"The benefits for collaboration are amazing," says Brunsting. For example, employees can decide what kind of alerts they want to have fed to their screens ("supplier X is three days late with a delivery") and then drill into data to identify the cause of the problem and the potential ramifications.
The system has not been a panacea, however. Brunsting says that while the technology he's using is very good at sifting through structured data such as that contained in databases, it is far less good at handling unstructured data, such as correspondence, computer-aided design drawings, and the like. SAP recently combined its portals division with another business unit that dealt with online marketplaces, where unstructured data predominates, and Brunsting is optimistic that over time, all that functionality can be brought to bear in a single product.
While portals have the look and feel of Web sites, Kurt Schlegel, an analyst at research firm Meta Group, points out that they are much more than that. "It really is the next generation of the desktop," he says, "because when you can bring the staggering amount of information within an organization into a single environment and make it easy to search, easy to use, you create a single system in which an employee will spend 70 or 80 percent of his or her time."
Some of that time will be spent on individual tasks--the report-writing, financial analysis, and sundry other chores of the solitary knowledge worker. But increasingly, the prospect of being deskbound is far less bleak than it once was. A number of collaborative tools have come to the desktop--often accessed within a portal, of course--that enable employees to reach out and interact with far-flung co-workers, clients, and other parties in new, more productive ways.
A Room with Views
Designers at Columbus, Ohio-based Chute Gerdeman Inc., a firm that helps Eddie Bauer and other retailers develop their stores, use technology from eRoom Inc. to create a Web-based collaborative space where they can show clients three-dimensional renderings, computer-animated tours, and other demonstrations of their design development process. Wendy Johnson, the company's executive vice president of finance and operations, says the technology has a direct impact on the bottom line, because "we pass the costs of the eRoom sessions through to clients, and since the technology lets us reduce travel costs and out-of-office time, our own fees can stay more competitive."
An "eRoom" is a virtual workspace in which multiple parties can view and work with almost any form of unstructured data, such as the renderings and presentations that Chute Gerdeman develops for clients. "These files are far too big to E-mail," says Johnson, "but once we place them in an eRoom, we simply teleconference with the client and walk them through our ideas. They see everything on their desktop, just as we do." Johnson says reduced travel time and expenses are not the only advantages. "We go from initial meeting to installation very quickly," she says, "so collaborative technologies such as this really help expedite projects. Sometimes we just trade comments within eRoom with no phone contact at all. Since the room is always there, it works for everyone's schedule."
Hewlett-Packard uses the same technology to create "communities of interest," some of which involve only its own employees, others a mix of HP staff and outside partners. "We wanted to get beyond one-to-one communication," says Chris Rand, who helps run the desktop infrastructure for HP's North American supply-chain division. "We don't want to have knowledge workers isolated. The ROI of all our technology spending goes up when we have people collaborating on decisions and projects. We can react quicker and understand changes more fully that way."
Web conferencing to the desktop, instant messaging, and other forms of what Schlegel calls "teamware" are making strong inroads on the desktop. Meta Group believes that eventually collaborative technology will permeate every facet of corporate activity.
All of this collaboration doesn't come cheap. At large companies such as MCI and Xerox, hundreds of servers and enough storage equipment to hold several terabytes of data are required to bring all relevant data to employees' desktops via portals or intranets (which are essentially the same). That equipment costs a significant amount of money, and also poses a management challenge, since often these systems aren't the sole domain of the IT department but are spread throughout the organization. Even at Herman Miller, where a plan to centralize around a single Web site is under consideration, Brunsting says departments have had leeway to develop their own portal strategies, which "means no one feels held back, although when we try to bring them all together we may face difficulties."
Whatever challenges may loom behind the scenes, from their desktops employees can now be more productive and enjoy entirely new forms of contact with co-workers and business partners everywhere. Now if someone could just design a coffeeproof keyboard.
Scott Leibs is a senior editor at CFO.
Big Blue Space
At IBM, the future is on display. Make that displays. Working with Grand Rapids, Michigan-based office-furniture maker Steelcase Inc., IBM has developed BlueSpace, a working prototype of what it describes as the office of the future. In this vision, the typical knowledge worker won't rely on just one computer monitor but several, including touch-screen displays that will allow him or her to dim the lights or turn up the heat, as well as others that act as message boards, alerting passing co-workers about an employee's schedule or whereabouts.
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