Trends in Collaboration
By Jörg Beringer, Head of xApp Design Group, SAP AG – 09/12/2002
While Collaborative Computer Supported Work(CSCW) has been a well-known term in HCI for quite a while, the concept of "collaboration" is used in so many different ways that its exact meaning still remains somewhat fuzzy:
- Collaborative business scenarios refer to business processes that cross company borders and therefore require special enabling. Most of the time, the technical challenge of bridging firewalls and automating business transactions is the focus of such projects.
- Co-authorship of documents (one of the origins of collaborative system support) focuses on the challenge of coordinating multi-authorship on the same object. Similar requirements exist in collaborative engineering, in which product specs are reviewed and modified by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and multiple suppliers.
- Communication tools (most of them concentrated on synchronous applications, like chat and video conferencing) are trying to establish new ways of computer-based communication. Virtual meeting services are becoming more popular due to globalization and increasing travel costs.
- Document management systems help people to share and access information. Document-based workflow helps to coordinate work that is driven by passing around electronic artifacts.
- Websites and other corporate shared servers provide access to information that is public, either on a team or corporate level.
Today's challenge in the software industry is to unify these different technologies, especially ERP and collaboration services, into one coherent solution that provides significant value for companies by supporting business and work processes in a coherent way.
The following sections describe trends and principles of good collaborative design and outline how collaboration techniques that are disconnected today could be brought together in the next-generation collaborative applications.
Goal-Directed Collaboration
When designing collaborative applications, it makes a big difference if the targeted user group is the private consumer market or an company employee. The prominent collaboration tools from the consumer market like instant messenger, chat, discussion forums, and subscriptions on Web pages are all focusing on entertaining communication and knowledge exchange of a loose association of people, or a group of buddies that share some common interest but have no well defined goal of achieving something. The computer is used more as a communication device and a virtual community place in which opinions are exchanged.
Such private networking and knowledge exchange through communities of practice are an important part of a company culture and a B2B relationship as well. Instant messaging at the workplace and communities of practice within an intranet is already becoming more popular.
Besides directly using such principles to enhance corporate communication, a collaborative enterprise solution must, in addition, help employees to achieve some formally or informally defined work intents. If the design goal is to support work, other types of collaborative services become more relevant, for example,
- Unified calendars to coordinate availability at individual and team level
- Tracking of deliverables that have to be created by multiple contributors
- Ad-hoc work processes that involve many people and assign responsibilities
- Decision threads that focus on the outcome of a discussion
Designing and developing collaborative services that reflect such generic work activities must be the next step.
Embedded Collaborative Services
Early versions of communication tools were designed as stand-alone applications that enabled one specific collaborative service. Chat tools or online meeting room applications coexisted independently of each other, just as e-mail and phone are disconnected today.
New product designs combine such collaborative tools and embed them in a larger context in the form of collaborative services that are launched from within a working context. Such contexts are either object-centered (document, business object) or process-centered:
- People collaborate on a document by starting discussions, adding annotations, voting, and setting subscriptions
- People work on the same business object (for example, a customer, product, or market) and share information to coordinate, communicate, and plan next steps
- Teams achieve a working goal in a jointly coordinated effort
Good application design should integrate collaborative and transactional functionality into one coherent solution in which users switch seamlessly between both worlds or start a new collaboration thread without realizing what kind of tool they are using.
Collaborative Patterns
Work relationships in companies or between companies are not random. They follow principles of best practice, trust, and business information flow. They can best be described by a limited set of collaborative structures. The most prominent structures are
- Private networks that reflect the personal relationships of one person to other people
- Work groups that are set up to achieve a common goal
- Communities that consist of a loose association of people sharing one common interest
For each of these structures, there are different collaborative requirements, which require different collaborative services. Special work conditions, such as the physical distribution of people, may also influence what type of collaborative services is needed most.
As mentioned in the beginning, the term "collaboration" also became popular in the context of B2B scenarios in which two or more companies are cooperating (for example, supply chain management, direct procurement, collaborative engineering). While this is usually considered mainly in terms of the technical challenge of implementing B2B processes that connect two different IT infrastructures, recent investigations by InContext Enterprises have stressed the importance of people-to-people relationships between two companies, and their values for building up ongoing relationships between companies (see Beyond Commerce: Bringing Business Relationships and Community to the Web in this edition.)
Connecting Knowledge
From the company perspective, the expertise of employees and the effectiveness of their collaboration are considered a human and social asset that increases agility and responsiveness to new business goals. This requires general knowledge management solutions as well as the establishment of an environment that helps people to successfully work together.
The other important aspect is to make implicit corporate knowledge explicit. In large companies, it is usually very difficult to find experts or to locate related information that has been produced within the company in previous projects. The activities of knowledge workers are especially hard to track and the outcomes of such work get lost in a Web or document repository. The money lost due to a failed alignment of knowledge workers that is resulting in redundant effort or irrelevant work is probably significant in any modern company.
Recent research (see Knowledge Sharing in Practice in this edition) reveals that solutions that rely mainly on the introduction of public information spaces are very likely to fail because
- The motivation of experts to publish into public communities or take part in public conversations is limited
- The documents that are published are often out-of-date
- The majority of collaborative work is done within personal networks and not in a shared space.
Successful knowledge management strategies must therefore try to connect knowledge instead of capturing it and create traces of ongoing conversations that can be used later to access information and locate experts. Examples of how to achieve this are
- Parsing ongoing communication (for example, e-mails, discussion threads, votings)
- Providing system-supported collaboration spaces (for example, team rooms, communities), that implicitly bundle information structured by a given business context and create traces of collaborative work deliverables.
Collaborative profiles of people working in such systems can be developed, recording their work relationships, work artifacts, and expertise. This can be used to locate them as experts or actively push relevant information to them by content-based messaging.
One step further, collaborative agents can learn about personal interests, work relationships, and personal preferences and use this knowledge to act within this virtual social network when the user is off-line.
Collaboration Requirements
Designing applications that integrate ERP functionality and collaborative services require a new design paradigm that is beyond a single application, a single user, and a single business process. Requirements must take the work practice of individual people and work groups into account as well as the work practice of the whole information network.
Ethnographic analysis becomes more important than ever. Contextual inquiry and the observation of real work practice, with focus on information needs, collaborative structures, and associated communication flow, becomes crucial for successful design. The anchor points of formal and informal collaboration, which can be a business object or a business process, must be identified. The associated collaborative activities must then be mapped to the appropriate collaborative services.
A combination of information architecture and semantic profiling of roles is necessary to recognize opportunities for connecting people that share a common interest, defining taxonomies that structure public information spaces, and establishing work relationship models that support knowledge inquiry along collaborative relationships.
Any of these collaborative services must support ad-hoc instantiation and modification because work processes are dynamic and taxonomies are fluid.
Where We Are Today
Creating coherent work-support solutions that bridge the traditional borders of functional oriented ERP systems and disconnected collaboration and office tools is a big technical challenge. It requires full system integration as well as a semantic integration of the work processes and work artifacts. Semantic Web, Web application integration servers, or abstraction layers for unified objects are being discussed as foundation layers for such integrated solutions.
The new SAP xApps (cross applications) are pushing this approach even further by not starting from a transactional business scenario but rather from people-centric work process. Collaborative activities and their artifacts should stay within the context of the corresponding business scenario and help employees to work and collaborate efficiently in a complex people and information network.
ERP functionality, like transactions and analytics, and collaborative services are integrated as needed to support this business scenario. The result is a software solution that is directly addressing individual and collaborative needs and is creating a synergetic value significantly beyond traditional applications.
