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To collaborate, according to The American Heritage Dictionary is "to work together, especially in an intellectual effort." If I asked you to describe how you collaborated on work twenty years ago, you might paint a picture with a corporate meeting room serving as the backdrop. Comfy chairs, a big conference table and a dry erase board with a rainbow of colored markers may quickly come to mind. You may describe how you brainstormed with colleagues to spark new ideas and to review project progress. In years past, great business ideas were the product of these very meetings.
Business today continues to be dependent on successful collaborative efforts. Collaboration still involves working together by combining the intellect and varied experiences of employees, partners, customers and vendors. I personally think there is still value in a roomful of people holding a successful meeting that results in new ideas formed through collaboration. Even in today's business environment, there is much to be gained from face-to-face communication.
However, as the speed of business communication has increased, largely due to the proliferation of the Internet, the way people work has dramatically transformed throughout the past few decades. Further impeding upon in-person collaboration is the fact that today's businesses are widespread. Businesses that span continents, target global audiences and encourage telecommuting have seen the demise of most boardroom-type meetings.
A snapshot of collaboration taking place in businesses today would be much different. Technology has made collaboration possible in even the most dispersed enterprises. Browser-based applications like EMC Documentum eRoom enable workers from different departments, locations and companies to work as if they were in the same location. By providing a single, secure environment to coordinate project activities, collaboration technologies are able to bridge functional, organizational and geographic boundaries.
This issue of The AccuView focuses on the value of collaboration technologies and the convergence of people, processes and content through these technologies. We have also provided additional information about eRoom, which we can integrate into a complete content management and collaboration solution for you.
Where are the majority of your collaborative efforts taking place? If your great ideas are on a whiteboard just waiting to be implemented or erased, it's time to release them from the confines of the boardroom. Call us at 615.242.7226 to discuss how to put today's best collaboration technologies to work for you.
Best regards,
C. Roy Payne
roy.payne@accuimagellc.com
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Document collaboration is something companies do every day, albeit not in the most effective ways. Think of the documents you've passed to and received from members of your team and other departments, or e-mails you've sent to and received from colleagues in other locations, asking for feedback. These methods provide you with the input you need, but not in an organized, cohesive manner.
In fact, in most organizations, employees spend up to 25 percent of their working day on non-productive, document collaboration-related tasks. Businesses risk much more than poor performance by not managing the production of their high-value business documents, and the time has come for document collaboration to move on from simple intra-company collaborative exchanges to more sophisticated inter-company collaborative experiences.
Through a document collaboration system, when implemented as part of a robust enterprise content management solution, individuals now have the power and opportunity to link up in networks of peers to cohesively produce goods and services in a very tangible and ongoing way.
Every organization that creates documents - budgets, presentations, reports, spreadsheets or other documents - recognizes that collaborative efforts are required. The growing accessibility of information technologies puts the tools required to collaborate, create value and compete at everybody's fingertips. This liberates people to participate in innovation and wealth creation regardless of their location. The new promise of collaboration is that, with web-based peer production, we will harness human skill, ingenuity and intelligence more efficiently than anything we have witnessed previously.
Web-based tools have become the preferred way for knowledge workers to communicate and coordinate with each other. In today's workplace, people tend to execute independently within distributed teams. These teams need to work closely, productively and creatively toward common goals and deliverables. They need to plan, collaborate and make decisions as they design and build new products, coordinate their supply chain, work with external clients, and pursue other key business initiatives. Collaboration technologies that leverage the ubiquitous nature of the Internet make all this possible.
Sources: Computer Business Review, Federal Computer Week and Integrated Solutions
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In the rush to tie together the back office, many companies have automated and increased efficiency between software systems while paying little attention to an equally important area: the interactions between the people responsible for running projects and processes. Many of the back-office technologies that focus on system-to-system collaboration fail to acknowledge the interpersonal processes, the "air gaps" that require human intervention and interaction.
Astute companies now recognize that by increasing efficiency on the front line, where knowledge workers plan, manage and execute a company's core business initiatives, they can dramatically drive down costs while accelerating and improving the delivery of new products and services. Collaborative applications have emerged to help people become much more efficient in their daily tasks, enabling them to seamlessly collaborate on projects, programs and processes, and eliminating the gaps that put pressure on profitability and time to market.
Improving the Way People Work
Companies cannot succeed by working in isolation; they are increasingly dependent upon external organizations for the support of critical business processes. For example, manufacturers work with contract manufacturers and strategic suppliers; pharmaceutical companies work with contract research organizations and joint-venture with other companies to share risk and accelerate delivery of new drugs; and companies across all industries work with consultants, marketing firms, auditors and the like. It's clear that collaboration is rarely limited to the four walls of an organization. It was for that reason that collaboration technologies were designed to transcend functional, organizational and geographic boundaries, enabling companies to improve the quality and efficiency of enterprise knowledge work.
Highly flexible collaborative technologies enable people to work together toward common goals, deliverables and outcomes, both within the enterprise and beyond. Distributed teams and external entities (such as partners, suppliers and customers) can work closely, productively and creatively to plan, strategize and make decisions as they create new products, coordinate their supply and demand chains, engage clients, and work on other key business initiatives.
