The Evolution Of Collaborative Tools

JEFF PAPOWS, PRESIDENT, LOTUS

DEVELOPMENT CORP.

In the early days of Lotus Notes we, at Lotus, often

felt like we were crying in the wilderness about how important collaborative computing

tools and groupware were to business communications and productivity. The hardest part was

getting business leaders to understand what the terms meant. We define collaborative

computing and groupware as the advent of document-centric, unstructured, knowledge-based

applications that foster simultaneous collaborative computing which, in turn, accelerate

user and corporate productivity rates manyfold.

hspace="0" width="117" height="227">What a difference 10 years makes. From Lotus'

perspective in the waning months of 1997, groupware has not only been firmly embraced by

major enterprises throughout the industry worldwide, but is also rapidly converging with

messaging and the Web into one inseparable piece of infrastructure. Not only are we

rapidly approaching the 20 million user mark for Lotus Notes installations, but the

biggest players in the global software market have weighed in with psuedo-competitive

offerings.

A Paradigm Shift



As we consider future product directions to meet this evolution, it's an oxymoron for
industry vendors like us to conceive of investing in separate topologies to deal with the

convergence of these three critical technologies. And if one considers the value and

complexity curve that we've climbed as an industry over the last three years, it's quite

stunning. It was only about two and a half years ago that most of our email experiences

were either host-based, meaning System-370 products like PROFS, or mid-range products like

All In One-based, and/or file sharing-based, with products like Microsoft Mail, cc:Mail or

others. But today, that evolution is rapidly shifting to a second generation of client

server advanced messaging systems that facilitate collaborative computing.

It wasn't long ago that messaging was the

carrier pigeon for a range of attachments. Somebody had to give idea to attach a world

processing file or a presentation graphics file, or some other business object to a mail

message. It was user-driven rather than a product of some centralized IS department. As a

result, the average size of a mail message in the course of the last 30 months has gone

from 4 K, on an average, to something close to 22 K, due to the ubiquity and propensity of

our email to be the carrier pigeon for this range of business attachments. There's still a

lot about this that's going to change very materially, as well.

With the advent of collaborative computing,

rather than using the mail message as a carrier pigeon or a transport vehicle, the

document became the central container for an entire class of business objects. It wasn't

simply objects like text files that were sent, but rich documents that were differentiated

by many fonts, colors, sound, or video. The richness of the information sharing experience

exploded because of the diversity and robustness of the media and the data types that

could be found in a document. Today, with Internet explosion, and its revitalization with

the advent of products like Netscape Navigator, the Universal Resource Locator (URL) has

become the most ubiquitous data type of all. URLs have begun appearing in virtually all of

our documents. It was brilliant go-to-market strategy on Netscape's part that made the

Navigator browser grow at the staggering rate that it has achieved. Practically everybody

downloaded their first browser. No one bought it. It just became freeware.

This has given millions of us the

capability to click on a URL and be immediately launched in space, to some other context,

to some other time, to some other server, in short, to the tremendous wealth of

information and contacts on the Internet. While considering how tremendous a technological

advancement this has been, it's also important to remind ourselves that the topology has

to be consistent as we jump from one source of information to another. The users drive the

propensity of all of this change, and we can't anticipate in advance either what the mix

of their operating systems, clients, or servers will be on either side of the firewall.

And this is even more of a given outside firewalls. Neither can we predict the rate of

growth or change that will occur within their infrastructures.

So, the important thing is to invest in an

infrastructure which deals with the convergence of these technologies, and build as much

strength and mission criticality into those infrastructures as possible. But as we reflect

upon how the industry got to this point, we've gone through a significant evolution since

the seventies. During that time, the bulk of our focus as an IS industry was on backoffice

automation. It was the era of big iron and big systems. Hierarchical databases were being

replaced by relational databases. We were focused on things like automating payroll and

general ledger systems. Interestingly enough, although it's a little self-deprecating to

admit, it was this period in the mid-to late-seventies that our companies received their

greatest RoIs from IT as we were automating those manual tasks. For the most part, we

haven't seen RoIs of that nature since then.

And as the PC moved out of hobbyists'

basements in the eighties, with the help of desktop productivity tools from companies like

Lotus, we rapidly shifted to the advent of the frontoffice.

