Enterprise Collaboration for the Twenty-First Century

2 0 0 9 W H I T E P A P E R Enterprise Collaboration for the Twenty-first Century Copyright © 2009 Oracle Corporation and IT Business Edge. All rights reserved. 1 Enterprise Collaboration for the Twenty-first Century By Paul Gillin Today’s globalized, hyper-competitive economy provides layers of management, and product and service no room for complacency. Market leadership is fleeting innovation. The division between work and personal in a world in which geographical and technological hours is blurring as office professionals tap out e-mails barriers are quickly dissolving. No company has the on their mobile devices while on the beach or at the luxury of resting on its past accomplishments, and no symphony. About 80 percent of Americans work 40 enterprise can afford to run on automatic. An hours or more each week, according to the International unpredictable economic environment has ended Labor Organization (ILO). Demographic trends are business-as-usual management practices and is forcing creating a new urgency for creating a more collaborative organizations to find new ways to reduce costs without workplace. The Baby Boom generation is graying—more impacting operational efficiency. The global economic than 77 million Baby Boomers will reach retirement age downturn has intensified the need for both business and over the next 20 years. As a result, we are in the IT to make the most out of their existing resources. process of completing the largest inter-generational transfer of knowledge in human history. Effective New information technology offers managers the collaboration tools are needed to aid this departing flexibility to adapt to this new nonstop, global business workforce in transferring their skills and experience to a environment. Workforces are becoming more distributed new generation of workers. and global. About 30 million Americans—or one-fifth of the nation’s workforce—work outside the office on a The Collaboration Mandate regular basis. High-speed Internet service permits Today’s networked, hyper-competitive business businesses to build truly global networks of employees environment demands new approaches to collaboration. and contractors so that work can “follow the sun.” In order to stay in tune with their markets and respond As geographic and technology boundaries between quickly to changes, organizations need to support organizations fall away, the watchword for success is efficient enterprise collaboration that connects “differentiation.” Enterprises must identify their unique employees, contractors, managers, supply chain and competitive advantage and work with customers, sales channel partners, customers, constituents and traditional and new partners, and even past competitors government agencies. to deliver uniquely differentiated products and services. The need for collaboration will only intensify as more This white paper will explore the ways in which people in the workforce begin using public and collaborative technologies can deliver the heightened consumer social-networking sites and as more Internet- levels of internal and external cooperation needed to savvy people join the workforce, bringing with them new compete in today’s global economy and will examine expectations for how organizations should communicate some of the challenges that can prevent enterprise and share information. collaboration initiatives from delivering increased As the world’s largest enterprise software company, productivity and innovation. It will examine how Oracle’s Oracle is very aware of these market forces. In new collaboration system, Oracle Beehive, tackles those response, Oracle has created Oracle Beehive, the only challenges to provide a new richness of enterprise unified collaboration system built from the ground up for collaboration for twenty-first-century organizations. the needs of the modern enterprise. Oracle Beehive A New Organization incorporates the latest standards, technologies and architectural principles, and it improves user productivity As the world flattens around organizations, the dynamics while dramatically decreasing complexity and within them are also changing. The market’s demand for administrative overhead. efficiency is forcing the compression of business cycles, Copyright © 2009 Oracle Corporation and IT Business Edge. All rights reserved. 2 Let’s next look at the factors that have contributed to process and cultural innovation. Because extracting today’s fragmented collaborative infrastructure and how these products wholesale from an IT infrastructure can Oracle Beehive’s unified approach offers a simpler and be expensive and potentially disruptive, many more productive alternative to users and administrators. organizations have tried to make do. However, the increasing pressure to improve information-worker Collaboration Tools: productivity, coupled with the need to contain IT costs, A Disjointed History has led to a growing need for an incremental approach For the purposes of this report, collaboration software is to modernizing enterprise collaboration. This type of defined as tools that enable individuals to work together approach requires a flexible architecture that offers an toward common goals. Popular examples of immediate improvement in the user experience without collaboration software include e-mail, instant messaging, necessitating a sudden abandonment of existing online whiteboards, threaded discussion groups, shared systems. document repositories and web-based virtual workspaces. Towers of Babel Many of today’s incompatibility problems among Technology vendors have been attempting to use collaboration systems have their roots in early stand- software to improve collaboration since mainframe office alone collaboration packages constructed on customized suites dating from the early 1970s and early e-mail- file systems and tied to proprietary communications based tools introduced more than 25 years ago. networks. In the days before standardized development Discussion forums were one of the earliest forms of services and toolkits, vendors had to develop their own online collaboration, and they continue to be widely used ways to manage critical elements like storage, for technical support as well as informal conversation. In communications and identity management. These the 1980s, groupware products were introduced that systems treated their information and processes as targeted small groups of workers collaborating in distinct from other enterprise applications and in many relatively simple and predictable ways. cases failed to evolve their underlying platform as more Over the last few years, a wave of new technologies has functional and flexible IT technologies became prevalent emerged under the category of Web 2.0. Tools like in other areas. For many years, collaboration tools were blogs, wikis and social networks are proliferating in the designed to provide new rather than improved services; consumer market and increasingly are being adapted to even the standards that were developed for existing the unique needs of a modern enterprise. These tools tools did not address the underlying limitations of offer richer interactions across less structured popular tools. As a consequence, many enterprises have communities and faster and more flexible sharing of a accumulated a mish-mash of isolated, parallel variety of media. Many early Web 2.0 tools were collaboration tools that do not talk with each other or with distributed online or as public domain freeware, adding any of the standardized applications like ERP and CRM to the already crowded and confusing patchwork of that are now at the core of modern IT operations. available collaboration technologies. Over time, the legacy of aging collaboration systems has Decades of evolution have yielded great innovation in become a seriously limiting factor on the ability of IT collaboration, but the largely unplanned and organizations to adapt to changing business uncoordinated deployment of a variety of specialized requirements. Many IT managers may find themselves collaboration tools has also resulted in complex, supporting a half-dozen different collaboration tools fragmented and fragile IT environments within many based on a seemingly random selection of file systems, enterprises. Many large organizations have assembled user directories, databases and administrative consoles. collections of point products over the years, each of The potential results, detailed in Table A on the following which addresses a problem in a unique way using a page, are tremendously inefficient in terms of both unique combination of technologies. Many organizations required system capacity and redundant manual today find themselves locked into outdated or proprietary processes. Supporting everyday events like employee collaboration systems whose hard-wired approach limits onboarding or internal transfers can require rights being Copyright © 2009 Oracle Corporation and IT Business Edge. All rights reserved. 3 Table A Integration and administrative problems posed by legacy applications built in isolation. Problem Area Problem Impact User Interface As result of legacy interfaces designed and • Higher training costs optimized for each application, users are • Lower user productivity forced to learn multiple UIs. • “Cut-and-paste” integration • Higher risk of error Database Legacy database integration can be difficult to • Partial to complete data incompatibility impossible, and as a result, some older • Higher administrative costs systems may go unsupported.

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