The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• Managing Projects: Examples … Austin Hardware uses eProject to facilitate new product development projects, enabling people from across the company to be involved from the beginning. “… before eProject, we could spend 50 hours or more on a project before we even did basic research and scoping or had a commitment from a customer. Now, we have more insight into our projects and can be more certain that every man-hour we spend increases the likelihood of market success. Instead of a belly flop off the diving board, we now stick our toe in the water first and make our way to the deep in with confidence.” C&S Wholesale Grocers uses eProject to standardize its project management efforts across the business, replacing a hodge-podge of older approaches. Key change: visibility across the business of what’s going on. FASTForward Blog
• Seduce Your Users … David at British American Tobacco argues that a focus on “user seduction” is key to achieving high user satisfaction with new tools. Key ideas: (1) remember that users still have a choice whether or not to use the tools; (2) remember that people have multiple roles to juggle throughout the day (work and family); (3) approach the deployment of a new technology as a change management initiative; and (4) invest in one-to-one (not group) training. BlackBerry
• Collaboration Strategy Struggles … 51% of Canadian and 55% of US companies are currently dissatisfied with the impact of their collaboration and communication tools. Key problems: (a) user habits are not evolving fast enough, (b) a lack of user education, (c) the perception of exorbitant prices, and (d) poor understanding as to what the tools can actually do. However, the future looks bright: “The study also found, in the next two years, companies expect to broaden their repertoire of digital collaborative tools, in particular enterprise search, VoIP, videoconferencing and virtual workplaces.” ITWorldCanada
• Telecommuting and Virtual Culture … Eleanor writes about “culture” (“a set of practices, involving a people”) in a virtual world, and argues that Intel has been very successful in cultivating a suitable culture where people are rarely together in person. She also dislikes the term “telecommuting”, preferring “telecommuning”. “Intel has a robust current corporate culture that has adapted amazingly well to being virtual, as our own internal tracking studies have shown us for the past four years. Not only have we done well, but in the last year for the first time, we saw perceived team performance finally get better, thanks primarily to the standardization and expansion of collaboration tools. It is the whole package of these tools on the cognitive, practical and business process level that can make it work, and there is plenty of room for improvement. Despite the infomania-mania, e-mail is one piece of that puzzle; so are shared repositories, so is screen sharing and the most wonderful little tool of all: instant messaging. That has presence awareness and all the responsiveness you need.” IT@Intel

The Technology Trends of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams

• IBM UC Releases … IBM launched the next phase in its unified communications strategy, with new telephony integration features for Lotus Sametime. “Lotus Sametime “Unified Telephony” software is a new IBM offering that is being developed to bring telephone communications into the business applications people use most. Based in part on elements of Siemens OpenScape technology, this product will make it possible to manage communications across multiple business telephone systems and access them through virtually any application.” Sample use cases: (a) managing incoming calls, (b) automatic setting of availability if the person is on the phone, (c) VoIP calling from the desktop, and (d) integration with telephony systems from multiple vendors. IBM also announced three levels of Sametime: Entry (IM, presence, spell check, emoticon, chat history, contact list management), Standard (adds on premise Web conferencing, location awareness, plugin and mashup support, and public IM interoperability), and Advanced (adds persistent group chat and broadcast community tools, among others). Standard is due in 4Q2007, whereas Entry and Advanced are due in 1H2008. IBM (see also InfoWorld, Cliff Reeves)
• Attensa Update Coming … Attensa will release new enhancements to its enterprise RSS platform this week, plus a new Mac OS X RSS reader. The latter includes full inline reading of content. Janet Johnson
• A-Space … The US Intelligence Agencies are working toward a December rollout of “A-Space”, a MySpace / FaceBook style system for analysts. It is hoped that A-Space “will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community …. [and] also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.” Key capabilities: “A-Space will be equipped with web-based email and software that recommends areas of interest to the user just like Amazon suggests books to its customers. The site will also allow users to create and modify documents, and determine user privileges, in a similar fashion to Google Documents.” MSNBC
• Nokia Mail for Exchange 2.0 … Nokia announced the availability of Version 2.0 of Mail for Exchange, its server syncing software. New features: support for S60 devices, and task synchronization between Exchange Server and Nokia devices. “Other new features include Global Address List (GAL) lookup support, ability to accept/decline meeting requests, support for the N76, ability of Search on E-series devices to search for content in emails synced to your phone and further integration with an upcoming release of QuickOffice.” Available immediately. ZDNet
• Business Value of Unified Communications … Unified communications delivers business value by making it clear whether people are currently available or not. “… companies are discovering that simply getting messages in one place isn’t enough. A message must be delivered on the right device at the right time to the right person—a person who can respond immediately. That’s where unified communications and its key feature, “presence,” comes in. Simply put, presence lets users know who’s reachable where and when. How? Think about how instant messaging works: Users can see which coworkers are active and which have stepped away. Put all communications tools (voice, data and video) on the same IP network, add an instant messaging-style interface and, voila, you’ve got presence. You also have everybody in your organization on a single, secure IM network, with record keeping if necessary.” CIO Insight
• Chaos Coming in UC Market … An analyst at COMMfusion expects that UC deployments will be focused on the early adopter segment through to 2010, when mainstream customers will start buying. “Businesses are more likely to take a wait-and-see approach over the next couple of years before jumping in. Keeping customers on the sidelines will be the inevitable chaos, familiar to most emerging markets, as vendors try to stake out their territory through mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships, and new products that take different approaches.” The analyst also warned about the “trojan horse” nature of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (“… its likely when companies are ready to replace their PBX systems, Microsoft will have many of the telephone control capabilities they’ll need.“) InformationWeek
• Email: From a Communications Tool to a Coordination Channel … With the changes in Notes 8, IBM is leading the way in transforming the email client from a simple communications tool into a channel for group coordination. “What users are witnessing is the morphing of e-mail from the primary communications tool on the desktop to the primary tool to coordinate communications from multiple sources such as RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, IMs, and voice. Instead of opening an attachment from a Word file, for example, today’s e-mail clients simply use e-mail to communicate that a file is located somewhere. The e-mail tells the user where to find the file and provides a link to, say, Microsoft Sharepoint or Lotus ClickR.” Similar things are happening in other products, however, such as Zimbra. InfoWorld
• Microsoft UC Service … Microsoft is planning to offer a hosted version of Office Communications Server 2007, for businesses that don’t want to build their own UC environment. “Barkley cited the need to serve small businesses that increasingly are widely distributed. Unlike large enterprises, they generally lack the IT resources to set up and run a communications system that reaches employees around the world.” CIO

Insights on Being Productive and Effective as an Individual

• The Golden Hour … Jim loves the early morning, before everyone else is up. Things he does: organizing, working out / exercising, journalling, meditation and yoga, walking, getting lots done on a project, and reviewing goals. Jim Estill
• Workaholic or Hard Worker? … Which are you? Answer Cindy’s seven questions to figure it out. If you are a workaholic, note her recommendations for getting over it: “(1) Find a mentor who is respected but doesn’t work insane hours; (2) Create something important for yourself outside of work; (3) Figure out what matters each day and spend your time on that; and (4) Concentrate on quality of work over quantity. People don’t lose a job for not working unpaid overtime, they lose a job for not performing well at the most important times.” Work/Life Balancing Act

Other Noteworthy Insights

• Belkin Cushtop … Michael raves about the Belkin Cushtop, for absorbing laptop heat. Michael Parekh