The 'Virtual' Environment



We're now in a period in the nineties that has focused on what I would describe as the
'virtual office'. All our quaint definitions of office or enterprise, which encompass in

many cases the organizations in which we work, are crumbling into virtual teams, virtual

organizations-even virtual companies in some respects-as we merge our computing paradigm

outside our firewalls and directly connect our suppliers, our customers, and in some

cases, our competitors. With the advent of the virtual office and the graphical user

interface layer in the Web, our entire computing paradigm has evolved far beyond what had

been predicted, and irrevocably changed for the better. The system architecture that is

allowing 'virtual offices' to exist in this manner is one based on network computing.

Network computing is driving 24 percent of

the CAGRs in business today, and what we traditionally refer to as backoffice and

frontoffice computing paradigms are driving about 7 percent of the industry's growth,

which will top $ 1.3 trillion this year. It's also important to note that 15 percent of

that growth is coming from embedded microelectronics devices, which brings about a whole

additional thrust in the advent of things like universal messaging, as things like our

messaging and our mail systems merge and the client devices that we potentially

interoperate with become more ubiquitous. We used to think about dumb terminals or PCs,

and now of course the birth of the NC. But, it's the advent of things like smart

telephones and PDAs for the first time that are becoming a significant and a serious part

of this business.

The Knowledge Management



An important subset of network computing that speaks to the practical application of the
vast wealth of collective data being captured and managed by collaborative computing

technologies is Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management is simply the conversion of

tacit knowledge, our corporate or institutional learning in memory, to explicit knowledge.

The important issue here is the use of technology to capture the inherent learning that

goes on in our corporate cultures ubiquitously as we progress. If we don't find a way to

capture and harness that collective knowledge, it will never be captured, stored, or

served to people in any useful manner. And, especially in our industry, it's that

intellectual capital-our human assets-that walk out of the door every night that we care

most about. They represent the biggest chunk of our investments. But, what is the process

for making this Knowledge Management workable and returnable in our companies? It's about

creation, it's about the ability to employ tools, to build a sort of infrastructure that

captures information as we move forward, and the corporate discipline to codify all this.

It's about the application of this knowledge for specific corporate purposes. And is about

the technology that allows for its universal distribution: technologies like search

engines, datamining capabilities, an ability to move and manipulate this information

quickly.

It's also about the 'occasionally

connected' computing metaphor and technologies that we are becoming dependent upon in

collaborative computing, like replication. An easy example is how rapidly the travelling

business knowledge workers are adopting personal data assistants that can easily capture

and update data (mail in particular) over standard phone lines or wireless means. The

payoffs are obvious: accelerated cycle-time for decisions, real-time training and enhanced

skills, reduced R&D costs, increased worker independence and empowerment, enhanced

customer relations, and improved products and services.

For example, Nokia recently sought to

operationalize what it calls the notion of 'democratizing strategy'. This is a very

diversified company with large, global operations producing about $ 33 billion in annual

revenues. The CIO there had the notion of what would later be called 'future watch team

rooms'-knowledge bases that were spread around 18 different sites where they got

information from the market about changes in the nature of the competitive frame of

reference in that particular part of the world, aggregated back to a centralized database

every night, and shared with the part of the corporate staff that dealt with all of the

annual planning cycles. Part of its beauty was that it was never more than a few days out

of date. Ultimately, it led to the building of a future watch database for the board of

directors. It became a way to establish listening posts throughout the marketplace, where

soundings could be taken on a regular basis, gathering latest information on the

competitive dynamics of their particular business. That's a real form of knowledge

management at work today.

Similar circumstances at Chrysler Corp.,

which is made up of a lot of independent brands and lines, whether trucks of passenger

cars, led to the creation of what it called Engineering Book of Knowledge (EBoK). This was

about common manufacturing processes that were relevant not just to trucks, but to cars

and other things, because the construction of subcomponent processes for doors or

dashboards, in some cases, were irrespective of models. And in automotive manufacturing,

70 percent of the parts that go into the cars we buy are outsourced. So, this became an

important part of their Knowledge Management process. Important because it netted them, in

the model year 1996, $ 1.2 billion in savings and reduced manufacturing and subcomponent

costs, while accelerating time-to-market in certain lines and models. $ 1.2 billion!

That's Knowledge Management.

These are the results of collaborative

computing maturing into the age of network computing. It's an incredible journey from

where I sit, and one where we've only begun to see the real payoff for the global

marketplace.