Collaboration in the
Enterprise: What’s new?
(1 of 2)
Anand Deshpande, Ph.D.
Founder, Chairman and
Managing Director
Persistent Systems, Pune
anand@persistent.co.in
January 2009
1

Let us salute
the brave
martyrs of
26/11.
2

Done in Collaboration with
□ Harvinder Walia
□ Queenmary James
3

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ananddeshpande
4

Disclaimers …
• This is my recreational research topic
– necessity is the mother of invention!
• Everything that I am presenting is
available on the Internet … you just
have to find it! My contribution for
this workshop has been to collect
interesting ideas already researched by
others and putting them together in
one place – this is a MashUp.
• We at Persistent are building some cool
products around these technologies.
• This is work in progress!
5

What will we discuss today?
• What’s collaboration?
• Why is it important?
• How are people
collaborating in today’s
Internet Age?
• What does it mean in
today’s enterprise?
• Future Trends that may
have an impact on how
we Collaborate?
6

Overview and Introduction
7

Peter Drucker, the
greatest management
thinker of all time,
pointed out that the
\"firm\" is a relatively
Peter Drucker Photo
recent innovation,
designed to do the
things that
individuals cannot
easily do on their
own.
8

□ A group needs only two
things to be a tribe: a shared
interest and a way to
communicate.
Human beings can’t help it:
we need to belong. One of
the most powerful of our
survival mechanisms is to be
part of tribe, to contribute to
(and take from) a group of
like-minded people.
9

Great leaders create movements by
empowering the tribe to communicate!
A movement happens when
– people talk to one another,
– when ideas spread within the community
and most of all,
– when peer support leads people to do what they
always knew was the right thing.
Ideas that spread win.
Boring ideas don’t spread.
Boring organizations don’t grow.
Source: Seth Godin in Tribes. 10

Nearly half the
Enterprises are
thinking of
implementing
a collaboration
strategy
11

As CIOs, why does your CEO want you to
implement a collaboration strategy?
□ Increase employee productivity
□ Improve internal communication effectiveness
□ Promote corporate culture and community-
building
□ Ensure compliance to internal processes
□ More effectively leverage corporate knowledge
and expertise
□ Eliminate inefficient communication tools and
habits
□ Increase user adoption and more effectively
manage technology investments
□ Create a more fulfilling work/life experience.
12

Collaboration Tools: What are they?
Web Conferencing Video Conferencing
Forums
Email
Instant Messaging
Telephone
Document Management
SMS Wikis
Blogging Micro-blogging
File, Photo, Video Sharing
13

Collaboration
tools, by
Web Conferencing
Video Conferencing
Forums
Email
definition, touch Instant Messaging
Telephone
Document Management
multiple people SMS Wikis
Blogging Micro-blogging
across the
File, Photo, Video Sharing
organization!
14

Who drives your information
agenda?
Marketing HR Communications
• Brand, look • Culture, • Who we want
and feel message, news to be
Everyone and
Web or Intranet IT
no one
team
• What is easy
• As convenient
• Standards, for them
perfection
15

Collaboration
Tools have
become the
enterprise
“glue”
16

Collaboration
Tools have
become the
enterprise
“glue”
17

How many of you use these?
Web Conferencing Video Conferencing
Forums
Email
Instant Messaging
Telephone
Document Management
SMS Wikis
Blogging Micro-blogging
File, Photo, Video Sharing
18

19

History of Email
20

Today’s #1 Mail Problem
Deal With Spam and Virus
21

□ Spam – 69.7% in October (a decrease of 0.4% since September)
□ Viruses – One in 141.4 emails in October contained malware (a
decrease of 0.05% since September)
□ Phishing – One in 233.3 emails comprised a phishing attack (an
increase of 0.08% since September)
□ Malicious websites – 5,424 new sites blocked per day (an
increase of 48.2% since September)
22
Source: Message Labs

23

Now that we have handled
spam, what’s next?
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About 60%
of the
executives
spend at
least half of
their time
dealing with
email!
25

Not much has changed with
email in 40 years!
26

From the 80s PARC system
27

From the 90s ELM/MH/
28

From 2000s: Outlook Express
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Why Email? And why now?
□ Metcalfe’s Law:
– The power of the network is proportional to the square
of the number of nodes.
□ We are in a connected World.
– What ever is important – either I have received
from someone or I have sent to some one
□ Email is a means of getting something done!
30

Email Clients

Personal
Information
Management
Systems (PIMS) 31

32

Email Clients used by Business Recipients
http://fingerprintapp.com/email-client-stats 33

