BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Build Bridges Beyond Your Corporate Collaboration Island

Following
This article is more than 9 years old.

Modern enterprises are never insular. They work and interact with developers, resellers, suppliers, and customers, all of whom represent the extended enterprise. Yet, many keep IT systems closed by firewall and policy, and sometimes similarly so for employees as well, even when they need to work with people externally. Information access may need to be restricted, but limiting people to interacting solely by email with the outside world severely limits their ability to communicate and build a shared context of understanding. The one place you should support interaction is in the collaboration system.

That ability to build bridges to the internal island (or continent) that is your organization’s domain of business interactions, becomes a necessary element in recovering the front from interacting solely within the limitations of public social networks. While I still agree organizations need to participate in public social networks, I also think that we limit ourselves in doing so—as well as becoming beholden to them. Furthermore, there are many considerations (legal and otherwise) why some information should never permanently leave the domain of their IT systems, regardless of whether that is in-house or on the cloud.

So how do we solve this? How do we get employees to interact with external partners within the security of the enterprise domain? Does this mean we are creating walled-gardens again?

First, think about the approaches for how people interact, rather than how systems are deployed. Some interactions need to occur wherever the customers are, or similar public places where they go. Other interactions need to occur with external partners in exclusive settings.

From a combined IT-Business view, this could mean:

  1. Helping employees participate in an external social media for work purposes
  2. Building public spaces beyond the firewall on your domain where anyone can come
  3. Building spaces beyond the firewall that you can invite small or large groups of people
  4. Building spaces beyond the firewall that you can invite specific individuals
  5. Inviting external people inside the firewall within limited areas
  6. Inviting external people inside the firewall with broad access

Generally, #1 is rarely debated, and companies by many measures participate in external social media. #2, #3 and #4 meant that IT had to manage a second deployed environment, and sometimes many of them. IBM for example has their IBM developerWorks community with millions of users in a public space they run.

#5 and #6 tended to be the most complicated to handle because it meant having or building the right access mechanisms and the policy systems to keep access in check. This happens for many reasons. If you’re having conversations with one customer about their private concerns, then you need to keep it private. When working with partners, you may want to give them exclusive early access before others. You may want suppliers to be able to interact with employees and departments but only about their offerings within ordering systems.

What if your collaboration system could do all in one?  This is generally what IBM is proposing with their latest revision in IBM Connections 5. I had a recent discussion about the changes with Jeff Schick, recently promoted to GM of Social Software at IBM.

IBM has been growing and evolving their social business offering over the years, first from a collection of social tools into a holistic suite, and then into an enterprise process-ready system. Now, with the insight of design thinking with the team at IBM Design, they have expanded their view to support the way people work in the extended enterprise.

Per, Mr. Schick, once you deploy IBM Connections 5 internally in the organization, individual users and owners can invite guests into internal secured areas, with “an email and a single click”. IT has administrative controls over who is allowed to do so, but once approved, individual employees can invite others into their specific internal community, blog, wiki, files or other social components in the system. While the external guests are in the system, they can only access what lies within that limited subdomain; links to other areas of the system would be walled away. If you are keenly interested in how it works technically, there is an extensive 150-page IBM Connections 5.0 Reviewer’s Guide available.

Mr. Schick explained this was already in demand by their customers regardless of industry. For example, a company could invite a team from their marketing agency to collaborate with their internal marketing team in preparation for a new activity or customer event. To go further, Mr. Schick spoke of an unnamed Telecommunications and Unified communications company that is building their customer offering on top of IBM Connections on the cloud. Rather than build a system from scratch, they are using the IBM platform and in particular the Activities component to build a new offering for mobile use. This describes the IBM social software as a platform for customized Collaborations-as-a-Service that companies can provide to their own customers.

From a software industry watcher’s view, it moves the IBM Connections family more towards IBM’s usual familiar space in enterprise middleware, where it is a strong leader, rather than end-user software. IBM is still working on building its presence in the cloud computing market. According to Mr. Schick, in the 4Q2013, they added 390 new cloud customers, and in 1Q2014, another 350 customers. That might seem few in number, but you consider the size of some of them and what they support: the United Nations, Carnival Cruise Lines, Slideshare (part of LinkedIn), or WhatsApp (part of Facebook).

IBM has been popping new datacenters in countries around the world, in the process of or will soon add UK, Frankfurt, France, Beijing, and Hong Kong to existing centers in the US, Japan, Singapore, and Amsterdam.  This supports the increasing concerns of companies on national level oversight or policies for co-locating employee and customer data locally. For IBM Connections, likewise the future is in the cloud.

Are they playing catch up to existing collaboration tools that have grown up entirely on the cloud over the Internet? Yes, but in doing so, they have leaped ahead because they have already figured out the public, the internal and hybrid models all with a single unified approach to working beyond borders and bridging beyond the corporate collaboration island.