Collaboration has evolved beyond simply providing groups with shared access to documents. Companies engaged in complex initiatives have realized that running collaborative projects efficiently requires far more context, structure and organization than a basic shared network drive can deliver. This condition is only compounded by the fact that projects often span departments, divisions and corporate boundaries.
At the same time, projects have become the common element of any work activity, and the building blocks of strategic programs and other business initiatives. For this reason, companies also began recognizing the need to manage their projects as part of a connected portfolio of initiatives in which processes and protocols can be centrally administered, projects can be justified and approved before they're funded and implemented, and issues and opportunities can be rolled up and centrally managed as part of a broader program. Managing a portfolio of initiatives, therefore, requires the ability to understand the value and risk associated with every project that has been proposed or is underway. And that requires the ability to quickly view key project information that enables strategic decision-making.
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To enhance the benefits of a collaborative solution, many companies have begun to consider a system that integrates collaboration and enterprise content management (ECM) features. Web-based collaboration and ECM were traditionally independent, standalone categories. But many organizations are now seeing an opportunity to combine these technologies as the foundation of an integrated "knowledge infrastructure" to support distributed project work and the management of content throughout its entire lifecycle.
Collaboration and ECM naturally complement each other. Documents, discussions, annotations and other objects are the input and the output of most collaborative work processes and can proliferate rapidly in a productive environment. This unstructured content represents valuable knowledge that can be leveraged across the enterprise, allowing users to benefit from existing best practices and reuse lessons learned. For those reasons, collaborative content must be managed just like any other knowledge asset: it needs to be captured, retained, classified and made accessible within multiple applications.
That's the traditional realm of ECM systems, developed to address the need to secure, control and retain all types of content. And in a growing number of industries, content is subject to strict regulatory standards, conditions and rigorous compliance issues that govern how it's managed and controlled over time. An ECM solution allows organizations to meet these requirements.
A system that combines collaboration and ECM should provide a seamless relationship between the less structured upstream aspects of the content creation (including the informal phases of brainstorming, collaborative creation and other creative processes) and the more structured downstream aspects of how content is managed, published and archived. By deploying a combined system, companies get the structure and control they need for managing content along with the flexibility, ease of use and context they need for effective collaboration.
Source: EMC Documentum
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EMC Documentum eRoom is a secure, web-based workspace that can be quickly tailored for a specific project, process or business initiative. With eRoom, your employees are better able to plan and manage their projects and associated processes. They can reduce their reliance on e-mail and work more securely with others across the enterprise and collaborate easily with external partners, suppliers and clients. Additionally, they can leverage the benefits of a web-based, feature-rich collaborative environment to more readily develop innovative products, deliver world-class services, and optimize their most critical business processes.
Key Features and Benefits
Mobilize the team and get people going right away. Kick off a project by selecting people from the directory and inviting them into the eRoom workspace. eRoom sends an e-mail invitation and hyperlink. Because it integrates natively with Microsoft Office, Outlook and other desktop applications, users can leverage eRoom immediately, saving their business files directly in the workspace for others to view.
Easily manage and coordinate multiple projects at once. The dashboard feature of eRoom provides project and program managers with instant visibility into a variety of important information such as events, tasks and status, across multiple eRoom workspaces. You can also use your portal environment to display key eRoom project elements along with other important application data.
Communicate instantly with team members. Install eRoom Instant Messaging Integration Services and leverage the power of instant messaging within the eRoom environment. Team members will be able to communicate instantly regardless of location, respond more quickly to critical project issues, and alert each other of important updates to project information.
Create a project plan for your team. Create tasks and milestones, assign owners and deadlines, and begin executing right away. View task relationships and interdependencies with Gantt chart views and enable team members to update their own progress as well as report on the status of task groupings or the entire project.
Discuss issues and make decisions faster. Hold real-time, on-the-fly meetings - great for dealing with issues, planning, and group editing of files and documents. Create a threaded discussion to deal with complex issues. Use dynamic polling to drive consensus on open issues.
Keep everyone in sync - no matter how large the team or how complex the project. Use instant or daily notifications and alerts to keep everyone updated. Enable team members to remotely access key project information online and work on it offline.
Share and finalize important documents safely and efficiently. Use full-text search to locate and reuse documents or data, then employ version tracking to maintain a history of changes for each document, without losing iterative versions. Quickly configure a multi-step approval process to get sign-off on important documents and deliverables.
Roll up key project information. Use an enterprise overview to provide top-down visibility into a larger portfolio of connected project records.
Complete projects faster and improve work processes. Use standard eRoom templates as the starting point for new workplaces. Or use your own eRoom workplaces as templates for future projects, leveraging a saved repository of plans, procedures, discussions and proven solutions. In either case, projects move to completion quickly and users improve their own processes with each project - all without assistance from the IT department.
For more information about eRoom, or any EMC product, please contact us.
Source: EMC Documentum
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AccuImage, LLC is a systems integrator that empowers their customers with solutions designed to gain the maximum value from their information at every point in the information lifecycle. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, AccuImage specializes in the design, installation and support of document and content management systems, forms processing solutions, and electronic workflow systems. The company offers hardware and software from leading companies - AnyDoc Software, Böwe Bell+Howell, Canon, Captaris, Captovation, EMC Documentum, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Kodak, Kofax, Panasonic, Plasmon and Verity - as well as consulting, document conversion and professional services.
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