Consumer Email Accounts
34

May
you get
lots of
email
A modern day curse!
35

Basic Email Operations
SEND
RECEIVE
STORE
36

Why Do We Store Email?
Archive
READ
Mining, Investigation
SEARCH
Local Storage
Looking for Something
RESEARCH
Now
Doing my job!
37

Read Messages
□ What are you trying to do?
□ How do you go about it?
□ When?
□ How often?
□ How many messages are touched?
38

Email: Getting Work Done?
□ Communicate – Status, … Telephone/IM
– Quick response, check availability
□ As a Front-End of an Enterprise
Application Enterprise Systems
and Applications
– Respond to actions in Enterprise
Applications
□ Collaboration Twiki/Groove
– Work on some documents, activities together
□ Schedule Events Calendar
– Setup a time for meeting
□ Get Reports -- Information Portal
– Check for some information
39

What Do You Do With Email?
□ For Corporate Workflow Workflow
– Ensure that steps are followed – Systems
activities are tracked
□ Personal Tasks Task List
– Task List Manager – track what I am
supposed to do today
□ For Off-line Activities Local File
System
– Easiest way of carrying work home!
□ For Addresses Address
Book
– Address Book functions
□ As a Repository of Things Shared
– If I am looking for something, it is File System
somewhere in my mail box.
40

Email is Simple
Personal
Calendar Databases
Workflow
RSS / Blogs
Systems
Portal
News feeds
Task
Collaboration
List
Twiki
Local
Enterprise Shared
File System
Applications File Systems
IM and Address
Telephone Book
41

Email is Simple – Needs Integration
Personal
Calendar Databases
Workflow
RSS / Blogs
Systems
Portal
News feeds
Task
Collaboration
List
Twiki
Local
Enterprise Shared
File System
Applications File Systems
IM and Address
Telephone Book
42

43

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When we are looking for
something – we remember
context and not text!
45

Search Messages
□ What are you trying to do?
□ How do you go about it?
□ When?
□ How often?
□ How many messages are touched?
46

Capturing Context!
I send a message to
someone to achieve
something.
Likewise there is a
reason why I get a
message.
47

Identifying and Capturing Context
□ Persons
My context
–
My role
–
My Organization
–
My Organization’s Context
–
My Social Networks
–
□ Time
– Date
– Events
□ Flags
□ Attachments
What is the reason for this message?
48

Capturing My Context
Name
Address
Phone
My
Number
family
Email
Children
URL
Friends Org-Chart
Alma- Customers
Mater Vendors
My context
My Personal
Context
My Organizational
Context
49

Building An Enriched Address Book
□ Visiting Cards, capturing address information
from signature lines
□ Capturing Organizational Org-Charts
□ Different email addresses
□ Capturing Geographic Information
□ Building Connections – Social Networks
– Why are the two of us recipients of this email message?
50

Integration of Calendar and Email
□ Events and dates are very important aspects of
context.
□ I received mail from Amit Kulkarni after
CSI-2008
□ He sent me the presentation after I saw him
Norway.
□ He sent me nice note and a poem after Arul was
born!
51

Prioritizing Email
□ Which messages do I reply to?
□ When do I respond to messages?
□ What are my patterns of replying to email
messages?
□ MAPS (Message Attention Priority Sequence ):
Which messages must I reply to?
52

Virtual Folders relate better to
contexts of Emails
□ Single mail can correspond to multiple
contexts.
Examples of
Context
□ Virtual Folders provides multiple views
• People
over the same email where each view
• Families
corresponds to the context associated
with the email.
• Organization
• Groups etc.
□ For example:
• Geography
An email is sent to the user by person X
• Events working in organization Y.org, which talks
about an upcoming conference.
• Dates
• Parties
The user will see this email in the virtual
folders corresponding to “events”, to X, to
• Meetings etc.
organization Y. And also in “this week” &
“this month” virtual folders.
53

Virtual Folders – some dimensions
• Categorization
• Flags
– Sys-Admin messages, Status
– Unseen messages, Messages
addressed only to me, Reports, Technical Issues,
Messages marked for etc.
follow-up etc.
• Alerts and Follow-up
• Time-based
– Feedback Expected
– Today, This Week, This
– High Priority Messages
Month
• Project based folders
• People
• Mailing Lists
– Atul Kulkarni, Arun Jain
• Company’s Internal – VentureWire, ACM Tech
Messages News, DBWorld
– Executive Committee • Geography
– Admin messages – India, Pune,
– HR messages
• Events
• Domain based folders
– ICDE, New year
– IITB, .COM, microsoft.com
54

