Research Paper: Enterprise Collaboration Systems
Introduction
Enterprise Collaboration Systems or ECSs are systems that create team and workgroup collaboration. They enhance communications, productivity and provide support in business operations. Some basic examples of ECSs are e-mail, chat, and videoconferencing (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). As we dive into this research paper more detailed explanations will be made of what the systems are and how they help organizations collaborate and enhance quality of work. ECSs also include applications that are sometimes called office automation systems, which are systems that create workflows to get rid of paper and create a smoother experience for users (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Organizations have many systems and ECSs are not ones to be left out. Information systems perform three vital roles in business firms. They support organization’s business processes and operations, give users more valuable information to help with good business decision making, and create strategic competitive advantages. Information technology, with the help of the Internet, provides us with the avenues to communicate ideas, share resources, and coordinate our cooperative work efforts. The goal of ECSs are to enable us to work together easily and effectively by helping us to, communicate, by sharing information with each other, coordinate, by helping us organize our work efforts and use of resources, and collaborate, by helping us work together cooperatively on join initiatives (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Much research has been done on this paper to identify the trends in ECSs in the current business world. In the background section the reader can expect to learn about the history of how ECSs came about, how they help business, how they are used, and detailed examples of ECSs. The analysis section is used to discuss opinions of the topic and to identify any further research that would be done, to further enhance the knowledge of the topic and to understand in which direction organizations are could be moving to with ECSs. Lastly the summary and conclusion will be used to restate the research topic and concisely reiterate any opinions. The overall purpose of this research paper is to further identify the different types of tools that are used in the enterprise world, how they can be used together and to identify the full benefits an organization can see from implementing such a technology.
Background
A definition taken directly from a textbook by O’Brien and Marakas defines Enterprise Collaboration Systems as “The use of groupware tools and the Internet, intranets, extranets, and other computer networks to support and enhance communication, coordination, collaboration, and resource sharing among teams and workgroups in an inter-networked enterprise” (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Since the inception of the Internet the demand for better enterprise collaboration tools have increased substantially. Most of the technology like web browsers, servers, hypermedia documents and databases, and intranet and extranets provide the hardware, software, data, and network platforms for many of the groupware tools for enterprise collaboration that business users want (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Enterprise Collaboration Systems are mostly made up of three different types of tool sets; Electronic Communications Tools, Electronic Conferencing Tools, and Collaborative Work Management Tools (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Electronic communication tools grant a user the ability to send electronic messages, documents and files in data, text, voice, or multimedia over computer networks. These tools make it easier to share data with your team wherever they are as long as they have access to a connection to the network. With this collaborating effort, thanks to the Internet, being extremely easy and efficient, it is a major contributor to collaboration. Some examples of these tools include e-mail, voice mail, faxing, web publishing, bulletin board systems, paging, and Internet phone systems (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Electronic conferencing tools let people communicate and collaborate as they are working together. With the origin of the Internet there are multiple methods teams and groups can cohesively work together from different locations to exchange ideas at the same time or at their own convenience. Some examples of these tools include data and voice conferencing, video conferencing, chat systems, and discussion forums. These tools also include electronic meeting systems and other group support systems where teams can meet at the same time and place in a conference room setting, or use the Internet to work collaboratively anywhere in the world (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Lastly collaborative work management tools help people accomplish or manage work activities. Some examples of these tools include calendaring and scheduling tools, task and project management, workflow systems, and knowledge management tools. Other tools that promote joint work such as the Microsoft Office suite or Lotus SmartSuite are also included in this category of tools (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). Since the early 90s electronic communication tools have become an essential piece of people’s lives. This is attributed to the Internet and the speed of its growth. “The development and use of the Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other. This change extends to personal and business communications” (Pondent, n.d.). Users knew that it took days and sometimes weeks to get a response from someone via postal service, but with the birth of e-mail, messages were able to get from one person to another in in a matter of seconds (Rance, n.d.). E-mail is one of the earliest communication tools and still one of the most popular (Pondent, n.d.). E-mail enables users to collaborate and work together in almost real time. Consider e-mail the father of collaboration of the Internet era. Close relatives to e-mail are chat rooms, instant messaging, and social media. These are similar to the way e-mail is used because it’s a collaborating method of communication. Chat rooms began as a very early type of social media, but don’t seem to fit in an enterprise setting. A very similar tool to chat rooms for collaborating is instant messaging. Instant messaging is a technology similar to e-mail and chat rooms but it is in real time and usually involves only one other person. Organizations that implement enterprise e-mail usually include a solution for instant messaging. This solution gives users the ability to send a message instantly, have a voice chat over the local intranet, or even start a video call. This saves organizations money in long distance calls, and travel. On the topic of video calls, Internet phones, or IP phones have recently grown massively. “Research firm IBISWorld recently predicted that the VoIP market will grow by 14.2 percent this year, reaching $15.4 billion. According to the firm, digital voice as a component of other phone and Internet plans is fueling much of the growth” (Teo UC News, 2012). IP phone are another type of tool that can be used to collaborate across the globe while saving enterprises money. IBISWorld