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Market Opportunity
(This is a "founding document" that I wrote in late 1997, prior to incorporation, to communicate the essence of what Groove was to become.) The Challenge As companies have grown more efficient through restructuring over the past years, they have increasingly developed into very, very complex and chaotic work environments. Businesses now commonly operate
In an attempt to gain more effectiveness and more efficiency in this complex environment, many enterprises have chosen to embrace collaboration and business process automation technologies. At the macro level, where such business processes can be understood and mapped out in a top-down fashion, these technologies (e.g. Workflow, Notes, Web, Databases) have been tremendously effective. However, in any complex organization where hierarchy has diminished, it is clear that much - if not most - of the process of "how the organization operates" defies formalization, and thus defies automation attempts through any means other than perhaps electronic mail. And this is because it all comes down to people: In order to solve problems effectively, serve customers efficiently, and dynamically address challenges, employees interact with one another in an ad hoc manner. People "network" with one another, gaining value and effectiveness through their relationships. leveraging each others' knowledge, ability and experience. The breadth and effectivness of an organization's culture and "interpersonal value network" can, in many ways, shape its real operational effectiveness. In fact, by focusing on the task of improving the effectiveness of interpersonal relationships and collaboration, one can arguably gain as much if not more long-term results to a business than can be obtained through macro business process reengineering. For, while there are limits to the amount of efficiency that can be milked out of a business process, the incubation of ideas and the management of knowledge and relationships toward corporate advancement can yield continued vitality and potentially sustainable growth. The key to a dynamic organization is the individual, and the nature his or her collaboration with other individuals. For example: When a few musicians get together to "jam," the small, tight group naturally coordinates itself, establishing its own tempo and its own rhythm, improvising outcomes, tolerating both consonance and dissonance, continuity and diversion, producing a unique and effective work as transparently collaborating peers. The outcome is so fluid and effective that rehearsal is indistinguishable from performance. However, when the number of collaborators is large, as in an orchestra, coordination requires a conductor and rigid discipline. And while the resultant orchestral work is arguably of high and predictable quality, the potential creative variance of the outcome is far less than through the inspired passion of a few individuals. There won't be many surprises, good or bad. While continual improvement of business processes, and large-scale communication and collaboration systems are surely necessary for organizational efficiency and survival, sustainable growth and overall operational effectiveness is best achieved by focusing on the enablement of the ad hoc network of individuals within an organization. Collaborative Innovation If enablement and empowerment of the collaborating individual is the focus, then it is useful to examine how people collaborate, and how they utilize objects, tools, environments, and technology to collaborate effectively with one another when in supposedly "optimal" contexts - that is, in the same place, at the same time, working toward a common goal. In meetings, and during brainstorming, individuals communicate with one another using whatever tools and environments are at their disposal to most effectively get their point across. Telephones, voice mail, whiteboards, pads of paper, napkins, electronic mail, faxes, musical instruments, clay. People on the path to innovation and discovery need to sketch and prototype and perform; they need to convey insights that only a visual or tactile or aural representation of the problem can evoke. The nature of the shared space shapes the process of collaboration. Rapid prototyping and breadboarding, sketching, jamming, all introduce collaborative vocabularies; speaking the same language is a prerequisite to collective understanding. One cannot divorce the language of collaboration from the medium that carries it, and even one medium can carry several languages: talk & music aurally, video & sketches & paintings visually, and so on. Visual and aural and tactile language elements are all woven into a continuous flow of communication that shapes understanding. It is clear that an effective collaboration environment should be flexible enough to support a rich variety of interaction methodologies. Collaborative tools & environments should empower human expression, not handicap it due to the limitations of a particular medium. But the computer-based collaboration tools available today - eMail, exchanged Attachments, Web publishing, Web forms, shared Discussions & Newsgroups, Notes databases - are now virtually universal and define a language - a constrained language - within which we all operate. (Arguably, it is these tools that have actually in some ways helped to create the chaotic environment within which we work!) The language of the Web is "page", "www.something.com", "read", "surf", "publish", "advertise", "shop", "form", "buy", "search", "bookmark". The language of eMail is "message", "send", "receive", "reply", "inbox", "folder", "attach", "delete", "forward", "address". To that, the language of Notes adds "document", "share", "form", "view", "database", "replicate", "server", "user.id", "administrator".
