FT.com / Technology - Doing what comes naturally

FT.com / Technology - Doing what comes naturally

Doing what comes naturally
By Alan Cane

Published: November 20 2007 14:44 | Last updated: November 20 2007 14:44

People collaborate naturally; the internet has simply added a new dimension to this most human of characteristics.

“If collaboration hasn’t happened in the past, it’s mostly because barriers got in the way – geography, time zone, position in the corporate hierarchy, language and so on,” says Graham Oakes, founder and head of the IT consultancy Graham Oakes Ltd. “Most technology does not really help collaboration so much as reduce the effect of barriers.”

These technologies enable individuals and groups to communicate easily across time and space, sharing data and the “same version of the truth”.

Jen Wachtel, senior product marketing manager for Vignette, a collaboration tools developer based in Austin, Texas, says that, to her, collaboration means “allowing people to connect across their organisations where before they were siloed by geography, department or status.

“It enables omnidirectional communication. Products get to market faster because the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ enables you to make quicker and smarter decisions.”

Not everybody agrees, as will become evident later in this article, but there is, nevertheless, a cornucopia of collaboration software tools on offer, ranging from the large and complex to the small and simple, from the heavily professional to the consumer-oriented.

Dassault Systèmes’ Enovia product set represents the top end of the market. It is used by Boeing to co-ordinate the design and production of airliners, most recently, the US aerospace group’s giant 787 Dreamliner.

John Squire, vice-president of Enovia marketing for the French software group, says supporting the development of the 787 is the most complicated commission Dassault has undertaken and “uses everything we have”.

Boeing describes it as a “global collaborative environment”. Mr Squire says it is a way to bring together the 40 partners sharing the risk of creating the 787.

“It’s the people who build the engines, the fuselage components, the avionics and so forth,” he explains. “Three years ago, before the airplane ever existed, Boeing could bring all the parts together in a three-dimensional digital model and ensure they fitted together before they had to worry about manufacturing those parts. They could check for tolerances and conflicts between parts early in the development phase when the cost is much lower.”

Mr Squire says the trick in collaboration is to allow engineers to have access to the parts they are responsible for, allow them to see the parts around it, but deny them access to parts for which they do not have clearance.

“We use 3D as the universal language. Even if you don’t speak the same language as a Japanese engineer, you can share the screen with the guy and point to a problem area. Using a few words of broken English over instant messaging you can communicate what needs to happen.”

Dassault 3D software is used to collaborate in the design of everything from airliners and rocket engines to yoghurt cartons and mobile phones. At the other end of the scale, there is a growing market for simple collaboration tools using nothing more complex than the telephone and a web browser.

MeetingZone, for example, a fast-growing UK-based company, has introduced a high level of automation, and therefore economies of scale, to the simple concept of conferencing by telephone coupled with screen-sharing over the internet.

Tim Duffy, co-founder and chief executive, points to the disadvantages of conventional business meetings: “No one has the time, no one wants to put up with the expense and inconvenience of travel and everybody is looking to reduce their carbon footprint.

“We think good collaboration tools that enable people to do business without travelling are vital requirements for most businesses these days.”

While still small, MeetingZone, Mr Duffy says, has achieved 67 per cent average annual growth for the past three years, suggesting his analysis is accurate.

Sun Microsystems, the US group whose server technology underpins much of the internet, prescribes collaboration and takes its own medicine with a full set of collaboration tools.

According to Heather Garrett, head of human resources for Sun in the UK, the intention was to enable staff to work any time and anywhere. She says the result has been a 30 per cent improvement in productivity with impressive savings on travel, real estate and a lower carbon footprint. Sun staff are in favour of electronic collaboration, she says.

Ten years ago, the company started with a collaboration site, a shared work and information space, and added a collaboration dashboard, a way of tracking progress in projects, so individuals can see what has been achieved and what has yet to be delivered.

Jay Huff, head of Sun’s UK marketing department, says the company has taken to wikis in a big way. A wiki involves software that allows users easily to create, edit and link web pages. According to Wikipedia, the Delphic oracle on all things wiki, they are: “often used to create collaborative websites, power community websites and are increasingly being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective intranets”.

This is their function at Sun, where Mr Huff says all the company’s engineers and systems architects work in a wiki environment. Wikis are also popular with the marketing people: “Wikis are where we talk about work in progress so we can get feedback quickly,” Mr Huff says.

“The aim is to stop the tremendous amount of e-mails you would normally have associated with one of these projects where everybody responds to everybody else with 20 to 30 e-mails on the same subject.”

E-mail jail is an example of the kind of dangers that lurk in the over-enthusiastic use of technology to promote collaboration. Dr Oakes, the IT consultant, warns that many people are driven to respond to e-mails and instant messages 24 hours a day. “Eventually they will burn out and be lost to collaboration altogether,” he comments.

“This happens because they have not developed ways to control the technology – it is controlling them. Helping people take back this control, perhaps by developing appropriate etiquette within their networks, is probably necessary for most companies to push collaboration to the next level.”

Sun Microsystems is unusual in that its management encourages – but does not mandate – staff to make use of social networking sites such as Facebook, Ning and Twitter where it makes sense to do so – to distribute information before a conference, perhaps, or photographs of attendees.

There are dangers, of course. Global Secure Systems, an IT security consultancy, faced spending several thousands of pounds upgrading its internet access provision until it discovered that about a quarter of its bandwidth was being swallowed up in social networking: “After locking down this traffic, we found we didn’t actually need to upgrade our bandwidth after all,” says David Hobson, GSS managing director.

He now advises his clients to block access to social networking sites. “They are just trouble all round and have no place in the modern business environment, even during legitimate staff breaks,” he said.

However, Scott Petty of Dimension Data, an IT services group based in South Africa, argues that social networking sites, used carefully, are both valid and necessary business tools.

He says: “Our younger engineers straight out of college are much more comfortable with tools such as Second Life and Facebook than senior managers. They would think we were quite a strange company if we didn’t allow
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007