we were using very primitive tools to try and do very sophisticated things. The tools hold us back. And, for the most part, many of us still live in that world.
Natural Evolution – Groupware and Collaboration Environments
I got pretty involved in a Lotus Notes project in the mid 1990s. Cool stuff at the time. And I’m sure we’ve all been exposed to groupware and collaboration environments such as Documentum’s eRoom, or Microsoft’s Sharepoint.
They demonstrated the value of collaborative environments, but it became pretty clear from my perspective that they were missing some important elements.
First, there was no organizing mechanism across multiple uses of the collaboration environment. Every team did their own thing, and before long, you had Notes sprawl, or Sharepoint sprawl, or eRoom sprawl. There was no ability to reuse what one team had done for the use of another.
Second, there was very limited ways to create sophisticated workflows that worked the way people worked. We need to meet to discuss this topic. Someone has to make a decision. We can’t move forward until other pieces fall in place, where are they? We need to get more people involved.
And so on.
If the collaborative group was small and self-sufficient, things were OK. Trying to collaborate at scale, and work with the rest of the enterprise at the same time – well, that took some extra effort.
There were some power tools missing as well.
Enterprise search – what else does the organization know about this topic, and how can it help me?
Tying into our day-to-day tools like Outlook and email in a natural and intuitive way.
Being able to set up virtual meetings as part of the workflow where these things naturally flow, rather than require a different set of tools and processes.
Management and status reporting as an integral part of the workflow and collaboration environment.
The ability for non-core team members to “drop in” and see what’s going on. Or maybe you’re working on something sensitive, and you need to audit who’s seen what.
The ability to pull data from legacy systems as needed, and so on.
The Next Step?
ECM – Enterprise Collaboration Management
Yes, this is a play on words.
There’s a defined category out there already known as ECM – enterprise content management – that came at the problem from a different angle – managing the content better to create additional value.
Think web content, automating paper-based processes, creating repositories, and the like. Great market, growing fast. EMC’s Documentum is the lead technology in this category.
But along the way, Documentum evolved some pretty strong collaboration and workflow capabilities. The ability to do useful enterprise search. The ability to work with all sorts of information types and legacy systems. The ability to integrate seamlessly into the desktop environment that many of us use, Microsoft Office. And more.
What we have here is the next generation use case – addressing the need for enterprises to collaborate effectively and at scale. Work the way people want (and need to work). Provide centralized control and efficiencies of scale.
And – surprisingly – I saw a significant number of customers “take the plunge” in 2006. They did wide-ranging enterprise Documentum implementations – not for traditional content management, that was a by-product – but for enterprise collaboration.
I think they saw what I’m talking about. Maybe they can articulate it better. But, bottom line, they decided to get ahead of the curve.
[for a very articulate perspective from the KM – knowledge management – community, check out this link. Yes, you have to register, but if you’re this deep into this post, it’s time to do a bit more research, no?]
The question is – how many more will take this perspective in 2007?
And is "enterprise collaboration management" the killer enterprise app for this decade?
Good article. I wrote a few on ECM and Planning here:
http://www.scanguru.com
Posted by: Steve | March 04, 2007 at 12:34 PM