These tools surely provide us with rich languages - languages that have been invaluable for a wide variety of business and non-business applications. But will the language of these existing tools suffice for the kind of individual collaborations that need to be fostered? Probably not; it is clear that people are struggling to do more, outside the constraints of the languages imposed by the tools that they're using:
Many products boast of multimedia capabilities and flexible environments, but even the best general purpose collaboration tool in existence, Lotus Notes, is constrained to a single type of collaboration model with its own constrained language, exhibiting - coarse, document-centric granularity - only one person can work on a given document at any given time - mostly appropriate for document-accrual-based applications - non-real-time, occasionally-connected design center - purely horizontal design methodology, one user interface for all applications If one believes the assertion that our increasingly chaotic business environment will require increasingly effective collaboration, it is surely arguable that one must also think beyond the collaboration language constraints of the current tools and environments. One must envision tools enabling individuals to creatively collaborate in new ways, by defining a new environment with new languages for interaction - languages appropriate to the type of collaboration being undertaken. The goal must be to embrace tools and environments that enhance and augment the productive relationship between collaborators, ones that do not simply act as a "different-time different-place prosthesis." One must think in terms of many factors that come into play in collaborative environments, such as
It is surely clear that, when a small group is brought together, their most effective collaboration tool can be a whiteboard, a pad of paper, a flipchart, or a napkin. Aren't there environments or products that can be developed to enhance same-time same-place collaboration? And when they're apart, should the flood of collaborative ideas be forced through a straw of constraining technologies? Interpersonal Collaboration Within the enterprise, collaboration is generally driven top-down by the requirements of a business process. Collaboration occurs in formal contexts: amongst formal "teams" or related to "projects," toward the enterprise's greater business goals. In fact, it has been shown that the use of Notes in many corporations is predominantly eMail until or unless a "leader" or "champion" of sorts drives the specific implementation of a collaborative business process application. As such, due in large part to the buy-in necessary to successfully implement collaborative systems, the use of collaboration tools such as Notes to date has been largely an enterprise phenomenon. In an attempt to bring more effective collaboration to smaller groups and smaller businesses, products are beginning to emerge that are intended to make it easier for small teams or groups of individuals to set up server-based collaboration environments. Products such as Instinctive's eRoom, Changepoint's Involv, HotOffice, Lotus' Instant!TEAMROOM, Lotus' Haiku, and Concentric Networks Virtual Office offer traditional document-oriented collaboration environments in packaging that is much more lightweight and easier to deploy than traditional enterprise web and collaboration tools. While these lightweight server-based collaboration environments are indeed tuned for smaller groups, they are still oriented around the notion that a small "team" will create a virtual "room" within which to collaborate, principally at the level of granularity of a "document." Although they purport to be different types of products, the language of collaboration in these environments is not substantially different than that of the enterprise tools. And although they do scale down to small teams, they really don't scale down to the most fundamental unit: individual or the pair of collaborating individuals. And it is this - the most fundamental unit of collaboration, the pair (or at most "a few") - that represents the vast majority of interpersonal collaboration currently occurring. By simply examining electronic mail archives, one can identify a vast number of individual collaborators and collaborations. Some collaborations revolve around the resolution of a single "hot" issue: they form, they are intensively active, and then they cease. Other collaborations involve small pairs or sets of people who work closely over a long period of time on a wide range of issues. These collaborations are generally well focused and represent tactical collaborations - "field" or "front line" collaborations - as opposed to the strategic business process collaborations driven top-down within the enterprise. Furthermore, this type of intensive interpersonal collaboration isn't limited to the enterprise. Increasingly, due in large part to the ubiquity of SMTP-based electronic mail, individuals are now using the Internet to collaborate with their attorney, their accountant, their architect, their child's teacher, or remote family members. While clearly not "optimal", these individuals choose electronic mail because it has many essential characteristics:
Indeed, the mechanism of eMail enables rudimentary collaboration. But if one believes that our increasingly chaotic business environment will require increasingly effective interpersonal relationships, it is surely arguable that one must think beyond the constraints of the current personal tools such as eMail. One must think in terms of what kind of an environment would be most appropriate for this type of "individual" or "pair" collaboration, which is either goal-focused, with a few people working together on something in common, such as a component of an engineering project, a research project a customer support issue a sales prospect or relationship-focused, with a few people working together intensively on an ongoing basis, such as an executive and her assistant, a manager and his direct reports an attorney, an accountant, a banker, an architect, a contractor, a client a board of directors, a group of musicians The Goal Define a new class of software known as "pairware". If "groupware" was the term given to software intended for group empowerment within structured organizations, "pairware" will be the term given to software intended for personal empowerment in the context of ad hoc relationships or tasks. Pairware will enhance
Pairware should feel truly revolutionary, supplying the smallest missing factor, as Peter Drucker puts it, that can transform a jumble of elements into a working system - he minimal mutation that provokes a new paradigm. In this case, the paradigm is pairwise collaboration. Using the product to collaborate with another individual should feel subjectively 10 times better than using eMail, and should feel subjectively 10 times easier and more efficient to do than if any other type of team- or group-oriented product were used. Everyone who uses a PC to connect to the network with any regularity would always have three tools in their tool chest: eMail, a Web Browser, and a Pairware environment.
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