As agencies grow more comfortable with collaboration technologies and practices, the companies that serve them are responding. Vendors are developing products to facilitate collaboration and taking stock of tools already on hand that fit the collaboration market.

Companies also are shaping their marketing messages to capitalize on the burgeoning area of interest.

But the market is still hard to gauge, so many companies are moving cautiously.

Most of the time, collaboration requirements are buried inside larger procurements, said Andre Etherly, vice president of federal solutions at Keane Inc. Rarely does a contractor searching for explicit collaboration solicitations strike pay dirt. But that situation may be changing, he said.

“Agencies are going to have to take a break from some of those big, hard-to-do long-term initiatives and take a look at these shorter-term approaches to facilitate information sharing,” he said.

Collaboration is a general term that encompasses a variety of activities. It can describe any case where information is shared among people and groups, whether by forwarding e-mail or using an application that lets multiple users access and edit the same set of documents and files. Collaboration technology includes desktop products, such as Microsoft SharePoint, and Web-based tools, such as wikis and portals. The term can refer to technology that connects contractors and their customers and also information-sharing efforts within and among agencies.

But most agency customers don’t think about what they do as collaboration. They just see the need to share information as a component of larger programs.

“Collaboration is never somebody’s primary job,” said Mark Levitt, program vice president of collaborative computing and the enterprise workplace at research firm IDC. “Their job is to send invoices or design airplanes. The collaboration piece is a way of doing those things.”

E-mail is still the primary collaboration tool, Levitt said. It has the advantage of being already available and familiar to most people. However, organizations are facing a growing list of needs that make e-mail inadequate in some cases.

“What organizations are looking to do is add the tools — including real-time collaboration and coordination — to the mix,” he said.

BUYING IN TO THE IDEA
Autodesk Inc., a software company based in San Rafael, Calif., acquired Emerging Solutions and its product ConstructWare in 2006 to round out its collaboration portfolio. Autodesk had its own collaboration product, Buzzsaw, and now is integrating the two products.

“We see an increased interest around government customers and their contractors to collaborate,” said Rebecca Chisolm-Walker, director of business development for Autodesk’s government business. “We saw scenarios where contractors would manage their budgets and construction timetables themselves, but government couldn’t join in. There needed to be a way for contractor personnel to allow some sharing of information.”

Like many emerging ideas, though, collaboration has its share of skeptics in agencies. Chisolm-Walker said the holdouts are usually people who are not convinced that making significant changes to the way they operate will have much payoff.

“There is hesitancy, but once people begin to see their real return on investment in terms of reduced numbers of errors and in the efficiency that comes with it, that tends to win people over,” she said.

Many also come to see soft benefits, said Tracy Murphy, marketing manager for government architecture, engineering and construction solutions at Autodesk. Managers discover they have better control over the scope of a project and don’t have to wait for someone else to provide information before they can make a decision. Those benefits are harder to measure than cost savings and error rates, but they make a big difference to some, she said.

WRAPPED UP
The technology needed to facilitate collaboration is largely available, but each project raises questions about the best approach to take. Companies are finding that in many cases the traditional approaches are not the best.

Etherly noted that for many people, the phrase information sharing implies storing data in a centralized data warehouse. But the data in many cases doesn’t have to reside anywhere but in the system that created it. What’s needed is a way for other agencies to query those systems and extract the data.

One option is to modernize older systems to take advantage of built-in data-sharing capabilities in newer systems. But that usually takes too long to meet immediate needs, he said.

Keane uses wrappers, or open-source Web services code added to the data, to let other systems retrieve and use it.

Policy and data governance are bigger challenges than technology. “In the legacy world, there were system owners,” Etherly said. “That starts to break down in an information-sharing world. One of the questions agencies have to wrestle with is who has the authority to share the data.”

THINK TECH BUT ALSO BUSINESS
One challenge for companies providing collaboration tools is to find situations that demand them, said Michael Donovan, enterprise architect of U.S. government solutions at EDS Corp.

Some are obvious, such as EDS’ Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) contract, but there are other cases that might seem like collaboration but really don’t require sophisticated tools.

“Where people are sitting in an office and working together day-to-day, there’s not a high demand for these tools,” he said. “Where there is the real need is when people are in widely dispersed locations and they need to be able to work together as if they’re in the same room.”

EDS is planning a deployment of IBM Lotus Sametime, Adobe Connect and Jabber — an open-source instant messaging application — for NMCI.

“Defense customers are asking for a way to connect processes and people that have information with processes and people that need to consume it,” said Dennis Hayes, chief technology officer of EDS’ NMCI account.

The available collaboration tools are steadily improving, Donovan said. The government has sometimes balked at implementing collaboration products because of the difficulty of authenticating the identity of people using the connections. But increasingly, collaboration tools have authentication capabilities built in.

Digital rights management is becoming a bigger issue. “We’re moving away from protecting the space where the data sits to protecting the data itself,” Donovan said.

Another improvement is the ability to see what hardware participants have available, he said. If someone is connected via a smart phone rather than a desktop computer, another user will know it’s not a good idea to send that person a large file.

STANDARDS CAN HELP
Keeping the technology current is a key component of success, Donovan said. “The average age of somebody coming into the military is 18 or 19. The way they’re used to working is on wikis or Facebook. They look at an e-mail-based network and say, ‘How quaint.’ It’s like what I would say seeing someone write with a quill pen.”

But the very young are not the only users of collaboration technology, Donovan said. Older workers might be nervous about relying on something other than an e-mail network, no matter how outdated it might seem to the younger set.

“The key, I think, is getting folks to realize the value of collaboration,” Hayes said. “In the tactical space, in the battle space, the value is pretty well demonstrated. But in the more ordinary work environment, it’s got to be shown.”

Collaboration comes with some risks to business processes, said Raj Sharma, president and founder of Censeo Consulting Group. It’s easy to oversaturate users with unneeded information. When people must sort through data to pick out the pieces they need, efficiency suffers.

The solution is to approach collaboration from a policy perspective, he said. An organization should set standards for when and how to share information so the right people have it when they need it. In some cases, making data available to everyone via a Web portal might be the right course of action, and at another time, it might be better to share the data in an e-mail to a select few people who need it.

“Collaboration as a theory sounds good and dandy, but we have to specify what we mean,” Sharma said. “You have to think about the negative part of this. As quickly as you can gain efficiency, you can lose it at some point.”

Michael Hardy (mhardy@1105govinfo.com) is an associate editor at Washington Technology.