Todd L. Watson, assistant editor for SQ magazine and /AIXtra: IBM's Magazine For AIX Professionals, has been with IBM since 1991, specializing in AIX and RISC System/6000 communications issues. He holds a bachelor's in English and a master's in mass media studies, both from the University of North Texas.
And now the computer, which has taken on the burden of processing everything from routine administrative chores to complex scientific calculations, is at the center of yet another innovative period. Integrated with networks and telecommunications, the computer is changing not only how we work -- but where.
The new technology goes by different names: collaborative or cooperative computing, computer-supported cooperative work, groupware, personal conferencing, and workgroup computing. Whatever the name, it's compelling employers to give their staffs the information they need to make knowledgeable decisions -- or get left behind, stranded in a wasteland of isolated employees with unlinked workstations.
"Workgroup computing is more than a
bunch of shrink-wrapped applications,"
says Steve Mills, general manager, IBM
Software Solutions Division. "It's about
software that adapts to the nature of an
organization."
"Technology should allow people to do what is instinctive to them," says Max Alexander, a consulting support specialist with IBM's Networking Software Division in Atlanta, Ga. "Since primitive man hunted in groups, there's been a desire, if not an outright need, to approach tasks in a collaborative manner."
Although many companies have been hesitant to implement full-blown workgroup solutions, the rapid growth of networked and mobile computing, combined with increasingly flattened and empowered organizations, is forcing their hand.
It's time to seize the day, according to Alexander. "`Why now?' That's been the question since the start of the Industrial Age," he says. The answer? "Because you can fall behind. And while you delay your decision, competitors who move into the new technology may gain an advantage over you."
After deciding to move ahead, some IS executives invest significant resources in equipment and innovative, but often expensive, applications. Then they all but ignore the human-resources issues involved in making the new technologies work to their advantage, leaving them still thirsting for the substantial benefits they were so desperately seeking.
"The key to workgroup computing is first understanding what work needs to be done, then ensuring that the right information reaches the right people at the right time, so that they can do their work in the most effective manner possible," says Richard Sullivan, director, workgroup marketing solutions, IBM Software Solutions Division.
"It's not the amount of information that counts, it's the quality. We want to enable people to make the right business decisions."
Collaborative computing has typically been used in several key applications, each having a different type of information flow. They include E-mail, information sharing/discussion databases, personal conferencing, time management/scheduling, meeting support, electronic forms, and workflow.
Instead of envisioning them as fused, interdependent agents working together to create a truly collaborative environment, many organizations have allowed orthodox, standalone PC-centric concepts to place too much emphasis on each of these areas as autonomous entities. Effective workgroup computing rests not only in encouraging shared information among employees, but also in the interplay of software. How can people share information efficiently when their software can't?
"Workgroup computing is more than a bunch of shrink-wrapped applications," says Steve Mills, general manager, IBM Software Solutions Division. "It's about software that adapts to the nature of an organization."
Consisting of a comprehensive portfolio of modular group-communications, information-sharing, and workflow products, IBM WorkGroup integrates existing product offerings with new and forthcoming products across multiple platforms. As a result, once incompatible applications and platforms will now work together and communicate with one another to streamline and bridge various work environments.
"We've seen computing from a centralized view, and we've seen it from a decentralized view," says Mills. "The time has come to see it from an interconnected, interoperable view."
IBM WorkGroup was developed with three notions that are central to effective team-oriented work -- communication, collaboration, and coordination.
Effective teamwork means getting people and organizations collaborating; applications, tools, and information stores communicating; and processes and activities coordinated. Doing so means moving beyond the segregated fundamentals like personal productivity, E-mail, and information sharing -- all of which have traditionally operated as if in a vacuum.
IBM WorkGroup's primary objective is to reflect the way businesses and people actually work. It focuses on the work that needs to be done instead of the tools used to do the work; it does so while leveraging existing IS investments.
"IBM WorkGroup is about using the tools you have," says Mills, "and then plugging in those that you need."
