Chapter 1: Groupware - The Changing Environment

By David Coleman

ISBN# 0-13-727728-8, Copyright 1997, 720 pp.
Now available through Prentice Hall

1.10 Some Case Studies in Collaboration

Different companies have different uses and goals for implementing groupware. The following case studies have been chosen to illustrate some of the principles we see in evolving organizations today. We have case studies from several areas of business including manufacturing and service organizations. Each case study has a common thread...collaboration, and how it enabled a critical evolution within the organization which was necessary for success.

1.10.1 Re-engineering for the Virtual Organization

Leveraging knowledge is one of the most critical functions in a consulting organization, after all, knowledge and experience is all they have to sell. This case study shows the "right" way to self re-engineer. Decathlon Systems is a 30-employee, UNIX-based groupware vendor in Colorado. In order to reduce overhead and provide better client service, they re-engineered their own organization with groupware. Decathlon’s solution was to use groupware to create a “virtual organization.” Decathlon products are run in-house on a SCO UNIX server and consist of e-mail, group calendaring and scheduling, group resource management, cooperative document editing, and personal information management tools.

Before the re-engineering, all Decathlon employees worked in one 6000 sq./ft. office. After deploying groupware, the entire Decathlon staff telecommutes. They maintain a 500 sq./ft. office for staff meetings, get-togethers, and customer demonstrations. The office is used to house the central groupware servers for the company. For Decathlon, this was an inexpensive and trouble-free process. All the employees were enrolled in the transition process and provided input during a six-month period prior to the rollout. Decathlon's primary advantage was that employees were already familiar with the software, and only new hires required training. The only re-organization related expenses related to network and telephone infrastructure upgrading which amounted to a few thousand dollars. “The transition cost us less than one month’s rent would have been,” noted Bob Williams, Decathlon CEO.

Bob goes on to say, “There have been many advantages to distributing our organization: people are more productive, morale is better overall, we have saved on overhead and commute time for employees. Even though we have only been doing this for a short time, my estimate is that we are saving 30% on our overhead. We found this works especially well for our technical people who often work at night. We have assigned people to be available at certain hours so there is always coverage.” Decathlon is still structured with departments, but they are moving to a team structure, coordinating through e-mail and their software’s conferencing facility. Each team works with a prime government contractor. However, the requirements are often multi-disciplinary. To deal with the issues of cross platform support, training, and complex customer issues, all account management is done by teams.

All aspects of implementation for the client are accomplished electronically. All account knowledge is in a repository. Other team members can review the account activity and status if, and when, the prime sales person is not physically available. Additionally, problems of lost or unacknowledged mail and other client-related information are eliminated because the groupware’s forwarding functions resend the mail to another team member if the lead account representative does not respond within a specified time.

Williams admits that although security has not been at issue so far, it could be problematic in the future. Therefore, Decathlon maintains two parallel servers—an internal server and an external server in a firewall configuration.

What is unusual about Decathlon is that it is a small company. Most studies about companies adopting groupware indicate that groupware is being used by larger organizations, usually having over 1000 employees and that it has not yet been embraced by smaller organizations employing fewer than 100 unless the smaller organization is required to do so by a large enterprise partner.

1.10.2 Doing Groupware Right

A good example of an organization which successfully overcame the organizational challenges of using groupware is General Foods. This project was a successful because General Foods was able to learn from a prior failure. The systems manager, Bob Sickles, was successful because he was aware of these challenges and worked both with the technology and the organization to overcome them.

General Foods has 4000 people at its headquarters in White Plains, NY. Trying to schedule meeting can be not only frustrating but a waste of time. It got so bad that Bob Sickles, Systems Manager for Dinners and Enhancers Division (110 people), created a video called "Nightmare on North Street: The Scheduling Monster." This 20-minute video detailed the frustration and efficiency of scheduling a meeting at General Foods in a humorous way. It was just one of the things Bob did right in integrating groupware into General Foods successfully.

Success often grows out of failure. Five years ago General Foods tried to implement an electronic scheduling program with PC clients and a VAX server. It failed miserably. "It was too much of a behavioral change," said Sickles. "People were not used to having their PC on and running the whole day. Now with e-mail so prevalent, keeping the PC on is standard. If you are not on e-mail, you can't do your job."

Bob first found a champion in top management; Jim Cook, who is responsible for both TQM and Information Systems at General Foods. Next, Bob went one step further and got buy-in at both the staff and at the secretarial levels, so the middle managers who would use the scheduling software heard good things about it from both above and below. Taking both a top-down and a bottom-up approach proved to be a successful strategy for General Foods.

After hearing about the initial failure to introduce electronic scheduling systems, Bob realized he would have to change people’s behaviors, overcome their fears, and competently train them to use the system in order to have a successful rollout. A decree from the division president stating that everyone must attend the two-hour training session for the scheduler was also helpful.

To tackle the specter of fear, Bob asked the staff about their anxieties. The most common concerns were loss of control of personal calendars and a fear that they would be inundated by meetings because they were now easier to schedule. Bob finessed these fears with a two-pronged strategy. First, he rolled the product out in a phased manner and only gave it to specific functional groups to start. These were groups that had considerable contact with everyone else in the division, so the word spread that these fears were unfounded. The second prong of the attack was to publicize the success of the project. He wrote articles for the company TQM newsletter about how much time the scheduler saved in the initial pilot tests and how easy it was to use. The word got out, and the fears evaporated.

