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Three
reasons why ‘Less is More’ for SMB Collaboration
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By Roger Greene .
Talking with David over sushi at lunch recently, we discussed his definition of collaboration: “E-Collaboration occurs anytime you have two or more people sharing complex information via the computer on an ongoing basis for a specific purpose or goal.” It’s pretty open-ended definition, but as readers of this newsletter know, collaboration has many faces.
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We talked with David about a wide range of technologies for collaboration, from team rooms to document management solutions and even direct neural interfaces for attention management. For me, collaboration for smaller businesses always came back down to the basics: e-mail, shared calendars, contacts, and instant messaging, and those applications have to be easy to use and easy to manage.
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In this article, we take this contrarian, which is really a retrospective, view that, at least in small and mid-sized businesses, “Less is More” when it comes to collaboration software. What we mean by less, is less functionality. For example Lotus Notes, which has an incredible amount of different functions, and is the “Swiss Army Knife of Collaboration,” also has it’s downside in terms of training and administration.
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This “Less is More” philosophy flows from three major differences in how smaller and larger businesses operate:
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Focus IT resources
Creativity/control continuum
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Many enterprise software vendors ignore these distinctions when packaging their collaboration solutions for the SMB (small medium business), and produce products with too much overhead or too many components to manage, like Notes. Those who work from the bottom up, identifying the critical components of SMB collaboration, we believe, will win the lion’s share of this vast market (CS estimates the asynchronous collaboration market to be over $30B by 2006).
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IT Guy vs. IT Group
The clearest difference between large and small businesses is resources. In a company of fewer than a hundred or two hundred people, information technology is often handled by one or two people, or a handful of part-timers, or even outsourced completely. In larger enterprises, IT is a department, a constituency, and a cost center.
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This certainly affects what kind of collaboration tools a company can implement. It’s easy – although not always cheap – to get help from a VAR when installing and implementing a collaboration product. However, it’s the ongoing administrative burden that takes its toll on the smaller IT departments. Policing usage, giving and taking training seminars, managing storage groups – these are the hallmarks of large-company IT departments supporting enterprise systems that the SMB can ill afford.
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Outward focus vs. inward focus
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Smaller companies are almost entirely customer, or vendor-facing. The corporate boundaries are more porous for smaller companies as they are more dependent on outside vendors for major parts of their business. Collaboration must cross the boundary easily, using the simplest tools available and sticking to standards whenever possible. Security is also a concern when going outside the firewall. E-mail, FTP, and iCalendar scheduling are likely solutions.
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Larger organizations are just as engaged with their partners and suppliers, but have more people who are completely internally focused, and may have internal groups doing things that once were contracted out, such as an in-house advertising agency. The more inward-focused the organization, the more need there is for custom collaboration applications and specialty databases. Proprietary tools present less of a problem, and with IT resources more available, they can be supported.
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Creativity vs. Control
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As companies grow, concerns shift from creativity and revenue growth to accountability and expense control. It’s not that large companies don’t value creativity – most do – but as the firm grows beyond management’s immediate ability to see what’s going on, more and more resources go into management, control, and reporting. As growth slows, managers look to control expenses, and detailed reports of resource use become more important. As a result, creativity suffers.
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The impact on collaboration needs is similar. Smaller companies have more ad-hoc collaboration needs, as teams are fluid and everyone wears many hats. SMB collaboration must empower the end-user. In a small business you don’t need permission to create a shared folder, and you certainly don’t want to wait around for paperwork or a service department to create one. You just do it from your desktop, e-mail your team about it, and then get to work.
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E-mail Centric
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Collaboration tools often emerge to address perceived shortcomings in e-mail, such as document management systems to reduce e-mail attachments. E-mail is so widespread, so entrenched – e-mail has long since passed the “Mom Test” (David’s term for a collaboration technology that is now so simple that even his Mom can use it). Over time we have found that attempting to switch user behavior to another interface for another purpose is often hard to do without significant training and IT support, sometimes even then it’s difficult. Old habits die hard, and the most successful collaboration products will be those that leverage the old habits, like using e-mail or an IM client, in new ways. One example might be threaded discussions via e-mail list server instead of in newsgroups or web forums.
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For small businesses where collaboration needs to be fast and free, unstructured, general-purpose tools allow the most unobstructed collaboration inside and outside the business. Easy doesn’t have to mean feature-limited, but it does imply an economy of design and a focus on the most important capabilities first and foremost. Collaboration systems need to facilitate the work of a business, not add to it.
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Conclusion
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As David suggested, “Collaboration” is all about working together. In smaller businesses, there’s too much to do and too little in terms of resources to get caught up in overweight infrastructure or environments when what you really need are basic, easy-to-use solutions for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. Larger businesses have the need for, and the resources to implement, more extensive, managed, customized applications for collaboration.
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Small businesses that let enterprise software vendors tell them the scope of their collaboration needs are bound to get taken for an arduous (and expensive) ride, and that doesn’t make for a lasting collaborative relationship between vendor and customer.
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Roger Greene is the president and founder of Ipswitch which Ipswitch develops and markets software that works for small and medium businesses worldwide. More than 100 million people use Ipswitch software every day. To find out more, visit www.ipswitch.com or e-mail info@ipswitch.com
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