Chapter 1: Groupware - The Changing Environment

By David Coleman

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

1.15 The Future: An Architecture for the Connected Organization

Many clients and organizations we have studied have implemented groupware in pieces; e-mail in this department, calendaring and scheduling in another department, Notes over in finance... To make matters worse, the technical/MIS people don't believe in groupware at all.

We ask these clients what they are trying to accomplish. Why groupware? Yes, it's neat technology, but what is the collaborative problem you are trying to solve? And, is the chosen problem critical to the organization?

1.15.1 An Integrated Collaborative Project Management System

The ideal is an integrated collaborative project management system would use the best-of-breed collaborative products, all linked together to provide an almost seamless integration of information, process flow and accountability.

For example, after using an electronic meeting system to facilitate a specific discussion, meeting notes are exported into a Notes-like or Collabra-like database which provides an organized forum for ongoing discussion and decision making for the project. Additional benefit would be derived if those decisions were exported directly to a project management tool, like products from Digital Tools (Santa Clara, CA) or Project Gateway (Sausalito, CA). Ideally, tasks or assignments could then be imported into a workflow tool that would not only help map the project process, but enable "What if" analyses in moving around project resources. The workflow tool would also track and route tasks and assignments, with time and date stamps. Such a system would finally insure that when someone in a meeting volunteered or was assigned a task, it could be tracked through to completion and integrated into the project plan and resource management. The project would be completed, and then the cycle would begin again (see Figure 5).

Figure 1.5

1.16 Summary

This chapter covers a lot of ground on groupware and organizations. It covers definitions and a framework for groupware. It looks at the business reasons for using groupware, the size of the groupware market and justifications for groupware.

It also looks at some of the current findings in new sciences and tries to apply them to organizational evolution with groupware. A tall order. It shows that there are circumstances where imposing control on a chaotic system doesn't always work. Rather defining a knowledge architecture and giving your people the right tools, can help them engineer themselves and become a self organizing system. Groupware is an important and valuable component in a company's overall competitive strategy.