CITO ResearchAdvancing the craft of technology leadership

October 2012

How IT Can Supercharge Collaboration

Sponsored by QlikView

Contents

Introduction 1

The Convergence of Social Media and Business Intelligence 2

The Transition to Collaborative Business Discovery 2

IT and the Characteristics of Collaborative Business Discovery 5

The Benefits of Collaborative Business Discovery 7

Conclusion 8

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

IntroductionInteraction and cooperation is a basic human need that is essential to decision-making. Tasks that we often think of as being performed by an individual—writing a document, researching a potential customer, or even booking a conference room—usually require coordination with others. More complex tasks, such as determining a proposal strategy or selecting the site for a new store, involve a great deal of cooperation and collaboration.

Since decisions are made collaboratively, it’s high time that software reflects and supports that real-ity. Collaborating about data is a dynamic process. Software that displays only static reports will not satisfy the collaboration needs of such a dynamic and iterative activity. For example, business users who are looking for answers about a sales process need to know which regions drove the high sales fig-ures and what’s really behind the numbers, and they will ask new questions that can’t be anticipated in a static presentation of data. In other words, decision-making is best supported by Collaborative Business Discovery.

As software supports more and more of our daily activities, there won’t be collaborative software and “other” software—software as a whole will integrate more features for collaboration. This shift toward col-laborative software has strong implications for the software IT supports as well as the very way IT interacts with the rest of an organization. IT’s original task was to provide technology to the organization and control use of that technology to reduce both risk and cost. IT was both provider and controller of technology in an organization. However, as users become more technology savvy and incorporate more technology

into their daily lives, the role of IT is itself becoming more collaborative (see From Gatekeeper to Enabler, and the most progressive IT organizations are finding a way to control a core set of assets while also creat-ing platforms that allow those assets to be used by as many people as possible.

One important part of IT’s new responsibility is ensuring that each platform supports collaboration. Providing collaboration features in business software isn’t introducing a new capability—its capturing the interaction that already occurs on an ad-hoc basis and incorporating it into a workflow. The reason it hasn’t been done in the past is that it’s difficult—most software was created to automate highly prescribed, linear processes, not to enable esoteric, nuanced, iterative processes. Older platforms don’t have much collaborative functionality and must be supplemented by other collaborative platforms. Newer applications have collaborative functionality, but the degree of functionality varies.

When formulating a strategy to include collaboration, key issues to consider include:

• Types of collaboration to support

• How to deliver collaboration as a platform or a collection of platforms

• How to deliver collaboration within the context of applications

Before it can unlock the power of Collaborative Business Discovery, IT first needs to understand this evolving ecosystem and adjust several aspects of its traditional model.

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

The Convergence of Social Media and Business IntelligenceBusiness decisions are made in discontinuous, col-laborative conversations in which people add insights to the conversation periodically. The problem is, most business intelligence (BI) tools are built to deliver reports for individuals, to consume alone at their desks, somewhat like dry, shrink-wrapped sandwiches. These tools don’t effectively support group decision-making. A person needing a decision emails a report for feedback, and then the conversation grinds to a halt while everyone waits for person A to comment.

Business decisions are made in discontinuous, collaborative conversations in which people add insights to the conversation periodically.

Enter social media. It’s already common for people to use shared workspaces and documents such as Google Docs to solve business problems, both inside and outside the workplace. When people see others changing documents in real time, it’s like the differ-ence between sitting in on a conference call and being in a room with a whiteboard.

Businesspeople see the success of social media in enabling ad-hoc collaboration in the consumer world and wonder if they could use similar approaches in their businesses. But social media, even when con-textualized to a corporate setting, has not itself led to better data analysis and decision support. Collaborative Business Discovery completes the circuit for effective decision-making.

Collaborative Business Discovery supports many forms of collaboration—disconnected, real-time, and interactive. It allows for shared insight, enables con-sensus building, and achieves greater speed to action. Participants aren’t just looking at one person’s flat analysis; they can consider the data, drill into it, see where it came from, and raise additional points to consider. Collaborative Business Discovery provides accountability, by enabling users to easily answer the question, “How did you come to that conclusion?” The factors that went into a decision are captured and traceable so that lessons really can be learned.

The Transition to Collaborative Business DiscoveryFrom IT’s perspective, the transition to Collaborative Business Discovery does not mean the wholesale replacement of traditional BI or collaborative tools, or any other enterprise system, with some other system. The biggest difference in the operational characteris-tics of Collaborative Business Discovery is that collabo-ration is brought into the context of the work, extract-ing the work from the business platform and placing it into a separate forum for collaboration. That changes IT’s responsibility from managing the complete life-cycle and ecosystem of an application to facilitating a more malleable set of platforms that allow for innova-tions of business-developed solutions.

