Groupware Implementing Groupware: Comparing Costs and Benefits

There are many varying definitions of groupware yet all share a common attribute or characteristic of enabling collaboration, sharing knowledge and providing work teams with greater insight and intelligence into operations. The intent of groupware is to create a scalable, reliable and agile platform for sharing information and knowedlge, both tacit and implicit, throughout distributed enterprises (Kline, 2001). Best practices in groupware encompass interdepartmental, intradivisional and enterprise-wide integration of content and knowledge management processes and systems (Corbitt, Martz, 2003). The benefits of such a pervasive platform for information and knowledge sharing has shown to deliver quantifiable gains in corporate-wide productivity and performance, leading to greater profitability as well (Lukosch, 2004) (Merono-Cerdan, 2008). With so many benefits and contributions of groupware, it's surprising that more organizations don't adopt these series of technologies to attain their corporate-wide information and knowledge management strategies. In reality implementing groupware is exceptionally difficult because it forces people in companies to change how they work (Chen, Hao, 2002) (Ellis, Gibbs, Rein, 1991). It takes an exceptional level of trust in the implementation and leaders of the implementation to make groupware projects translate into long-term change within any enterprise (Corbitt, Martz, 2003). The technology is the easy part; getting people to change is hard. This paper compares the costs and benefits of groupware, deciding if it is worth it as an enterprise strategy.

The greatest benefit is streamlining and increasing process workflows in an enterprise, increasing the transaction speeds and customer satisfaction levels of businesses in the process (Kline, 2001). The benefits of orchestrating complex process workflows that require each area of a company to contribute and use intelligence at the same time is evident in how new product introductions using groupware are now commonplace (Wallace, 1997). There are also quantifiable financial gains of using groupware in small businesses to automate information and knowledge sharing (Merono-Cerdan, 2008).
With all of these points of validation showing why groupware is such an excellent investment from a process automation and technology standpoint, there are just as many factors that make groupware one of the most difficult to implement.

The most costly component of any groupware implementation is change management, or the ability to get people to change how they do their jobs (Wallace, 1997). This is the Achilles' heal of any enterprise software implementation and is particularly problematic for groupware implementations as those in any company with the greatest level of information are often the most reluctant to let go of it (Corbitt, Martz, 2003). As the economy has progressively gotten worse, it is common to find knowledge workers continually hoarding information and not sharing it, for fear of…