A three-tiered structure for IBM WorkGroup allows applications to be integrated and new products to be introduced as they are developed -- distinguishing this coordinated, forward-looking strategy from other, more narrowly focused workgroup schemes.
The three tiers of this structure -- the foundation, the workgroup services, and the desktop -- establish a framework that goes beyond E-mail of the past and groupware of the present to enable workgroup computing capabilities for the future.
This foundation will ensure that business communications -- such as electronic forms, E-mail, multimedia documents, and information/discussion databases -- will be delivered reliably and securely. The messaging stratagem will do so in a consolidated fashion, according to Sullivan, the chief architect behind IBM's WorkGroup computing strategy. "Our server and messaging infrastructure is designed to bring everything to the same in-basket," he says.
E-mail has been the most widely employed workgroup function. Through the recent explosive growth of the Internet -- combined with skyrocketing subscriptions to commercial online services -- it has become a useful and cost-effective means of business communication. But E-mail's almost exclusively point-to-point capability has been limiting, especially when many users are involved in a project. Another frequent drawback: E-mail information is neither categorized nor passed on to anyone other than the original recipient, ignoring the basic workgroup principles of sharing and categorizing information. And until recently, people primarily used E-mail for sending only text messages.
With IBM WorkGroup, however, MQSeries-based message-oriented middleware provides the essential transport mechanism for complex business communications that can include text and multimedia data (images, graphics, voice, and video) -- all of which can be stored, shared, and categorized. This mechanism also facilitates forms routing, desktop conferencing, and workflow and fosters key business processes such as customer support, product development, and order processing.
The mail function of IBM WorkGroup supports all major mail standards, including vendor independent messaging (VIM), Mail API (MAPI), and Common Mail Call (CMC). The function will support native transport protocols including simple mail transport protocols (SMTP) with multipurpose Internet mail extensions (MIME), as well as transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP), X.400, and systems network architecture distribution systems (SNADS).
Such dependable, tightly knit integration allows employees to concentrate on their work rather than on elaborate business processes. No longer do they need to be concerned about what they want to send and how -- just who to send it to and why.
To help accelerate such "infoquests," IBM has developed an entire series of applications. IBM Visualizer Query products enable users to search DB2/2, DB2/6000, DB2/VM, DB2/VSE, OS/400, Oracle, and Sybase databases, using a few simple mouse clicks -- without knowing the intricate semantics of structured query language.
IBM Visualizer Ultimedia Query for OS/2, which operates in conjunction with IBM Visualizer Query for OS/2, allows users to search for images using traditional data and visual samples of color, texture, shape, and layout in both still images, audio, and video clips.
However, finding and accessing information isn't usually the only goal. Workers need to manipulate that data and mold it to their purposes. With Visualizer's optional plug-in objects, users are able to view their information graphically, analyze it statistically, formulate multidimensional business plans, build customized applications, and even hear their data.
IBM's Visual Document Library, which streamlines document management across an entire enterprise, allows users to store, organize, and locate virtually any kind of electronic data files, including text, graphics, and multimedia presentations.
The ability to find, visualize, and manage vast amounts of useful business data across client/ server networks will go a long way toward establishing a reunification of mainframe and LAN- or WAN-based data. The information was always there, you just were never able to look at it with the right perspective.
"The orderly progression of work from desk to desk is one of the hallmarks of any workgroup solution," says Sullivan.
Forget about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing -- we're down to miscommunicating digits. In theory, flat organizations sound great. But the truth is that instead of forcing employees to communicate through multiple levels of a hierarchy, such structures merely create communication gaps across an organizational horizon. Done properly, workflow helps eliminate such breakdowns.
"The key to workgroup computing
is ensuring that the right information
reaches the right people at the right time."
-- Dick Sullivan, Director, Workgroup Marketing Solutions, IBM
FlowMark workflow software plays a key integrating function in the information-management component of IBM's WorkGroup strategy. Designed to do more than merely shuffle along tired text-based electronic documents, FlowMark implements a client/server design built on a true system object model (SOM).
