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The
relationship between Groupware, Workflow
and Intranet technologies
1. Introduction
Corporations in the '90s are rediscovering the critical elements
of business strategy. No longer should they automatically, in the
first instance, think of deploying assets to build new products and
enter new markets. In today's marketplace business strategy must
focus on the concept of a business as a set of core capabilities
which ultimately link customer needs to customer satisfaction
through a series of activities which add real perceived value. These
activities or processes are inherently knowledge-based, as the focus
of most organisations' work becomes the creation and management of
intellectual property and skills. The ideal model for managing this
enterprise can no longer be hierarchical, it must be network and
team-oriented, flatter and with authority and responsibility
devolved to the point of customer contact.
With shorter life cycles for products and services, companies are
placing greater value on anticipating market trends and designing
customer needs. To be competitive, information systems can no longer
just support business functions such as accounts receivable and
order entry. They must link all of an organisation's activities from
lead-generating marketing programs, to sales prospecting activities,
to account management, to marketing research, to product design and
development and manage them as connected parts of a closed feedback
and itterative loop. The voice of the customer needs to be passed
through the organisation with minimal filtering and hand-offs. This
process of quickly turning individual customer needs into delivered
products must be managed both for maximum effectiveness and minimum
implementation/process time.
Management's most important potential contribution to this new
organisation is to plan and build the infrastructure, both technical
and human, that supports it. In the technical realm, information
systems must deliver all the information, not just operational data,
required for doing all jobs in the chain. By managing information
across organisational boundaries and treating related but separate
activities as part of a coherent process, companies can compress the
time involved in these critical business cycles. These new
information systems must also manage the sharing of critical
information, expertise, and knowledge that leads to effective
decision making by members at all levels of the organisation. This
shared information will make it possible to create team-oriented
organisations rather than the hierarchical models that in the past
were necessary because of the restricted availability of
information.
2. Groupware
Groupware almost defies definition. This software has captured
the attention and IT professionals, line of business managers and
end users, (not to mention software suppliers). While most
businesses have not developed a clear definition of groupware, they
are keenly aware that leveraging the knowledge of employees and
trading partners is the key to survival and success. Businesses know
that a clear competitive advantage lies with those who can
effectively manage and exploit their intellectual assets and
employee skills.
Most definitions of groupware tend to focus on singular
technologies with relatively narrow design centres. Suppliers of
products centred around communication, ("pushing"
information out into an organisation,) view messaging as the core
technology for groupware. Suppliers of products centred around
products aimed at assisting individuals and groups in the
co-ordination of complex tasks involving a rich mix of delegation,
sequential sign-offs, etc., are apt to view application development
tools that support task and workflow automation as the sine qua non
of groupware. Because groupware is at the convergence of what were
previously considered independent technologies (messaging,
conferencing, workflow, etc.) there is much confusion about its
definition and scope.
If we start from a belief that groupware should help individuals
work together in a qualitatively better way, we find that groupware
represents an integration of these team working attributes:
- Communication - rich electronic messaging;
- Collaboration - facilitating a rich, shared, virtual
workspace;
- Co-ordination - adding the structure of business processes to
communication and collaboration, to implement an enterprise's
policies.
Group applications require rich combinations of technologies.
What makes a groupware platform powerful is its ability to support
the dynamic movement between and through these three modes of group
work: communication, collaboration and co-ordination. Groupware is
not a laundry list of features and functionality, instead it is a
platform that simply and elegantly mirrors this convergence. A
groupware platform, therefore, is represented by the integration of
three primary technologies:
- An object store in which corporate knowledge messages,
documents, forms, memos, reports can be housed and managed.
- A distribution and access model that allows users to easily
locate and disseminate information.
- An application development framework that leverages the native
underlying services of the object store and distribution/access
model.
A groupware infrastructure must take into account the general
requirements of workgroup environments. Specifically, these include:
- Integration with external resources. The point of origin for
workgroup information is often external to the groupware
environment (i.e., desktop productivity tools, relational
databases, etc.).
- Platform independence. While groupware applications often
begin as departmental implementations, many eventually result in
company-wide deployment. Platform independence is critical to
ensuring universal use and investment protection
- Mobility. A groupware infrastructure must be capable of
supporting many geographically dispersed sites, including home,
laptop, and notebook computers.
- Inter-enterprise applications. As businesses begin to rely on
customers and trading partners as essential players in the
automation of business processes, the ability to seamlessly
extend the application from the start or added as an
afterthought is an important part of a groupware infrastructure.
No business process application can be written that fully
anticipates every situation. No matter how many exceptions and
special cases are accounted for, people will discover new needs as
they explore an application's depths and as new business situations
present themselves. Thus, we must conclude that any system designed
to create, manage and leverage corporate knowledge is, by
definition, of enterprise scale, and therefore must meet these
criteria:
- It must support the full breadth of client, network and server
operating systems.
