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Group Decision Support Systems and e-Meetings By David Colman
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For many years I have talked about the three factors necessary for any type of collaboration: content, context and process. In the past I have talked about the emerging category of e-meetings. E-meetings as a category has evolved out of a number of collaborative technologies: IM, Virtual Team Tools, and Web Conferencing (see figure 1 above). These tools like web conferencing are great at sharing content within a specific context, but do little to support meeting process. The question is how are GDSS tools part of e-meetings? E - meetings characteristics and features are listed below. Characteristics
Features
Both the ability to improve or optimize the meeting and the ability to provide a template or methodology for that optimization are an integral part of e-meetings. But we have yet to see an e-meeting vendor (see list below) that has incorporated some of these meeting process tools into their software to provide meeting structure and optimization.
There are a lot of these meeting process or Group Decision Support Tools (GDSS) available, and this technology has been around since the ‘80s. It never caught on because it required not only an investment in new infrastructure and technology, but also required a large behavioral change from all those participating in the meeting. These tools help to make better decisions, faster and usually include such functions as: voting or polling, brainstorming, mind-mapping, categorization of ideas, weighting and statistics, anonymity and the ability of a meeting facilitator to use the software to enhance the meeting. Some of the vendors that today offer such tools include:
Our Hypothesis It is our hypothesis that these electronic meeting support tools will see a resurgence; as e-meetings as a category starts to heat up. We also see that e-meetings could be the killer collaboration application. Not quite to the extent that e-mail has been adopted, but certainly to a greater extent than the penetration of asynchronous collaboration tools. Between them MS Exchange and IBM/Lotus Notes/Domino have about 100 million users, and most of those use these tools for e-mail rather than for collaboration. One of the features missing is the Presence and Status of those you want to interact with. E-meetings support often ad-hoc interactions between small groups of people to work together. E-meetings can also be scheduled, and because they are persistent (they provide a secure virtual space to store documents, conversations, etc.) they offer a greater level of value than IM, Virtual Team Tools, and Web Conferencing. Add in the process piece for optimizing meetings and you have something really interesting. If you couple that with a common user interface such as a "browser" or Outlook, cut down the learning cycle to almost zero and enable people to collaborate within the normal business tasks and processes they do every day (no big behavioral change required) and we think this stuff will start to catch on. We Are Not The Only Ones A few months ago Microsoft purchased PlaceWare, their entrance into the Web Conferencing market. Microsoft is no stranger to real time collaboration, as they have released at least three versions of NetMeeting, which is part of the Windows OS. In addition Microsoft has SharePoint Team Server and a new server (code named Greenwich) will support enterprise IM. "Think of what we're doing in this world of real-time communication and collaboration when you have audio, video and the network coming together. Web conferencing is very important, but it's just the beginning of this wave." "there is a great opportunity for people to have a real time communications platform within their company, and that's code-named Greenwich. But think of it as a real time communications server. It builds on the SIP platform and gives you instant messaging and presence in secure environments, and people build on that for solutions." Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Business Group But we believe that Microsoft actually sees the bigger picture and possibly the fact that e-meetings could be the next killer app in collaboration. Microsoft sees collaboration from the Office Desktop: "to take off on how people can use SharePoint services as the grassroots collaboration mechanism and how Office being integrally tied into that can facilitate that capability." Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Microsoft's Information Worker Business Group If Jeff Raikes and the VP actually in charge of the collaboration group at Microsoft, Anoop Gupta do actually see this bigger picture than Microsoft may be gunning for the e-meetings space. If so expect to see some process oriented acquisitions from Microsoft this year. David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies LLC and the editor of "Inside Collaboration". He is the author of two books on groupware, and many of the monthly Hot Tips on the collaborate.com Web site as well as this newsletter. He welcomes your comments, questions, and requests, and can be reached by e-mail at davidc@collaborate.com, on AOL Instant Messenger at davidc121, or by telephone at 415/282-9197.
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