also stated that VoIP is more affordable than ever before, and many businesses are beginning to realize this, leading to higher adoption rates. “IBISWorld believes that VoIP will likely continue to become more simplistic, adding to the usability and affordability while still allowing for advanced communications” (Teo UC News, 2012). Another tool that enterprises can use to collaborate with is something that is more recent and is still continuing to boom. Social media can help organizations easily get customers involved. With websites like Twitter and Facebook, customers are easily voicing their opinion to the enterprises and the enterprises are seeing this all happen in real time. There are also tools that enable organizations to have a social networking feel in the office as well. HP has experimented with a piece of software they have created called WaterCooler. The object of this software is to explore an organization through enterprise social media (Brzozowski, 2009). The purpose of this experiment is to prevent an organization from losing sight of what knowledge exists. HP used it as a collaboration tool in the enterprise but felt that the organization was not at the right state to fully implement and continue to use. Electronic conferencing tools, including electronic meeting systems, video conferencing, application sharing, and internet forums have gain much traction since the inception of broadband powered Internet. Electronic conferencing is the practice of conducting meetings over the Internet, and it requires no more than a simple set of interconnected computer software and hardware (Dirk, n.d.). It is possible to participate in an electronic conference from anywhere as long as the user has a computer connection. This is a large advantage for enterprises in that they save money on travel. Meetings and conferences create collaborating environments, and with the ability to collaborate anywhere at any given time this is a large advantage for enterprises. These conferencing tools like GoToMeeting, join.me, and Microsoft Live Meeting, promote the ability to easily store materials online which are easily accessible when the meeting opens, grant the ability to fluid lines of communication and let the owners focus more on the meeting and less on the note taking. Interests are devoted to the subject at hand instead of the pen and paper (Dirk, n.d.). Some of the other types of conferencing features are video conferencing. This featured is usually found in boardrooms across the globe. They enable executives to have meetings with users across the globe in real time. Electronic conferencing tools can sometimes be confused with electronic communication tools, but do have their differences that are identifiable. The term electronic conferencing tools can be deceiving, another extremely helpful tool in the enterprise world that promotes teamwork and collaboration is a well-known tool created by Microsoft called SharePoint. “SharePoint has taken the world by storm. As of last year, if Microsoft broke SharePoint's revenue out as a single entity, it would have created the fifth largest software company in existence, according to Jared Spataro, senior director of SharePoint product management at Microsoft” (Hassell, 2012). SharePoint provides organizations with a place to share information and work together on tasks in teams. SharePoint sites offers tools and workspaces that give the ability to users to easily track documents, projects, coordinate deadlines, create and edit documents using features like check in and check out, create shared calendars, alerts and workflows as well. SharePoint is known for its collaboration sites. With an out of the box installation there are templates organizations can use that will instantly bring value as soon as users begin using the sites and as the years go on further integration and technologies will be developed to promote more collaboration. The most predominant templates used in workplaces are the Team site template which gives teams the ability to create, organize, and share information, and the Wiki site template. By default the Team site template includes a document library, an announcement list, a calendar, and contacts list, and a links list. This template can be used to store long-term routine information for a single department, or short-term information for a special project that spans several departments. A Wiki site template is used for users to quickly and easily add, edit and link pages. It usually provides pages that users can quickly edit to record information and link together through keywords. A Wiki site includes wiki pages, a links list, and a wiki page library. Collaborative work management tools, the last of the three different types of collaboration tools identified in research, are probably the most helpful and obvious tools that keep business moving. They are found on almost all workstations in the enterprise, and are even used on workstations at homes. These tools facilitate and manage group activities. Examples of these types of tools could be, but not limited to, electronic calendars, project management systems, knowledge management systems, and office software suites, including word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications. In 1950s organizations started to systematically apply project management tools and techniques to complex engineering projects (Kwak, 2003). Since then tools have been developed to promote collaboration and provide access to centralized information. A project manager assigns tasks and tracks progress in these systems, while project participants provide the statuses of the tasks. Project management software is used to display information about projects, any issues they are experiencing (Anderson, n.d.). Examples of well-known and common enterprise project management tools are Microsoft Project, and CA Clarity. These tools are leveraged by organizations alongside the methodologies and approaches the organizations use. Knowledge management systems are similar to wiki sites. The systems comprise a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences (“Knowledge management,” 2013). Imagine a knowledge management system like a database; it stores all of that organizations data. Any of the lessons they learned from projects in the past, documentation on processes, and knowledge of day to day processes for business operations. The knowledge management systems create collaboration between teams on the business processes that happen from a day to day basis. Most enterprises have a difficult time collecting this data, so this is often a task that is contracted out. The most common of all collaboration tools are office suites. Microsoft Office is well known for their Office products and is predominately the most common suite found on workstations. This tool may seem obvious but it is important to make sure the reader understand, that without applications like word processing and spreadsheets day to day operations would happen at a much slower pace. Another type of office suite that is gaining traction is of the on demand decent. Google has developed an on demand suite that keeps everything in the cloud, giving users access to the stored files anywhere at any time. This is almost like a SharePoint team site except this is expanded to the Internet and anyone that can access the documents in the cloud can view and collaborate on them.
