How To Create A Digital Workplace

One thing has become abundantly clear in the world of e-business: The "e" certainly doesn't always stand for easy.

Rapid growth in Internet use fundamentally is changing the way companies obtain and share information and conduct business with their extended enterprise of employees, customers, suppliers and other business partners. The widespread adoption of the Internet as a communications platform has created a new medium through which companies can conduct business.

In tandem, business processes have become increasingly varied, complex and difficult to manage. This is due in part to the increased pace of global competition, increased outsourcing, rapidly changing customer requirements, heightened demand for more highly-customized products and significantly shortened product life cycles. These processes require a broad range of collaborative activities among the members of a company's extended enterprise, including conferencing, discussion, document sharing and editing, and project tracking.

The Internet provides the pervasive connectivity for members of the extended enterprise to collaborate with others regardless of organization, location or computing environment. Companies seek to use the Internet to support dynamically changing business needs, improve employee productivity and strengthen relationships with customers, suppliers and business partners. To do this, they require an application that easily is deployed and managed, that is compatible with existing software applications, and is accessible through standard Web browsers.

Clearly the new dynamics of e-business have created the need for a new workplace--a digital workplace--in which distributed teams can get work done. In a digital workplace, members of an extended enterprise can work together, resolve issues and make decisions. Distance is abolished, and access to information is unprecedented.

In its present form, e-commerce addresses some of the interaction between organizations--the ability to move purchase orders between organizations, the establishment of pricing for certain goods, delivery and delivery schedules, billing and exchange of fund transfer, and the management of inventory. These interactions, however, where experts have to make decisions, work together, discuss issues and so forth, are not well served in a standard e-commerce application.

To compete effectively, companies must devote substantial resources to business processes that take place before transactions are completed, such as the design of new products, requirement planning, vendor qualification and business planning. Companies also must cevote substantial resources to processes occurring once a commercial relationship is established, including making product design improvements, ensuring customer satisfaction, handling field problems and change orders, and forecasting future needs and next release planning.

This presents the need to go beyond the transaction between companies and to build a collaborative infrastructure for the virtual organization in order to support these key e-business initiatives--the digital workplace.

The digital workplace provides an environment for distributed teams to create, innovate and communicate on all the aspects of e-business that surround the core transaction. Teams can work together, resolve issues and make decisions, whether it is for single projects or across a company's enterprise. Relationships are cultivated that can be as intimate as if they took place inside the traditional four walls.

The effectiveness of a digital workplace, however, depends solely on whether it meets certain criteria--the five "C's," if you will:
* It must be comprehensible and have minimal learning curve. Companies and individuals simply are not going to change the way they work if it requires a significant ramp-up for a new application. If people have to learn a new tool, they will not use it, especially those people outside the firewall. The digital workplace needs to be as simple and obvious as e-mail or instant messaging.
* It has to be contagious. The digital workplace must have clear benefits to all parties involved, to both distributed workers and the different enterprises interacting in these new workplaces. There have to be clear benefits to the extended enterprise--reducing inventory, faster time to market, grabbing marketshare--aswell as to the individual workers--getting more done in less time, reduced conflicts, less travel. The workplace also has to be a trusted place, thus secure, both for the individual and the companies involved. People have to want to use it.
* It must be cross-enterprise. The digital workplace must span company boundaries and geographic boundaries. It also must operate outside the corporate firewall with an organization's customers, suppliers and other partners, and require very little IT involvement, or it will not gain acceptance.
* The workplace has to be complete. All communication, document-sharing, issues- tracking, and decision-making needs to be captured and stored in one place,
*The digital workplace must be connected. If not, it will not gain acceptance. When people work together, they do not work in a vacuum. Typically, they work on projects that support some broader business processes. So the digital workplace must be connected to both digital enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, financial systems and PDM systems, as well as digital marketplace applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems, SCM systems, electronic marketplaces and the like.

Recent industry statistics support the need for this digital workplace. According to Forrester Research, the e-commerce market could be a $1.3 trillion monster in the next couple years. As competition becomes increasingly global and extended enterprises more geographically distributed, companies will continue to shift the focus outside, to the sharing of information and processes with external partners and customers, something the META Group refers to as "externalization" of the enterprise. Gartner Group has said that it expects around 40 percent of large organizations to embrace this technology.

The statistics from our customers further prove this evolution. For example, Hewlett-Packard estimates that the arrival of the digital workplace has increased its worldwide inventory turns by 40 percent.

AT Kearney, a global management consulting firm of approximately 5,000 consultants with 60 different organizations worldwide, deployed the digital workplace across the entire organization, using it for all its engagements. The company's goal was to differentiate service by working more intimately with clients. Previously, client collaboration was hindered by geographic distribution and the fact that consultants were hesitant to participate in a standard knowledge management system. With the digital workplace, AT Kearney was able to save five hours to seven hours per consultant, per week.

The digital workplace trend has taken root. The rules have changed, and four walls simply cannot contain a virtual economy.