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

Before social media enhanced platforms took a few steps in the right direction, the most primitive form of collaboration was email. Users could send small chunks of text and attachments to each other. In Jive, the enterprise social networking software, sharable directories allow users to post items and place comments around them. But the assets themselves (documents, spreadsheets, presentations) were still transferred from one person to another. They could not be worked on simultaneously. Similar restric-tions apply to other document-sharing tools, such as SharePoint.

Google docs are at the next level—the asset itself is sharable and can be manipulated by multiple people at once.

But at the highest level, Collaborative Business Dis-covery allows real-time, contextual understanding within the asset. Through sharable objects, partici-pants can be brought into the dialogue and immedi-ately understand “where they are.” By using metadata that binds comments to the application, chains of comments can be created within a document. When someone clicks on the comments, the document changes to reflect selections made when the com-ment was written. Users can construct a narrative within the document itself.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that all collaboration within an organization happens within the bounds of a given application; indeed, many organizations will need to support collaboration across multiple applica-tions, documents, departments, and geographic loca-tions. For example, the natural-resources supply chain manager Noble Group of Hong Kong uses QlikView, a Collaborative Business Discovery platform, but has also created a wiki to share and discuss QlikView documents. It includes observations of the findings, as well as “how to” guides about how discoveries can be made and shared.

IT departments that are taking the long view will ensure that applications support collaboration so that users can make more effective use of data and thus drive more effective decisions. The greater the per-centage of collaboration-enabled technology there is in the enterprise, the more data-driven decision-making can be.

IT departments are looking toward supporting three fundamental aspects of collaborative technology:

• A sharable library of documents and objects – Users share access to the assets; the assets themselves may not all necessarily support in-asset sharing or collaboration

• Sharable objects – Such objects create a contex-tual understanding embedded in the document

• Live collaboration – The ability to collaborate in real time using collaboration sessions

Collaboration is historically not trackable, recordable, or secure. IT needs to provide software that can capture interactions and create a decision trail that supports accountability. To enhance security, collabo-ration can, and in some cases should, happen behind the firewall.

The problem is, most business intelligence (BI) tools are built to deliver reports for individuals, to consume alone at their desks, somewhat like dry, shrink-wrapped sandwiches.

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

The Evolution of Collaborative TechnologyThis is the beginning of an exciting new era. Today, applications increasingly include collaborative ele-ments. Word processors and spreadsheets are avail-able online—like Google Docs—that enable and encourage fully interactive editing by multiple users simultaneously. But even their desktop equivalents include numerous features for tracking edits and comments from multiple users. Almost every digital camera comes with software for sharing photographs online. Knowledge is crowdsourced, often formally, as with Wikipedia, but also often informally, through ad-hoc threads on social networks.

These are not technological advances; they are a case of technology catching up with our most basic needs. As humans, cooperation and interaction are essential to our decision-making, and even essential to our health and well-being. In prison, solitary confinement without contact with peers is considered very harsh punishment.

The following sections describe some of the essential features of a truly collaborative technology environ-ment and how forward-thinking IT departments are supporting collaboration.

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

IT and the Characteristics of Collaborative Business DiscoveryThese key characteristics of Collaborative Business Discovery close the gap between the latent potential of social media for BI and its realization. It’s incumbent upon progressive IT departments to understand and appreciate these characteristics of Collaborative Busi-ness Discovery and to support software that has these capabilities by making certain critical adjustments to the enterprise IT model. Supporting these characteris-tics increases the collaboration index.

Collaboration Transforms All Your DecisionsCollaborative Business Discovery helps to capture and support the natural process by which decisions are made, supplementing it with the ability to ask ques-tions that come up along the way. The decisions are collaborative and involve the right people and the right data.

The key lies in capturing ideas and incorporating them into a workflow that leads to a quick, confident deci-sion. In order to drive insights that deliver business value, data must be contextualized, relevant, and spe-cific to the group charged with delivering that value.

IT’s Role: IT must furnish or support the purchase of a platform that offers:

• Scalability. In many enterprises, thousands of users may need to access billions of records simultaneously. Automated load balancing is needed to ensure maximum performance.

• Maintenance of data associations, so that searches can be paused and resumed without IT intervention.

• On-the-fly calculation aggregation, so the user experience is super-charged and super-fast.

• Data compression. This will save on processor power and help maximize hardware performance.

Users Freely Manipulate DataBusinesspeople need to be able to search, visualize, remix, and reassemble data on the fly. They need to freely explore and interrogate data without any assis-tance from the IT department.

IT’s Role: To support collaborative access to data, IT needs to step away from the traditional, locked-down data warehouse model and embrace an architecture for data storage and access that allows applications to easily and securely obtain and use existing data and contribute new data through an orderly process.

