Article: Will the Real Groupware Please Stand Up: The Evolution of Groupware

It may seem bizarre to ask the question "What is Groupware?" when there are millions of users of Lotus Notes but it is a serious question because a strong argument can be made that "groupware," as the term is commonly used, does not exist. Iris Associates and then Lotus practically created groupware in the late 80's and early 90's and they did a lot of things right. However, what we called groupware then is not the same as what we mean by the word groupware now. Lotus has changed the definition not once but four different times.

This article looks at the evolution of groupware breaking it down into four distinct phases, discusses the challenges at each phase as well as what Lotus has done to meet those challenges. In conclusion the article considers the major market opportunities and future directions of Lotus Notes and Domino.

Why Groupware Does not Exist

Retracing the origins of groupware is somewhat like retracing the origins of the Macintosh UI to Xerox Park's laboratories. Back in the 1980's we already had e-mail, newsgroups, document management, group scheduling, and miscellaneous communications and collaboration tools. Some of the applications that evolved in the 1980s in the broad category of communication and collaboration, News groups for example, developed in the Internet community. Others had their precursors in PC-based bulletin board systems (BBSs) such as FidoNet which incorporated e-mail, automated scheduling and routing, and primitive workflow-like capabilities. Still others developed as alongside early microcomputer LANs, for example LAN-based e-mail and document management systems.

In the second half of the 1980's collaborative computing applications along the lines of chat and concurrent document access appeared in the Macintosh market. Although they were not particularly successful, the idea of "groupware" had been born. The concept of groupware was to take different applications and functionality under the umbrella of communication and collaboration and integrate them together as a common set of services or a single client application. It is important to understand that "groupware" is not a technology and it is not a product. The term "groupware" is actually a categorical term referring to a class of applications used for user-to-user communication and collaboration. Groupware represents a wide range of applications and methods of integration but it is not a particular product or a specific technology.

The word groupware is rather like the word "food." If you went to the grocery store and bought a box simply labeled "food" you would not know what foods the box contained, how they would taste, or if they were nutritious. If you knew that all four food groups were included in the box you would still not be able to plan a meal based on this information alone and you would be hard pressed to answer the question: "What's for dinner?" This is analogous to what IT decision makers face, and what Lotus sales people must overcome, when customers buy the box that says Domino. If a customer is looking for a specific product or technology called 'groupware', or a concise statement of what is in the Domino box, they won't find it because it does not exist. The groupware is actually the box itself rather than a specific thing that's inside: and there are many things inside.

The Invention of Groupware: Collaborative Computing

In the early days the concept of groupware was simple: communicate and collaborate. The term 'collaborative computing' was in vogue for some time although not until the early 90's. This was the first incarnation of groupware. Collaborative computing included e-mail but in the early 90's e-mail was all the rage and customers understood it much better than collaborative computing. Although Lotus made some effort to position Lotus Notes and Domino as a messaging product this never became their primary market focus and simple collaborative computing evolved into business process re-engineering which became the re-invention of groupware.

What Lotus did right was to build all of their groupware applications on a common client/server database system and make this system extensible as a software development environment. In this sense Lotus was far ahead of any competition. Only recently have Web-based application servers and workflow engines arisen to challenge the capabilities of Lotus Notes and Domino as a development platform.

The Re-Invention of Groupware: Business Process Reengineering

With the trend towards business process reengineering Lotus saw a great opportunity for collaborative computing by leveraging its workflow capabilities. Of course it is possible to reduce paper, automate workflow, and change business processes so that they are less labor-intensive and more reliant on collaborative computing technology. Lotus made progress with this approach but reengineering business processes requires a high-level management commitment to groupware.

The key enabling technology of business process reengineering is workflow which was a central component of Iris Associates' original concept of groupware and a historical strength of Notes. Workflow makes it possible to model business processes in terms of information flow, individual roles and responsibilities associated with information, and access controls. Workflow makes it possible to transfer knowledge of business processes to an automated system and to modify these processes based on new automation and integration capabilities provided by integrated 'groupware'.

The business process reengineering approach has much to offer to some businesses but little to offer others. Some types of businesses can benefit tremendously from reengineering and taking advantage of collaborative computing technologies, however, the benefits are not equal across vertical markets. The reengineering approach made possible by workflow can make it more difficult to sell the concept of groupware versus more traditional technologies such as e-mail or client/server databases. In most cases, workflow capabilities within a given company are not universally applicable thus 'groupware' is inhibited from becoming ubiquitous in the way that web or e-mail technologies almost invariably do.

