Communication and collaboration to drive business success

Digital collaboration is much more than selecting a platform vendor

When it comes to communication and collaboration, the way we work and the technology that empowers us has changed dramatically. What was leading edge and made sense 7-8 years ago is now of limited value. As blogs, wikis, and other social networking tools become popular inside the corporation, employees are building cost-effective communities of knowledge that enable them to share information more efficiently and simplify knowledge transfer—but managing costs and security has become a priority, requiring a more controlled and centralized infrastructure, while compliance is becoming critical for tracking mechanisms. At the same time, vendor offerings have changed dramatically, and much of the custom and user-built applications of the past are now offered as built-in functionality, reducing the cost of ongoing maintenance, security and compliance.

With all these changes, it's time to take a hard look at your organization's communication strategy. Do you still have the right fit, or are you, in effect, using a cell phone from 1995?

Back in the mid-90s, if your cell phone had call-waiting, you were ahead of the game. Now, of course, you can use your cell phone to check your email, instant-message your team, schedule meetings—even watch videos. If you were still using that old cell phone, you'd be missing out on tools that would help you work more efficiently (and certainly more enjoyably). Relying on an outdated, outmoded communication and collaboration strategy has much the same effect on your organization. Are you seeing a lack of responsiveness among your employees? Issues with an increasingly virtual workplace? Compliance problems? Maybe it's time to rethink your platform.

How well does your communication and collaboration platform meet your business needs?

Collaboration is much more than technology. To be successful, any technology you adopt needs to enable collaboration in a way that's intuitive and meets your business needs. So before you start evaluating the fit of your current platform and application strategy, we recommend identifying the communication and collaboration strategies the technology will enable.

To get started, consider how technology has increased the speed of business and raised the expectations of your employees, customers, partners, and suppliers.

• Faster response time and just-in-time collaboration: Globalization brings increased pressure to respond within the timeframe of local events—for example, sending approval at midnight Eastern Time for a proposal that must be submitted at 8 a.m. Greenwich Meridian Time.
  
  
• Virtual workplace: The workforce is dispersed with worldwide, home, and mobile workers, and relies on a variety of tools for business from information exchange to project approval.
  
  
• Regulatory requirements and compliance / eDiscovery: The need for control is growing, whether it's to manage access to documents by specific employees over the course of a corporate merger or to better share and track use of content in a virtual workplace.
  
  
• Virtual teams of customers, suppliers, and partners: To keep a competitive edge, businesses have to provide 24/7 response and access for growing networks of business-critical contacts.
  
  
• End user expectations and familiarity: New employees coming into the workplace have grown up with e-mail and blogs, and have most likely used Microsoft Outlook.

In a constantly changing workplace, communication is more than a technology—it needs to be part of a strategic long-term vision for your business and technology platform. Does your platform offer the flexibility to provide users what they need today and will want tomorrow? Does it offer a strong foundation to build on? When looking at your current platform and strategy, be sure to consider the following:

• Mobility advances
• Ongoing product support
• Securing, maintaining, upgrading applications
• Security and compliance
• Integration of new technologies, backward compatibility, and full functionality with current systems.
• New IT strategies and best practices, including server virtualization and consolidation place new demands

When evaluating your long-term strategy, it's also important to consider vendor leadership, the product roadmap, and the vision for communication and collaboration.

Start by assessing what you have

To understand the scope of a platform change and to effectively manage migration, companies need to know what applications they have and how they are used today. Given their specialized nature, custom applications may have been replicated throughout the organization as users shared and adapted them to their own needs.

Avanade recommends that companies conduct rounds of reviews to ensure a complete inventory and audit of the applications that serve the business. First, set a baseline to determine which applications are used, and with what frequency. Next, determine how the applications' functionality meets business needs and determine if this functionality could be addressed by another application or system now or in the future. Finally, identify what's required to make an application most efficient and useful, including whether it needs to become Web-based to adapt to new workflow requirements, or e-mail-enabled.

Keeping the long-term business and technology strategy in mind, conduct a holistic assessment of applications, overall infrastructure, and support by identifying:

• Tasks that applications are performing and related security or compliance requirements.
  
  
• Application type, whether discussion database, team repository, or workflow.
  
  
• Frequency of use, whether daily, monthly, or on occasion (for example, in conjunction with quarterly or year-end events).
  
  
• Level of utilization, whether by a few users, a work group or division, or company-wide.
  
  
• Impact of company growth or physical expansion on the applications that users built and how users have adapted (for example, by replicating those applications).
  
  
• Number of application servers, their geographic distribution (or distribution of data), and candidacy for consolidation.
  
  
• Accessibility, from data synchronization across application instances to employees' ability to use an application through multiple channels (making applications both easier to access and more vulnerable to changes in infrastructure).

Equipped with an inventory of collaboration tools, usage, and the infrastructure foundation, organizations can determine what makes sense to migrate or build and when it makes sense to do so.

Build a business case for a long-term platform strategy

When business considerations drive your choice of platform, the work of planning and execution becomes far more strategic as well. When making your strategic platform choice, Avanade recommends that you base this decision on your long-term IT strategy and business needs for communication and collaboration. Be sure to consider the following:

• Business requirements. Current collaboration tools and custom applications may no longer serve their purpose, or at best, may serve only present-day operational requirements and not the company's future plans.
  
  
• Software lifecycle status. User-built applications differ from enterprise software in that they typically are created in reaction to a present need rather than future requirements. They tend to evolve organically and may be abandoned when they no longer serve their purpose, making support and elimination challenging and complicating enterprise-wide issues such as security and virtualization.
  
  
• Access requirements. Changing business requirements may mandate new controls or wider access to applications. In addition, employees may need to be able to continue to use certain functions within the legacy system in order to ensure that business continues to run smoothly.
  
  
• Consolidation suitability. Advanced and built-in functionality in the Microsoft platform affords the possibility of consolidating servers.
  
  
• Availability of packaged applications. Applications may be candidates for replacement, as enterprise packages offer more sophisticated functionality.
  
  
• Maintenance and administration. Custom applications may be difficult to maintain as their creators change roles or leave the company. At the same time, different tools and skills may be required to support the new platform.

Avanade has worked with many customers to manage migrations from Lotus® Notes®/Domino® to the Microsoft platform. We take a strategic approach to minimize the impact on operations.

Best practices for managing the migration process

When planning a migration, a first focus may be technology and budget, Avanade believes companies should take a step back and first consider business operations: the way business is run today, where it is headed, and the functionality, collaboration, and "presence" capabilities needed to serve the business now and later—as well as long-term cost-of-ownership requirements.

• Team skills in relation to tools available. It's vital to understand not only IT staff skills but also user skills and their role in the company's production of intellectual property. If users are a primary source of IP and prospective employees (particularly new graduates) are familiar with the Microsoft platform, then the company's future will be affected by the choice to continue investment in the Lotus Notes platform.
  
  
• Alternatives to wholesale migration. If your organization's average custom-built application's lifespan is about two years and its data can be maintained and presented in a spreadsheet, it may make more sense to consider alternatives such as decommissioning to gradual retirement (sun setting), modification, Web enablement, archiving, or replacement with packaged software.
  
  
• Service level agreements. Determine whether service levels will be affected by changes made to the system, such as application deprecation.
  
  
• Compliance and regulatory requirements. Determine what controls need to be maintained or added for integrity and traceability over the course of application depreciation, and resources necessary to make sure that system changes are performed in compliance with segregation of duty and similar requirements.
  
  
• Licensing requirements. Application migration strategy may require retention of a few Lotus Domino licenses for support.