Sharing Is Real-Time and SecureIn order to support data-driven collaborative deci-sions, businesspeople need to share data securely about a specific product, service, region, or organiza-tion. These analytics need to be locked down so that only those with rights to the data can view it and collaborate on it. The common practice of emailing a document around and waiting for responses from multiple stakeholders will become a thing of the past. Increasingly, sharing must happen in real time.

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

IT’s Role: IT can adopt a business discovery platform that incorporates the latest security standards and protocols. This includes:

• Integration with existing data security infrastructures.

• Enforcing group, role-based, and individual user policies.

• Flexible controls that will permit approved users to gain access to analysis, data, metrics, and results, both as individuals and as parts of collaborative groups.

• Defining security procedures from end to end, starting at the application level, and moving all the way down to individual data elements.

Decision-Making in Real TimeTo support effective decision-making, multiple users need to be able to access a Collaborative Business Discovery app simultaneously and jointly ask ques-tions of the data to gain insight. Compare this with screen sharing conferencing applications, where the role of “presenter” is shifted from one person to the next and that person shares his or her screen. Col-laborative Business Discovery must support multiple users working at the same time and seeing the results.

But just as important, contributions that cannot be made in real-time need to be supported as well. In today’s business environment, executive decision makers aren’t usually available at once. Software plat-forms must support both synchronous and asynchro-nous decision-making. For example, one individual can comment on a decision and forward it to the next two people, who may be able to collaborate on that same asset in real time, pulling in relevant, up-to-date data as they do so.

IT’s Role: To support real-time decision-making, today’s top IT organizations deploy business discovery platforms that support the above capabilities from the outset so that IT does not have to attempt to add these capabilities later.

To truly enable collaboration, the platform will need to support:

• Live sessions that improve the quality of business decisions for geographically-distributed and mobile users who work in teams to analyze infor-mation and make decisions.

• Joint interaction with a document in real time, which means users are sharing selections and test-ing scenarios together to better uncover insights and solve problems.

• Sharing a document with others who don’t have a license for the software.

• Real time and multi user interaction with software, without having to pass control manually from one user to another.

• Support for collaboration on smartphones and tablets as well as on desktops and laptops.

Existing Social Networks and PortalsBusiness users need to be able to share Business Discovery apps and bookmarks through appropriate social networks and through portals such as Microsoft SharePoint or QlikView Access Point. Sharing an ana-lytical environment in real time requires Collaborative Business Discovery.

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

Collaborative Business Discovery is about business users drawing information from verified enterprise data systems as well as from outside assets, capturing their thoughts in an organized fashion and sharing those thoughts—scaling and accelerating conversa-tions that deliver real business value.

IT’s Role: IT must continue to curate the existing infra-structure of enterprise systems and databases that has been built up over time as well as allowing data from those systems to feed newer purchased applications or apps generated or brought in by users. This may

mean changing current group security permissions. It may also mean fewer prescriptive metadata models and more descriptive models that can be adjusted quickly as the business changes.

The Benefits of Collaborative Business DiscoveryIT can help supercharge collaboration in the business by facilitating an environment that supports Collab-orative Business Discovery, as shown in the figure.

Security• Leverages existing infrastructure

• Role-based permissions

Speed and Productivity• Accelerates decision-making

• Live collaboration

Frees Up IT• User self service

• IT focuses on core competencies

Bene�ts of Collaborative Business Discovery

Transparennncncnnnnnnnn yy• Enhanced compliance

• Clear audit trails

vityng

Fre• Us

• IT

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How IT Can Supercharge CollaborationCITO Research

Advancing the craft of technology leadership

ConclusionBecause collaboration is integral to the way decisions are made, software must support and enable collab-orative, data-driven decision-making. Collaborative Business Discovery is part of a new dawn for IT, which is in transition from a primary role as gatekeeper to a new role as an enabler. Forward-thinking IT depart-ments are taking up this role to enable collaboration in as many of the supported technologies as possible. This can be achieved by controlling a core set of assets, but also by creating platforms that allow those assets to be used effectively by as many people as possible. When self-service is enabled, data is emancipated to do what people want it to do, without creating large queues and headaches for IT. When the collaboration index of an enterprise increases, so does the effective-ness of its decision-making. Today’s leading IT organi-zations play an enormous role in making this happen, increasing efficiency and improving business results in the process.

CITO ResearchCITO Research is a source of news, analysis, research, and knowledge for CIOs, CTOs, and other IT and business professionals. CITO Research engages in a dialogue with its audience to capture technology trends that are harvested, analyzed, and communicated in a sophisticated way to help practitioners solve difficult business problems.

This paper was created by CITO Research and sponsored by QlikView.