UC and Collaborative Workspaces – The Future of Info- and Knowledge-based Work

How we work is changing rapidly, especially for the information workers and knowledge workers who make up about 25% of the workforce. No longer must the information used in the job and the communications tools needed for the job be considered as two separate domains with separate tools or end point devices. And, no longer must the information and the tools be accessed from a business office building. With the removal of those constraints, productivity grows and business processes are accelerated and optimized. 

Now, collaborative workspaces are being fully enabled with communications tools and social networking capabilities. The communication tools are very much UC tools – including Presence, Instant Messaging, user profiles and pictures, blog posting and wikis, and live communications: voice, video, document sharing, and online meetings. 

And, with few limitations, these integrated workspaces can be accessed from almost any device and from almost anywhere, with security via encrypted information and communications. Thus, the future of productive work, available now, for results-oriented information and knowledge workers sure looks to be a communication-enabled collaborative (and social) workspace. 

Let’s look at a few examples:

• Microsoft is building on SharePoint, their market-leading Microsoft Office component which provides for content management, information sharing, personal profile pages, and team workspaces. Now, Lync 2010, Microsoft’s UC product, integrates with SharePoint to automatically provide the entire suite of Unified Communications tools right in the workspace. This excellent blog post by Chris Stegh of Enabling Technologies which describes how this works. He points especially to the automatic communications with anyone who posts or is a member of a workspace. He shows how the search function will search the SharePoint database to find available experts, and also how SharePoint workflows can automatically invoke the UC functions of Lync 2010. This case study of Aditi Technologies includes Microsoft SharePoint and Lync.
  
• IBM serves this market opportunity with IBM Connections. While IBM is marketing this as “Social for Business,” it is still a collaborative workspace with communication tools. IBM has built on their solid experience with Lotus Notes and IBM Quickr for the collaborative workspace platform and have integrated IBM Sametime for the UC functionality. You can see some demonstrations of this in YouTube video posts here and here. The similarities to Facebook (for business) seem obvious. You will see that IBM emphasizes blog posts as the new form of team communication (i.e. instead of isolated phone calls or time-consuming physical meetings). This case study of Rheinmetall AG highlights the value of this "Business Social" collaborative workspace approach.

It is notable that both Microsoft and IBM also offer cloud-based combinations of UC and collaborative workspaces (via Microsoft Office 365 and IBM Lotus Live). 

Many others are pursuing this concept, including the emerging solution from Cisco which builds on their WebEx, Jabber and Quad components. You can read more about the evolution of this market in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, August 2011. Microsoft, IBM and Jive are the leaders in that report. You can also see the evolution of enterprise content management (which includes collaborative workspaces and portals) in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management October 2011; Microsoft and IBM are also in the leaders quadrant in this category, having built their customer bases for SharePoint and Quickr for over a decade (more on that at: “Business Social Networks: Leading The Way for Decades”).

In summary, the world of collaboration is changing thanks to the inclusion of Unified Communications and Social Networking functionality. The challenge to all of us in the enterprise communications and UC market is to embrace this delivery of communications as part of a business process, rather than as a separate silo which requires the user to switch from one application to another. This means we will have to work collaboratively with the vendors and the IT managers of collaborative workspaces, content management and social networking technologies if we want to produce high-return, competitive and relevant solutions for our customers who employ information and knowledge workers. 

Hope to see you soon in a UC-equipped collaborative workspace. 

5 Responses to "UC and Collaborative Workspaces – The Future of Info- and Knowledge-based Work" - Add Yours

Art Rosenberg 3/12/2012 9:01:38 AM

Thanks for the "collaborative" perspective, Marty!

It fits in nicely with what I have been calling the next generation "UC Contact Center," because it adds in collaborative contacts with both internal staff and business partners to the more traditional customer interactions of the contact center. Applications like "Help Desk" and Field Service Dispatch, will all be improved in the UC Contact Center..

I am glad that you pointed out the trend towards "cloud" based services, because that indeed is fast becoming the easiest way to migrate to the UC-enabled future of business.

Marlon Machado 3/12/2012 1:06:27 PM

Art,

We're doing some of that with Interactive Intelligence. You may want to take a look at this demo:

https://bit.ly/zTKsFx

Rupert Clayton 3/12/2012 2:51:13 PM

I feel there's a distinctly different vision coming from Microsoft and IBM here. Microsoft's approach remains document-centric, wedded to specific files and their organization into glorified network folders, albeit with a light smear of social veneer over the top.

IBM's approach, both in IBM Connections and IBM SmartCloud Engage (the new name for LotusLive) is primarily focused on people, and the knowledge they can offer (documents are merely a small portion of this). This also extends more naturally to UC than does the document metaphor.

Now, there's no doubt we're all familiar with the document and files paradigm (IBM Connections has this, too), and taking a new more social approach has to be carefully thought out. But if you're stuck building a better file cabinet it's hard to innovate with any really new business processes.

Marty 3/13/2012 7:42:37 AM

Hi, Art,

Thanks for your comment. I presume you mean that the 'UC Contact Center" represents another major use case. I don't see the "UC Contact Center" as a foundation for collaborative workers. I agree there is a population of workers, some already in contact centers and some who are in related back-office roles who will benefit from UC tools; but that will be much different from the collaborative worker role and deserves a separate use case, probably not based on SharePoint or Connections.

Thanks,

Marty

Marty 3/13/2012 7:51:53 AM

Hi, Rupert,

Thanks for your comments. I see that you are an IBM Collaboration Solutions Architect at CDW, so your thoughts on the differences between Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Connections are surely well-informed.

The key point, from my prespective, is to understand the Use Cases for which either tool (or other emerging tools in this category such as Google Docs/Voice/Apps or Cisco Quickr) would be used. There are many, many roles where the job is to manage the flow of information among a relatively closed community (R&D, Professional Services, Project Management, etc.); in those cases, the document, blog, and click to communicate features seem to be most important. There are many other collaborative roles (sales, a number of management roles, investment or market research, etc.) where the networking effect, both inside and outside the enterprise are most important.

In our consulting practice, we focus first (and always) on really helping the customer understand their use cases. From that, the nature of the work and the requirements for software tools to assist the people in their roles become quite clear. Those requirements make the product selection and deployment phrases very logical and easy, not to mention economical.

Great discussion, Rupert. Thanks!