Analysis
The world as we know it wouldn’t exist to this extent without the help of enterprise collaboration systems and tools. The whole goal and point behind collaboration is to bring together ideas, and people to come up with better ways to get the task at hand accomplished. Enterprise collaboration systems take everyday tools and infuse them with technology giving organizations the power to take their ideas, products, and services to the next level. The more frequent an organization can collaborate on tasks the more agile it becomes. There is no right or wrong way to use a system, if it fits for the business and completes a goal for them, give the organization the power to use it. Based upon the research done, a collaboration system to me is the most important piece of software in the enterprise. But it isn’t only the collaboration systems that are needed to create something great. Organizations need to understand that collaboration is a key to having the competitive edge but it’s also important that the organization is agile and privy to the fact of working together is essential in making an organization succeed. Collaboration systems reviewed in research are split into three different categories, electronic communication tools, electronic conferencing tools and collaborative management, or coordination tools. Each category is different but they all seem to intertwine with each other. E-mail is very similar to instant messaging, which is very similar chat rooms and forums. Each shares their benefits but is slightly different. As the years go on and with powerful mobile devices we can start to see and understand where the market is going with collaborating systems. Twenty years from now we can predict collaborating to the extreme with access to everything on a mobile device. If we were to go back twenty years and check how people were collaborating then, we would still find them using computers and word processing software but wouldn’t find them using anything like collaborative enterprise tools like SharePoint or knowledge management systems. Some organizations may find it difficult to convince executives that these collaboration systems can actually bring value to organizations. There is much more research to be done on this topic. To improve the subject area diving deeper into case studies of organizations that implement enterprise collaboration systems could be a great place to start. Having factual data may actually change an executive’s perspective in implementing a system that will bring more value than the company can see. An observation on how to improve this subject area would be for more organizations to invest their dollars in tools that promote collaboration. With this they could then possibly form a committee of some sort that would collaborate on coming up with better tools that enable a next generation type of collaboration. Next generation collaboration tools could be the virtual reality type. Imagine putting on a set of glasses similar to Google glasses, and entering a world where you can see the other person or group of people in a meeting room type of layout. Collaborating and working on ideas could then be brought to the next level. A blog article from Cisco describes a few possible predictions on what the future can entail for us. “Collaboration networks will be to enterprises what social networks are to consumers” (Warrior, 2009). In itself explains that the way social networking has boomed and caught on, collaboration systems and networks will grow in a similar way. “It is not about “on-premise” versus “on-demand”, it will be all about the user experience” (Warrior, 2009). This states that user experience will be enhanced and will become better in the future. “Innovation will be redefined by operational excellence” (Warrior, 2009). Here a prediction on improving quality to innovate and bring enhanced technologies. “Organizations without boundaries will drive the next wave of productivity” (Warrior, 2009). This is attributed to my statement earlier in that organizations that can think outside the box and invest in the future will create and drive the way the next generation of collaboration. “Information technology will evolve into information fabric” (Warrior, 2009). More focus will be brought to building a fabric that weaves together talent, technology and processes.
Summary and Conclusion This research topic covered Enterprise Collaboration Systems, which are systems that create team and workgroup collaboration. The goal behind enterprise collaboration systems is to enable us to work together more easily and effectively by helping us to: Communicate, by sharing information with each other. Coordinate, by organizing our individual work efforts and use of resources. Collaborate, by working together cooperatively on join projects and assignments. Through research we found that there are three different types of enterprise collaboration tools. These types are electronic communications tools, Electronic Conferencing Tools, and Collaborative Work Management Tools. Some of the software tools for enterprise collaboration systems are electronic communication, which include e-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, faxing web publishing, and paging. Electronic conferencing, examples being data conferencing, voice conferencing, videoconferencing, discussion forums, chat systems, and electronic meeting systems. Lastly, collaborative work management tools, which can include calendaring and scheduling, task and project management, workflow systems, document sharing, and knowledge management. The purpose of this research was to further identify the different types of tools that are used in the enterprise world, how they can be used together and to identify the full benefits an organization can see from implementing such a technology. Without enterprise collaboration systems the speed of developing systems and working together as teams would slow down to the pace of a snail. Enterprise collaboration systems have greatly enhanced the speed at which business moves. This is proven by the research done in this paper. The future of collaboration is hard to tell, but from following history and trends we know that these new methods will enhance the way we collaborate and create tight knitted threads of information between businesses, and their employees.
References
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