Virtual Folders
55

56

Email – some tenets of our research.
□ Context of the message is more important than
the text in the message Itself.
□ Email is the Executive Desktop
□ Email is Corporate Resource – but it is personal.
□ Search and Navigation go hand in hand.
57

Email is good …
… but we need more!
□ Email is asynchronous and very individual
centric.
□ The model encourages personal and
point-to-point interaction.
□ Instant Messengers have become popular
for synchronous collaboration.
□ Newsgroups (NNTP) became popular for
“group mail”
58

Chat -- Instant Messenger
59

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007
60

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007
61

Wikis
62

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64

Atlassian Enterprise Wiki
65

Atlassian Enterprise Wiki
66

IBM Teamware – Quickr Wiki
67

IBM Teamware - Quickr
68

Document Management/Content Management
□ Document management systems provide centralized
store for corporate content. Features include
– Security
– Access Control
– with ability for classification and categorization,
– search
– Information sharing,
– Versioning,
– Business process automation and
– Controlled Document Lifecycle.
□ Examples of these include Oracle ECM suite, EMC
Documentum, Opentext and open source Drupal.
69

EMC Documentum
70

Source Control Systems
□ Source control systems are specialized versions of
Document Management Systems.
Example: IBM Rational Clearcase, Visual Studio
Team Systems (VSTS), Subversion etc.
□ These systems are specialized for software
developers and integrate with other development
tools such as
– Bug Tracking Systems
– Compilers and Debuggers
– Profiling Tools
71

Forums
□ Forums allow users to post content organized by
topics, typically in the Q&A form.
□ Forums are used to facilitate discussion.
□ Service delivery organizations such as an IT help
desk or HR employee services group use forums
for customer service.
□ Employees ask and answer questions in the
forum, allowing other employees to benefit from
the answers provided and shared to all.
□ Topical forums allow practitioners to share
information with their peers in the open (rather
than in a limited email conversation).
72

Forum Examples
□ EllisLab, IBM, Invision Power Services, Jive
Software, Microsoft, Groupee’sUBB.threads,
Jelsoft Enterprises’ vBulletin
□ Many free and open source forum server
solutions are available for download. Low-cost
options are available, ranging from about $100
to $300 per year for a server license. Higher-end
solutions that license per user are available, are
either hosted or downloaded, and can run
$2,000 to $10,000.
73

Forums
74

37Signals – Project Mgmt
75

37 Signals – Project management
76

37 Signals – Project mgmt
77

WebConferencing
79

Collaboration embedded in Business Apps
80

Engineers at the Global Collaboration Center in Everett, WA,
leverage a virtual workspace that allows them to collaborate
with 787 partners around the globe to make concurrent
81
design changes to the airplane in real time.

Blogs are gaining in
popularity
… they are also
getting corporate!
82

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Who is blogging?
84

Who is Blogging?
76,000 Blogs with Technorati
Authority of 50+
600,000 blog posts in the last 24
hours
1.5 Million in the last 7 days
7.4 Million in the last 120 days
133 Million Blogs indexed by
Technorati since 2002
85
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

Blogger
Demographics
86
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/

Mini USA, the American branch of BMW's Mini Cooper line,
tracks everything being said about its brand everywhere on
line -- in blogs, discussion groups, forums etc. -- then uses
what it learns to guide advertising campaigns.
87

Top 10 Blog Sites
1. Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post (Authority: 29,108)
http://huffingtonpost.com
2. TechCrunch (Authority: 15,962)
http://www.techcrunch.com
3. Engadget (Authority: 15,284)
http://www.engadget.com
4. Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide (Authority: 14,912)
http://gizmodo.com
5. Boing Boing (Authority: 12,437)
http://www.boingboing.net
6. Lifehacker, tips and downloads for getting things done (Authority:
10,996)
http://lifehacker.com
7. The Official Google Blog (Authority: 10,614)
http://googleblog.blogspot.com
8. Daily Kos: State of the Nation (Authority: 10,501)
http://dailykos.com
9. Ars Technica (Authority: 10,182)
http://arstechnica.com
10.Smashing Magazine (Authority: 9,366) Source: Technorati
http://www.smashingmagazine.com 88

What are people blogging about?
89

Microblogging:
Twitter is deceptively simple: it’s a Web protocol that
makes it easy to instant message people with short
messages. In fact the limit is 140 characters.
90

Twitter in the Enterprise!
91

RSS: Really
Simple
Syndication
92

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QUESTIONS?
94