Groupware and collaborative computing

By R.Ramasubramoni | 07 Aug 1999

The marketplace of the 90s has been characterised by fierce competition, increased quality, better customer service and lower prices, which, for the companies has meant more demanding customers (both internal and external), more flexible and responsive organizations and tighter co-ordination among business departments and units. The companies have responded with organizational re-design- flatter organisation structures, cross-functional teams, functional expertise- all geared towards increasing productivity.

For the above system model to work, internally the company needs to have a system to maintain the flow of information, to help information sharing and to co-ordinate joint activity. This is where groupware and collaborative computing comes in.

The technology expert David Coleman defines groupware as 'Computer-mediated collaboration that increases the productivity or functionality of person-to-person processes'. Beyond the definition, what groupware does is to support the efforts of teams and situations that require people to work together. It helps overcome the constraints of time or space. Groupware maximizes human interaction while minimizing technology interference.

Groupware follows from the trend of collaborative computing, which, as a concept has been around for about twenty years. Collaborative computing has proliferated with the growth of networks and with the increased need to share resources and data plus the need for interactive and team bound work processes has seen it become a major technology area.

The broader concept is called collaborative computing which allows group interaction-- communication, information sharing and co-ordination of group activity. These three form the corner stones of collaborative computing.

Groupware is the set of tools that provide the framework for collaborative computing. In this framework we can think of tools (elements) like

The last mentioned is the one that help integrate the other elements to make a seamless and unified set-up across computer platforms, operating systems, e-mail systems and network architectures.

We can see that basically groupware integrates the elements or activities involved in a group-working environment where the typical requirements are: emailing, document sharing, schedule management and co-ordination, workflow co-ordination, conferencing etc.

The major groupware products are Novell GroupWise, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Netscape Communicator, SuiteSpot Server, Lotus Notes, TeamOffice, OpenDoc, GoldMetal Workgroup and OpenMind.

What are the gains? Increased productivity, better customer service, automation and standardisation of routine processes, hence tuned towards quality initiatives like TQM, fewer meetings, the base infrastructure for and the possibility of extending the organization to include both the customer and the supplier, integration of geographically disparate teams, better co-ordination, leveraging professional expertise, increased competitiveness through faster time to market and getting differentiated in the marketplace.

With groupware, the critical success factors are the technology, economics and the internal dynamics of an organisation in an increasing scale of magnitude. It has been seen that for groupware to succeed, the culture of the organisation has to be tuned towards sharing of information with a flat and open hierarchy to complement it. Groupware forms a first step towards knowledge management. (see article ).

What next? Groupware is now progressing towards the Internet, like many other recent technologies. As the Internet becomes widespread and organisations move towards intranets, collaborative or workgroup computing has started migrating towards the Net. Products like Netscape Collabra, Lotus notes and Microsoft exchange interface with the web easily. The internet has made workgroup computing easier and highlighted the effectiveness of groupware.