Finally, Bob made sure it was fun. He used the video to poke fun at the current process and get buy-in from the whole division, so that when rollout occurred he was only fighting technical battles, not organizational ones. Bob realized that he was dealing with not only a technology but behavioral changes on the part of the division. They had successfully rolled out Microsoft Mail a year before and it had become the predominant way to communicate in the division. Bob was part of the company-wide TQM effort, and in the spirit of TQM he did a survey before, and after electronic scheduling. He found that the time needed to schedule a meeting was reduced by 74% from 5.1 hours to 1.4 hours by using Network Scheduler 3.0. Average actual time to schedule a meeting (the actual number of work minutes needed to schedule a meeting) was reduced 71% from 19.5 minutes to 5.6 minutes.

General Foods has had a LAN for two years, and Bob's division is one of the first to be up and running on a LAN. There is a 386 or 486 PC running Microsoft Windows on every desktop of this 110-node LAN Manager/Token Ring network. The current groupware products in use at General Foods are Microsoft Mail and Network Scheduler 3.0, They are evaluating the use of Lotus Notes and other bulletin board systems to access market reports and the on-line clipping service.

When asked about his secret to success, Sickles stated, "The TQM focus on measurement and the customer, as well as thorough planning helped us in the long run." Sickles was not looking for a quick fix and was willing to invest the time up-front to deal with the users of the technology. He had the support of his management and was able to train managers and administrative staff to adapt to their new roles. He used the lines of communication within the organization to allay the fears of the users and publicized the project widely within the company, both to help spread information and to focus the division's and the TQM's program on the project.

In our view, Bob learned from General Foods' prior mistakes and was rewarded with success in the form of a dramatic productivity increase. For those of you considering similar projects, learn from Bob's success. Plan well and reap some groupware successes of your own!

1.10.3 Groupware for Competitive Advantage

Bullivant, Houser, Bailey, Pendergrass & Hoffman, a Portland law firm, uses groupware not only to save their clients legal fees but to extend their organization to include their clients. “ Clients often want reports at periodic intervals. This is an expensive process for the clients and time consuming for our lawyers,” noted Don Evans, COO at Bullivant. "Rather than reporting to clients on a regular basis, we can change the process and bring the client into our organization. Using groupware, the client can examine documents in the working file or database, so the reporting time goes away. This can save the client up to 20% of their cost."

Although the major goal of Bullivant’s program was not cost savings, they have received some return on their investment. Bullivant invested $250,000, to purchase Lotus Notes software and build a suite of custom applications to support their lawyers and clients. Training costs were low due to the design of the application, but maintenance and support costs ran up to $100,000 per year. Including these expenditures, actual cost savings include $50,000 in redundant data entry in 1993 alone. Another $75,000 in savings was expected in 1994.

"The biggest benefit we have seen from this system is the intangibles," explains Evans. This application differentiates Bullivant in the mind of the client. "We can now measure how long it takes to resolve a matter, which has raised the level of consciousness on the client side of how much it costs to work with Bullivant. From the client's perspective they want their problem resolved quickly and inexpensively. This system lets them track that and see how well we are doing."

The next case study profiled, Oticon, is a good example of how teamwork and the groupware tools to support it helped a company turn itself around and become very profitable in a short time. What made Oticon’s effort successful, were three things; they were ready for change; they had clear direction and support from top management; and they used good tools to help proliferate and leverage knowledge while building a knowledge architecture for the organization.

1.10.4 Oticon: Re-organizing for Better Customer Service

Oticon A/S of Copenhagen had a customer service problem. Their customers were elderly and not receiving the kind of service they needed. Oticon was taking too long to get new products to market, morale was low, and profits were down. Oticon wanted to use groupware to not only enhance the quality of their products but to re-organize to better meet the needs of their elderly patients.

Oticon's goal was to improve responsiveness to customers by decreasing the amount of time it took to process paperwork. They set a goal of a 30% productivity increase over three years.

To accomplish this rate of return, Oticon re-engineered their IT systems and organization simultaneously. Oticon’s reorganization was focused around greater customer contact and greater contact between employees. Oticon examined a variety of groupware technologies like electronic mail and video conferencing but decided to use a group document and image management system tied to workflow software, all from Recognition Technologies as their solution. Cultural changes, such as a customer focusing on the abolishing departments, assigning all employees to multiple projects, and decreasing the layers of management, all contributed to turning Oticon around.

To show their commitment to the new technology and organizational structure dramatic changes were made at the first point of contact: the mail room. All incoming mail, except critical documents, was scanned and the originals were then shredded and employees could view the shredding process through a transparent tube installed in the employee cafeteria, providing The immense volume of paper providing a visual and continuous reminder of Oticon's commitment to greater efficiency through less paper.

Oticon estimates that the paperless system and new workflow methods allowed them to bring products to market in half the time (relative to their experiences during the previous two and a half years). Paper storage was decreased by 70%. Oticon easily reached their goal of 30% productivity efficiency. This is not the radical re-engineering proposed by Dr. Mike Hammer and Jim Champy, authors of Re-Engineering the Corporation, which looks for a 70-100% change after re-engineering a business. Expense reduction directly attributed to the system and organizational change is 10-15%. They have decreased employee turnover and cut costs by 15%, sales have increased by 20%. All of these changes have impacted the bottom line positively, resulting in increased earnings of 500% from 1992 - 93.