What Lotus did right was identify and pursue the reengineering opportunity, both within a business and in the area of business-to-business collaborative computing. What Lotus was doing in the mid 90's later evolved in the context of the merging of the corporate market and the Internet community into intranets and extranets. That evolution signaled a collision between Lotus Notes and the World Wide Web which Lotus moved to resolve in 1996 by embracing the web and re-inventing groupware as Domino. However, this had the effect of obscuring Lotus' core competency in workflow while Internet standards-based technologies and products lacked this capability.

The Second Coming of Groupware: Intranets, Extranets, and E-Commerce

Lotus made pioneering efforts with the concept of business-to-business collaborative computing through Lotus Notes. However, with the Internet and World Wide Web explosion of the mid 90's, the rapidly moving marketplace threatened to leave Lotus almost at the starting line. Lotus moved quickly to incorporate web technology into Domino and recreate it as web server and publishing platform. As a web server Domino offers the power of workflow and the Notes development environment which make it an excellent platform for intranet and extranet web development. Unfortunately, the server architecture and proprietary database technology and development tools have prevented Domino from becoming a mainstream Internet web server platform.

What Lotus did right was recognize that no proprietary system could compete with the Web and move quickly to extend Notes and Domino to the embrace it. As a web server platform Domino gives customers the best of both worlds: the power of Notes and Domino as a collaborative computing environment and the flexibility, accessibility, and openness of the Web. Another thing that Lotus did right was identify the e-commerce opportunity and move to make Domino a powerful e-commerce engine.

The New Groupware: Knowledge Management

While traditional collaborative computing and messaging, business process reengineering, and the Web (intranets, extranets, and e-commerce) are all strong markets for Lotus Notes and Domino, another re-invention of groupware has emerged in the past two years: knowledge management.

Similar to groupware, 'knowledge management' is a general term referring to a number of different applications exploiting different technologies. Unlike traditional collaborative computing applications, however, knowledge management focuses on collecting, processing, managing, and distributing corporate information, including information about business processes. In practice, this is not different from the kinds of Notes applications that existed under the business process reengineering mode of groupware but knowledge management doesn't necessarily imply changes in business processes and thus is not as difficult to sell. Instead, knowledge management seeks to model, capture, and automate existing business information and processes. Regardless of how well Domino fares in the Web arena, there will be a place for it in knowledge management partly because of Domino's strength in the workflow area.

Lotus Notes and Domino evolved in four major phases (collaborative computing, business process reengineering, the Web, and knowledge management) and Domino currently occupies at least 4 distinct market positions. This can make Domino difficult to define and it can be difficult for customers to understand what it is and how they can benefit from it. The installed base of Lotus Notes and Domino is growing and its rapid evolution towards Internet standards-based technologies, both on the client side and as a development platform, promises to make it more powerful, scaleable, flexible, accessible, and extensible in the future.

The primary market for Lotus Notes and Domino remains providing integrated IT infrastructures on corporate networks. There is an opportunity for small and medium-sized companies to benefit from Lotus Notes and Domino but, contrary to the enthusiasm Lotus has expressed to its business partners in this area, this opportunity for groupware will not grow as rapidly as the market segment. Small and medium sized companies (under 5000 seats) tend to have relatively simple requirements, more limited IT resources, and no application development budgets. Of course this is not true across all industries. Small and medium sized customers typically expect to utilize off-the-shelf products that existing IT staff can install, configure, and manage alongside other systems. They also tend expect products to integrate into their existing environments without an infrastructure overhaul. Moving forward Lotus faces stiff competition and cutthroat pricing among these Wintel-oriented customers.

The main opportunities for Lotus Notes and Domino are in knowledge management and in the intranet and extranet spaces. Domino 5.0 promises to boost Domino's viability as Web-based collaborative computing development environment. While Domino is unlikely to become a major Internet web server platform it can make great progress as an intranet and extranet server platform leveraging its strengths in messaging and collaboration to provide an integrated infrastructure solution. In this area Lotus faces mounting competition from 100% standards-based products and technologies as well as from Microsoft Exchange Netscape and other Web vendors are already focused on the intranet and extranet opportunity while Microsoft has gained ground based on messaging and simple collaboration.

Knowledge management overlaps both the infrastructure and Web spaces and constitutes a strong marketing strategy for Lotus moving forward. However, it is typically only larger companies that are concerned with knowledge management. Although the opportunities are vast there will be growing competition in the knowledge management area where vendors like SAP AG can overlap, as well as complement, Domino-based knowledge management applications.