The Many Faces of Collaboration
Why documents and integration are the key factors in the collaborative equation

We tend to talk about "collaboration" as though it were something new. But it’s only the technology piece that has fundamentally changed—the song remains the same. People still need people, and fully formed strategies are almost always better served en masse.

The challenge for modern businesses is to create an atmosphere where collaboration is viewed as a positive endeavor for everyone, and providing the systems and processes that allow it to happen.

Two things are important, according to Peter Auditore, Vice President U.S. Marketing, Hummingbird USA:

One, any collaborative environment worth its salt utterly changes a business process for the better. You may begin with a narrower goal in mind, but the end-game should always be to transform the business process.

"You start with a workgroup that has a specific business process," says Auditore, "and build an information management system based on document management. This allows the workgroup to search and retrieve content, manage its records, prepare for the Electronic Information Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, whatever." (Sarbanes-Oxley, inspired by the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals, requires publicly held companies to provide access to all records-e-mail, documents, the works-and provide a secure means for whistle-blowers to report abuses—ed.)

"From that alone you will gain tremendous benefits," says Auditore. "But you shouldn’t stop there. The next step might be to portalize your new information system, personalizing the portal to make it a collaborative environment."

Once this groundbreaking work is done comes the real value. "Now you can start thinking about doing business in a truly different way. And that is what people are dealing with right now," says Auditore. Everyone is at some point on that curve, some just starting, some pretty far along. But the end game is the same for everyone. The goal is to arrive at a collaborative environment for doing business in a different way. "That’s the way I look at collaborative e-commerce—it means creating an environment that lets you do business in ways you’ve never done it before," he says.

Think about a vertical industry. Take oil companies, for example. They are organized by workgroup and conduct certain business processes. Each business process is separate and distinct, whether it’s oil drilling or records management or contract management or engineers looking at oil fields. But each needs access to the company’s multiple sources of information, which they look at and manipulate in very different ways. That’s where the application integration issues come into sharp focus. This was the original problem that MySAP set out to solve, and in doing so pretty much debuted the modern idea of portals into our business processes.

But the reality is that it is an apples-and-oranges world. SAP and Siebel regularly cohabitate the same organization, and document management (DM) systems range from the imaging-legacies and off-the-shelf DM products, all the way through to the home-grown systems-integrators’ solutions with their database DM products. "Then comes the worst nightmare," Auditore warns. "The merger or acquisition." The application integration necessary to confront this onslaught of disparate systems and applications, Auditore says, is "the biggest challenge facing IT today." That makes it the biggest challenge facing modern business today.

The Rosetta Document

The second fundamental thing to understand about collaboration, according to Auditore, is that the basic denomination in any conversation about collaboration is the document."Most business processes are document-centric in some way shape or form," he says "Take a classic CRM example. How can you possibly know everything about your customers without looking at all the e-mails? The purchase history? All possible documents that relate to that customer have to be made available. So, you need to integrate your DM system.

"Then," he continues, "you’ll want to collaborate in some way, so you integrate your collaborative environment with the document and messaging repositories. Then you’ll want access to BI (business intelligence) information. So, in this example alone, you’ve got multiple information sources that need to be aggregated and cooperatively worked on in some environment." And you’re back to the application integration challenge again.But the early work—deploying document management—is a strict prerequisite. Much of Auditore’s research has been in the basic DM arena, and to his astonishment, it is still an infant marketspace. "You’d be just amazed at how few of the world’s organizations have a serious DM system in place," he frequently inserts into conversation. "I speak at groups all over the world, and I always ask for a show of hands from those who have DM systems in place. It’s usually about 10%. Amazing."

Organizationally, Hummingbird has responded by incorporating what had been discrete applications, previously sold as standalone products, under the umbrella of Hummingbird Enterprise as a suite of components, or features.

For example, they sell Hummingbird Enterprise Information Management systems (part of the Hummingbird Enterprise suite) at the clip or two or three per month—mostly to law firms, which Auditore characterizes as "way ahead" of everybody else. "They buy into these things to support their main line of work these days, which is working in a pan-international way—multiple countries and multiple organizations, doing M&As, cutting deals and negotiations over the Internet," he says. "That’s why they like this kind of solution."

EAI—Playing Soon Near You

An overarching DM approach appeals to law firms because, like everyone else, they are scared to death about integration costs. "We ran three focus groups in the U.S., with Gartner. There were line-of-business managers, IT and CIO-types," reports Auditore. "The absolutely hands-down number-one biggest problem for all of them was integrating all their applications."

Five years ago their number one problem may have been "choosing the right applications for my company." But now they’re past that point; the applications are bought and deployed. Now their problems are more like "I need to get data from an SAP system into this process so that these guys can track pricing logic." Another way of stating that is: Now that I’ve bought all this stuff, I am under the gun to derive value from it, fast. And value is hard to measure. "The hardest things to estimate, when technology changes a business process, are the indirect benefits of it. And those are often more valuable than the direct benefits," says Auditore. "In many cases, the indirect result is an increased ability to collaborate and leverage core information resources and knowledge.

"We always do an ROI study," continues Auditore. "That’s standard. At one customer we could show that about 85% of their ROI would be direct and 15% would be indirect. Then they found out that not only could they manage records better and move them faster (that would be the direct part), but they could also distribute them among the line-of-business people within their operation. Suddenly, all the line-of-business people were optimized." (And that would be the indirect part. Which one would you bet your business on?)

The Collaboration Riddle

Collaboration, therefore, is only partly defined as "the ability of people to work together." At its most basic, collaboration is also defined by the integration of systems so that business processes themselves can "collaborate" with other