- It must support mobile and remote workers.
- It must support seamless inter-enterprise interactivity
A groupware system that is architecturally correct in the sense
that it supports the convergence of communication, collaboration and
co-ordination is nevertheless doomed to failure on an enterprise
scale if it does not also deal with the pragmatic realities of
nomadic workers and inter-enterprise communication.
3. Intranets
Intranets have been initially proposed as a way of disseminating
information throughout organisations. Though information
dissemination plays a fundamental role in groupware, its value to
organisations which are increasingly interactive, is limited. As
Intranets mature from simple dissemination to interaction, their
logical goal should be to support flexible workflow, the acid test
of a workable groupware system. Workflow applications support
specific business processes, and are tied closely to the roles
played by individuals in the workgroup. At each stage individuals
will "add value" to the process by evaluating and making
judgements, or by adding and editing new information. A workflow
application provides an environment that both captures and moves
information through a work process, ensuring that each member of the
workgroup can access those pieces of information required to perform
his or her piece of the job. Workflow systems also provide a context
in which work is performed, allowing individuals to concentrate on
the work at hand, rather than on the process itself. By tying
information directly to business processes, workflow software has
the potential to return significant value on the investments that
have been made in information technology.
4. Workflow
The primary goal of workflow software is to improve the
efficiency of both mission-critical and ad-hoc business processes
and the effectiveness of the people who work together to execute
them. The real goal is to reduce costs and improve the outcome of
those processes, which ultimately results in enhanced quality,
faster turnaround, improved customer satisfaction, or some
combination of all three. The first requirement of workflow software
is that it must be capable of supporting real business processes,
which means that it must be customisable for a wide range of users
and industries. It must be transparent to users involved in the
process and fit comfortably with their existing desktop applications
and network environment. Workflow software must be scaleable, so
that it easily accommodates new users as they are added to the
process, as well as modular, so the system can grow as the process
grows in complexity. And finally, a workflow system must work across
multiple computing platforms, so that all members of the work
process can participate, regardless of what platform they have on
their desktops.
Workflow systems have the potential to do for office processes
what just-in-time manufacturing has done for production processes.
The goal of workflow software is to efficiently manage the
interactions between people and information resources, and to
thereby improve the effectiveness of work teams. Since each business
process is unique, the decision to provide workflow software
requires an understanding of how the process relates to an
underlying technical architecture.
Distributing press releases, product information, customer
profiles and some human resources material around an Intranet are
only the most basic uses of an Intranet. If it is going to act as
the very fibre of an organisation's information infrastructure and
support workflow, it needs to viewed as infrastructure. It has to be
reliable. It has to be scaleable.
5. Issues to address
The Intranet is supposed to simplify problems, not create new
ones. Therefore, an Intranet solution should reduce complexity as
much as possible, not introduce altogether new levels of complexity
to IT. The benefits of an Intranet are great enough to warrant some
complexity, but as IT planners evaluate Intranet technologies, this
factor will no doubt be near the top of their list of attributes.
An Intranet has to integrate with existing systems. It needs to
seamlessly integrate with legacy systems and with all corporate data
resources. And, as infrastructure, it must be complete, and not
exist as another infrastructure alongside other infrastructures. For
example, much of the industry has spent the last couple of years
labouring over the future of their messaging infrastructure.
Messaging has been recognised as a key to an overall IT
infrastructure. It has only been lately with the introduction
enterprise-scale, client/server messaging systems that these
infrastructures are seeing real deploment. An Intranet
infrastructure that is not closely coupled with this other strategic
infrastructure will inevitably meet with new issues of complexity
and system integration that most IT planners have spent years trying
to avoid.
Infrastructure requires the reliability of strong service and
support on an enterprise scale and a world wide basis. The Intranet
is not just a small, local application. When something goes wrong
with the infrastructure, IT staff need more than a the normal help
desk. They need an enterprise partner. Intranets may start out small
in scale, probably supporting relatively low end applications like
document publishing. This requires only a simple HTTP server, a
TCP/IP network, and a Web browser. As an Intranet grows in the
number of users and the number of documents it stores, site
management becomes a non-trivial issue. Managing all the links
between documents as well as providing users with an easy and
intuitive method of navigating the site are new challenges that IT
staff have not had to concern themselves with before. As any
Webmaster today will tell you, this is a full time effort. The
Intranet will eventually require the integration of a document
management facility. Some Web authoring tools have an element of
this, but it is still largely a manual task. The cost of Web servers
increases as the number of files grow and IT Web staff can expect to
spend much low value added time creating and maintaining links.
Once the number of documents reaches a certain critical mass,
(perhaps 5,000 documents,) users will require a way to conduct a
search to find relevant documents instead of browsing through dozens
or even hundreds of different paths. The Intranet will require the
integration of a search engine. Search tools are easy to find, but
they come with a cost.
