CTO Forum: Ray Ozzie charts dynamic collaboration

Boston — Enterprise workers are now hungering for richer collaboration, having moved beyond document-centric messaging toward a deeper drive for more dynamic interactions both within business groups and outside corporate walls to business partners and customers, according to Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks, speaking here at the InfoWorld CTO Forum on Wednesday.

Ozzie created Lotus Notes, one of first tools to address early collaboration needs, and now heads Groove Networks, which builds collaborative shared spaces that let groups work together on projects and documents in real time.

Groove originated to solve a missing link in business collaboration, Ozzie said.

“It is obvious and commonplace now, but at the time [in 1995] a lot of [Lotus] Notes customers had serious headaches trying to deploy and manage outside the enterprise collaboration,” he said. The trouble primarily stemmed from the need to get two separate IT organizations involved to satisfy a simple, real-time need to communicate, according to Ozzie.

The real sweet spot for enterprise collaboration, according to Ozzie, is to get multiple organizations and business units together dynamically and quickly, which is often difficult to achieve through the limitations of e-mail and with centralized enterprise IT requirements.

“If business environment is more decentralized and more dynamic inherently, maybe technology should be designed to serve that need instead of forming centralized approach on the business environment,” Ozzie said.

Ozzie cited a recent example of how Groove Workspace technology is being used on the front lines in the war in Iraq to coordinate supply requests. Previously, the supply replenishment process was cumbersome and slow, often requiring a courier to carry a paper form hundreds of miles back from the front lines to a remote supply location.

Because Groove is a purely decentralized system that does not need a server to host the application, laptops already available were loaded with the Groove application. Within two days, according to Ozzie, the Groove system was in place, collecting damage assessments and supply needs on laptops while offline and then transferring the requests back to the supply center when connectivity was available.

This example highlights the inherent value in providing technology that can quickly answer dynamic collaboration needs. “To conceptualize an application on a Saturday and deploy it on Monday is astounding,” Ozzie said.

In fact, Ozzie explored the idea of exploiting the inherently selfish nature of collaboration. “E-mail is the default collaboration tool in the enterprise, but people don’t think they are collaborating,” he said. “They are satisfying their own needs, which involve other people.”

Groove was built with this important concept in mind, Ozzie said, not as a replacement to e-mail but as a way to get group conversations into a more natural environment. “If five people on a [project] team say they are to be notified about a certain subject, then they all get the notification and find themselves together in a workspace,” ready to collaborate on that specific topic, he said.

“This brings people together automatically, out of satisfaction of a selfish need for information,” Ozzie said. “It is a smart model that brings people together based on selfish requirements. That’s how real world collaboration works.”

Collaboration raises some sticky issues with namespace and identity management, Ozzie pointed out. Organizations should strive for a balance between control and federation, but each company needs to navigate identity management depending on its own industry requirements.

“Namespace and identity management in any enterprise is inherently homogenous; your goal is to manage a set of resources in a uniform manner. When you are connecting systems to systems you want them to all be mappable,” Ozzie said. “But collaboration in business environments is inherently heterogeneous, so you can’t dictate what directory your business partner will use.”

Groove’s approach to this issue is to embrace a higher level abstraction that makes room for a set of identities that are a person, Ozzie said. This includes making allowances for a personal identity at work, he said.