E-mail Collaboration Blog

In the knowledge era, collaboration in business is like ecology in politics: it should not be the theme of a specific party but part of the programs of all of them! Collaboration should be a major component of any business activity, not an application by itself.

Similarily, collaboration software should not be a specific application, but a feature available in all business applications. Even further: it should be the glue between business applications. Just as a recent Forrester Study (see our recent article) showed that the future of collaboration lied in corporate IT's capacity to link the way people communicate every day with the projects they are doing for their company, the future of collaboration platforms lied in the capacity of software makers to tie together the business applications they use through common collaboration features that transcend these applications and even their vendors.

This sounds like middleware, doesn't it? Could collaboration platforms become the ultimate middleware the industry has been seeking for 15 years now, able to finally connect heterogeneous applications after the disappointments of CORBA, Web Services, SOA and Mash-Ups?

To become so, collaboration platforms need to exit their niche market of collaboration, portal or social networking applications to become infrastructure: the hub of all business applications and communications in the enterprise. But infrastructure software is much harder to sell to entreprise IT because it is much more critical than business applications. That is why it is so hard for smaller vendors to compete against the big three (Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus and Google Apps), even with products that show superior usability or functionality. This is because IT professionals anticipate that their collaboration platform will stop being dedicated to collaboration applications to become the communication hub between all their business applications.

Although this trend can be seen in the intranet, it's even more visible when it comes to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platforms, that I personally call PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) such as Azure, Force.com, Lotus Live, Google Apps, etc. These platforms offer an interface with their applications at a much higher level than Operating Systems or even Application Servers. And much of the additional functionality is about providing way to manage users and their interactions, in short, collaboration.

In the future, only a few "Business Application Platforms" (BAPs) will prevail, and I expect all of them to be available both on-premise and as-a-Service. Only the bigger vendors who can reassure their customers on the reliability, stability, security and future of their platforms will survive. Smaller vendors will have to specialize on vertical business applications that can be plugged into these platforms or on extensions that provide improvements to these platforms.

Octobre 2009 – Pour une étude intitulée « Construire le Futur de la Collaboration », FORRESTER a interviewé pas moins de 3700 professionnels en Europe et aux USA pour connaître leurs habitudes de collaboration et les besoins d’amélioration.

 

Le premier constat est une très forte intensification de collaboration à distance dans le travail intellectuel des professionnels des deux continents. 80% affirment collaborer chaque mois avec des collègues situés sur d’autres sites géographiques et 67% avec des partenaires d’autres entreprises.

 

Le deuxième constat est qu’un seul outil informatique tire son épingle du jeu et soutient 77% de ce travail collaboratif : l’e-mail. Les autres outils de collaboration asynchrone classiques (sites collaboratifs, forums de discussion) arrivent très largement derrière (17%), mais sont tout-de-même nettement mieux adoptés que les outils « Web 2.0 » (Wikis, Blogs, Réseaux sociaux) qui ne dépassent pas 5% d’utilisation.

 

Le troisième constat est que les professionnels veulent des améliorations, mais pas de changement radical. Ils préféreraient conserver les mêmes outils, mais gommer les défauts qui les font le plus souffrir au quotidien : les quiproquos, les fichiers éparpillés et les délais d’attente de réponses de la part leurs interlocuteurs. Les points d’amélioration les plus souvent cités sont la vitesse et l’efficacité de la collaboration (68%) et la clarté des échanges d’informations et d’idées (62%).

 

En résumé, souligne FORRESTER, « les répondants espèrent que demain sera similaire, mais en mieux ».

FORRESTER conclut son étude en constatant que les professionnels s’appuient toujours fortement sur l’e-mail et le téléphone pour collaborer, mais que ces outils ne satisfont pas entièrement leurs besoins. Il existe un intérêt pour de nouvelles façons améliorées de collaborer, mais que l’adoption encore faible des technologies Web 2.0 démontre qu’ils ne sont pas prêts pour cela à modifier radicalement leur manière de travailler.

 

FORRESTER recommande donc aux DSI de « promouvoir une collaboration plus efficace qui embrasse et améliore les comportements collaboratifs actuels basés sur l’e-mail, tout en facilitant l’adoption de nouveaux outils plus performants ».

I received an e-mail telling me that the Wall Street Journal featured an article strangely titled "The End of the E-mail Era": Read. You may also contact the author by e-mail at the end of the article.

This is a recurring matter and I’m looking forward to the day people will do all their project communication directly in MindUP for SharePoint’s visual discussion maps.

 

I don’t know if it’s any time soon, this other study shows that high social media consumers increase their e-mail usage faster than others... What to think? http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/is-social-media-impacting-how-much-we-email

 

Until then, E-mail is not that bad but has many downsides when dealing with group communication in business environments, and probably we can analyze rationally what’s wrong with it:

1) Attachments are duplicated and scattered, causing confusion and overloading mailboxes.

=> In project communication, we need is a way to capture the attachments, store them in a secured centralized location and replace them by links in the e-mail.

 

2) Messages arrive mixed and unsorted, making it difficult to prioritize processing and organize.

=> If collaborative messages could be identified upfront and sorted in the right project, the whole team would be able to prioritize their work and lower time and stress they spend in their e-mail.

 

3) E-mail conversations are often left hanging, as people add and remove recipients and reply partially to the others’ messages.

=> If we could structure who are the participants in a project and stick to it, and create a clear, shared vision of all exchanges for example in visual maps, it would eliminate confusion and allow identifying very quickly pending issues and decisions to make.

 

4) Members of the project have different ways to organize and manage e-mails. This prevents any complete and shared vision, expected during meetings, keeping their productivity low.

=> By sharing all messages, threads and attachments in centralized workspaces, we would create a shared vision, allowing the project to run faster with everybody on the same level of information.

 

5) When someone leaves or joins a project, it is very costly to keep the information and the members up-to-date with all the e-mails.

=> If everything was stored in a collaboration platform such as SharePoint it wouldn’t be the case. But it’s not.

 

In summary, the e-mail is a great and ubiquitous communication vehicle, but a poor place for collaboration. Maybe the solution lies in bridging the gap between the e-mail exchanges and that platform would solve that issue. That’s why MindUP for SharePoint captures and maps in a SharePoint site a project’s e-mails and attachments, event with external partners, regardless of the e-mail application people use and requiring no installation on the users’ computers.

 

And then people can choose to drop the e-mail and do everything in the platform, without having to force all their coworkers to change their own habits and do the same…