Most companies will not put their private Intranet up on the
public Internet for obvious security reasons. This means that,
unless they are a Telco, they need to install or lease a wide area
network to get all corporate data to all corporate sites. A company
with four global offices could decide to install a single Intranet
server in San Jose, and have all the remote sites either dial-in or
connect via a wide area network, but that would be costly. Many
companies have opted to deploy mirrored web sites with duplicate
copies of the master Intranet database which s sent out periodically
to all the remote sites, usually overnight. This keeps the cost
down, and increases availability.
But what happens if the users in London or in Sydney are also
making updates, adding new documents and changing others? How are
the changes made in London going to be reconciled with the changes
made in San Jose, Sydney and Tokyo? The answer could be a
bi-directional web server synchronisation or replication down to the
field level, to keep information synchronised. This technology
exists only, today, in Lotus Notes. It is likely that other products
will acquire this functionality, but it will come with a price tag.
If the replication services come from a separate vendor, then there
is of course the need for integration.
To be able to interact with the documents that are served up on
an Intranet an Intranet will require a forms editor to allow users
to fill in forms to update information about customers, to add
comments to proposals, to revise sales forecasts. Again, this is
another tool that will have to be acquired and integrated which
doesn't usually come with a Web server.
One might want to use a a form to participate in a discussion or
conference. This will require a discussion database or a news server
to deliver usenet groups which may also require a different user
interface to the browser. Some Web server vendors already offer
discussion databases but they are usually separate chargeable
products.
With each new tool, technology or facility added, a new seam
shows in the Intranet infrastructure. One of the benefits of the
Intranet is its openness and the ability to plug and play different
products from different vendors. But someone has to stitch these
things together. Let's say you add a discussion database to this
server. Can you use the same full text search tool to search
discussions? Can you replicate the discussion database between San
Jose and London? If you can't, then systems integration is required.
So far, our virtual Web server hasn't done much. It will have
cost more than an a-typical Web server, but it isn't really doing
the things which encompass the communication, collaboration and
co-ordination of business processes. The next logical step is to
build actual applications that run on the Intranet, perhaps using
Java Script or Visual Basic Script or some other scripting language.
Again, there is the need for a new tool and more integration. Some
questions to ask are, "Does the development environment work on
the discussion database as well as on Web pages?" Is it fully
integrated, or do you have to do some integration on your own? How
do you distribute the application to London and Tokyo? Can you use
replication, or is replication just for Web pages? If it isn't, then
you've got more complexity on this Web Site than you may have
initially anticipated.
Look at one of those forms that you might want to fill out.
Imagine you are a department head and want to create a new position
in your department. You fill in a form on my browser, write down the
job description, detail the applicant requirements and a suggested
salary range. Now, unless you are the CEO you can't just create jobs
like that, you need to get approval from the MD, from HR and/or from
finance. Once you have submitted this Web form to the Web server,
you need to tell the server who should get it. Where do you find
that information? In a directory. And now that you know who should
get it, how do you get it to them using an e-mail system?
The Intranet has its role to play in this, offering the widely
deployed SMTP protocol and introducing a low end, low cost mail
client protocol in the form of POP3. But the complex and expensive
part of messaging, message management and directory services are not
an integral part of any Intranet today. These have to be created
from scratch, (not a typical characteristic of an infrastructure,)
or need to be integrated third party products.
6. Mail systems
Of course, it would make sense if your corporate e-mail system
was the same e-mail system that runs on your Intranet. Companies are
trying to consolidate and standardise on a single messaging and
directory system, not add another one that has to be managed and
maintained separately. So, if you "just add a messaging
system" to your Intranet, you may have made the most expensive
decision of your IT career. Standards have a role to play here with
gateways to or native X.400 backbones and X.500 directories.
7. Database access
The promise of the Intranet is to give every employee direct
access to all information in a company. Of course, not every piece
of information is captured in a Web page, most of it exists in
databases. Every Web server needs a data access facility. Not ten
data access facilities, one for Oracle, one for DB2, one for SQL
Server, one for a document management repository, one for CICS
transaction systems. Every Web server needs a single data access
facility to minimise the number of moving parts to this
infrastructure, to reduce the cost of setting up and managing it.
8. System management
Finally, one needs to manage Web servers. Is the Intranet going
to be part of an overall SNMP management strategy? Are there robust
management tools for Intranet servers to measure traffic and
performance? No infrastructure would be complete without them.
9. Further reading
It never hurts to learn from the experiences of others. G.A.W.
Associates Ltd. consultants have prepared a series of case studies,
(ICL, HP, Barclays,) which detail the main issues addressed and
solutions delivered. Please contact the numbers on our contacts page
for further information.
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