FlowMark's workflow functions are constructed atop the communications and information-management capabilities, linking desktop and line-of-business (LOB) applications into a seamless work-automation system. By connecting these applications to electronic folders containing faxes, scanned images, photos, spreadsheets, and a variety of other objects, IBM WorkGroup allows employees to have a wide range of business documents at their disposal -- all at a moment's notice, transparently, and across distributed networks and disparate systems.
FlowMark helps organizations' computing paradigms shift beyond personal and group productivity to the next level -- to business and enterprise productivity -- by tying all these elements together: personal productivity, groupware, and line-of-business applications.
But did you ever think that the opposite might be true? WYDSIWYDG -- what you don't see is what you don't get.
That's the way it can be with complex workgroup software. While the package you're using may have extraordinary capabilities and functionality hidden deep beneath its covers, you may never realize they exist. You may have to conduct an exhaustive exploration just to understand its potential. With IBM WorkGroup, however, it's more like WYSIWYGAMM -- what you see is what you get and much more.
One of IBM WorkGroup's primary objectives is to integrate IBM applications and services, and those of other software companies. So, great emphasis is placed on developing common, synthesized features across the product line, including installation procedures, administration, and user interfaces.
The desktop interface is often the first, and sometimes the only, layer end users see. But what they don't know shouldn't hurt them, and the interface should never limit their ability to do a wide variety of work.
IBM WorkGroup software offers a range of desktop-oriented workgroup functions that users or administrators can easily customize to meet particular needs by simply selecting object components. These functions include mail, chalkboard, address book, calendar, document management, workflow, query, report, and forms. With a single logon, users have access to mail, directories, scheduling and calendaring, facsimile, and agents -- all with a common look and feel.
Because these functions' design is based on SOM-enabled object technology, they can be tightly integrated across all the various applications that users might likely want to incorporate into their company's workgroup strategy. Users can send notes directly from address books; request meetings, using calendar applications; and mail notices directly to attendees and forward tasks from workflow applications, using the mail system.
For administrators, IBM WorkGroup software streamlines the arduous task of user enrollment and maintenance with a single enrollment and user-management facility. This resource works not only with IBM WorkGroup facilities, but with popular industry applications such as Lotus Notes, and cc:Mail.
The interface is simple, the capabilities robust -- WYSIWYGAMM.
If time was of the essence in the past, it is the essence in today's competitive marketplace. "Recent business trends are creating a new paradigm in computing," says Sullivan. "These trends require organizations to be much faster on their feet."
Collaborative computing is proving to be an exciting and compelling solution that will help provide that speed. But it's not just a technology -- it's an attitude. You have to want your employees to have immediate access to information. Why create empowered, pancake-flat organizations if you're going to put a bridle on information, which employees must access to run the business? Better to let loose the reins now than flog a dead business down the road.
Doing so will not only keep you from having to manage the management of your organization, it can allow you to concentrate on improving the way you run your business. Isn't that your real job?
As networking and mail protocols grow to allow faster transfer of larger volumes of information, and as standards organizations establish specifications to create much-needed compatibility among disparate software technologies, workgroup computing will evolve with them.
IBM's vision for workgroup computing is simple, yet powerful: Workers will never see a standalone product on their workstation. Instead, they'll have a task-oriented environment that reflects their individual jobs. The underlying combination of technologies, like those who use them, will work together to accomplish their tasks effectively.
"There's tremendous power in leveraging both people and computing assets, in knitting them together, in organizing tasks, and in getting them to flow end-to-end," says Mills. "Allowing businesses to take advantage of those moments of truth that each business experiences -- that's our goal."
By blending the best of the technologies you already own -- and enabling them to work across a multitude of platforms including Windows, OS/2, OS/400, AIX (and other forms of UNIX), Windows NT, Windows95, and MVS/ESA -- and paving the way for the best that's yet to come, IBM WorkGroup is taking a significant step forward into the future of computing.
Talking Heads
IBM WorkGroup: What's In A Name?
IBM WorkGroup Products