Work flow. Groupware can help you analyze your business processes, tracking the status of documents -- who has them, who's behind, who gets them next.
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Detail Management
Calendaring, work flow, knowledge sharing. It all appealed to Rita Bloom, owner of Creative Parties Ltd., a $3-million, 28-year-old events-management company, in Bethesda, Md. Bloom handles vast amounts of information. When you work on lengthy assignments, as Bloom does, crucial details can slip through the cracks. For years that possibility haunted her. Then Bloom found what she thought would be the solution: a groupware program to help her staff stay on top of the many bits and pieces that go into planning a giant fete.
It all started in January 1994, when Bloom attended a special-events industry trade show, in Orlando. There she saw computer systems for caterers, florists, and the like, but none for event planners like herself. "I figured, why couldn't I do that, too?" she recalls.
Once she began to research software and interview programmers, Bloom decided that an off-the-shelf program wouldn't do. The planning process had to account for too many quirks and crises. The reggae band hired for a party might wear something too wild for a conservative group of guests. Or the curtains in a recently booked ballroom might clash with the client's favorite color scheme. Bloom needed a program that would give all of her staffers immediate access to the myriad details that go into an event -- what appetizers are going to be served, what time the band is going to take a break, what the centerpieces should look like.
Four months into her search, Bloom paid a local programmer $2,000 to design an application using FoxPro, a database-management program from Microsoft. But the application wasn't right. Finding information was cumbersome and time-consuming.
So Bloom went back to the drawing board. She had finally chosen a consultant, when her daughter Tracy, who was working in marketing for Lotus, in Cambridge, Mass., suggested she consider Lotus Notes. Tracy flew to Bethesda and made a presentation to her mother. The talk persuaded the elder Bloom to go with the Lotus offering despite the price -- $45,000. Connexus Consulting Group Inc., an Andover, Mass., groupware consulting firm, designed and installed the system on eight 486 computers and a Compaq server.
By late 1994 the system was installed. Then came getting the staff up to speed. About half took to it in a month; the rest took six months, except for two computer novices who, says Tracy Bloom, "have a mental block against it." (They're still trying to learn.)
Rita Bloom now runs the entire business on the system. From their workstations, staff members can retrieve information, in just about any form, relating to every phase of the event-planning process. Call up the name of a client, and you'll see correspondence, floor plans, schedules of events, invoices, even scanned-in photos of fabric swatches and musicians. And if you want to add in, say, the name of a new master of ceremonies, with two clicks of the mouse you can call up a new-vendor sheet on the screen, fill in the necessary information, and you're done.
Or suppose a client or a supplier calls with an urgent question. In seconds anyone can supply an answer. Recently, for example, a caterer called with a desperate last-minute query: Should the tablecloths on the bar be pure white or yellow and white? Bloom simply called up the event and, scrolling down, found a picture of the fabric swatch for the guests' tables. It turned out it was a mustard-yellow floral print likely to clash with the yellow and white cloth. She chose the pure white.
Thanks to the new groupware, Bloom is expanding the business from nonprofits and private individuals to corporations. "We don't look like a small-town mom-and-pop operation anymore," says Bloom. "We look like a 21st-century company."
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Information Exchange
When Bill Wright set out to find a program to help his beleaguered law firm, the large variety of groupware categories didn't concern him. "We didn't need all the bells and whistles," he says. "Just a way to share information." So in the fall of 1994, Wright started reading magazine reviews of bulletin-board and knowledge-sharing packages and came across a rave for TeamTalk. It seemed to do what he wanted: route and store questions and comments in an easy-to-retrieve -- and easy-to-append -- way, thereby reducing the need for meetings and freeing staff to attend to other duties. To Wright it promised an office where diverse information would be accessible to all. Moreover, all the reviews agreed that TeamTalk, compared with other packages, was a snap to install. He bought the program, which cost around $500 for five users, in October 1994. In about two hours, Wright, an amateur techie who has avidly followed high-tech developments for the past 10 years, installed it on four of the office's 486 computers.
By the end of the week, TeamTalk had become a seamless part of the firm's operations. Whenever a lawyer needed to ask a question or make an important announcement, instead of calling a hurried gathering of the partners, he or she would send the message over the system. Later those with access to the files could look up the information and add to the database as the situation evolved. (A bonus was an improvement in office morale as the number of closed-door meetings dropped.)
By the time the suit and countersuit were resolved, in January 1995, Wright and his colleagues had decided they couldn't do business without their groupware. Their application now has 14 users (partners, lawyers, paralegals, and the office manager) and covers 32 topics, from legal procedures to new cases. If, for example, a bankruptcy judge makes an idiosyncratic procedural ruling about foreclosures, an associate adds that tidbit to the pertinent topic. Some topics are available to everyone; others, like the one that disseminates confidential information about management, is open only to partners. A pregnant attorney created a subject area related to her cases so that others could track her cases while she was on maternity leave and so that she could get up to speed quickly when she got back.
