Best of all, the number of meetings has been cut in half, allowing the firm's partners to spend more time on billable work. Less important matters that might have involved a lot of phone calls and back-and-forth discussion often can be settled in minutes. When the office manager wanted to set a new dress code (she felt that casual Friday had crept into the entire week), she just added the message to the management area in TeamTalk, and the partners responded within minutes. (They decided to table the issue.) Not only was the groupware a lot easier to maneuver than regular E-mail, but the lawyers knew that down the road, when they decided to make a decision, everyone's comments would be there, neatly organized and simple to look up.
Wright is considering switching to a program that would make it possible to share information with big clients, many of whom also use groupware within their companies. That's something TeamTalk can't do. But for the moment, he says, "we don't need anything more. The status quo is working just fine."
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Simultaneous Updating
If you have to link up clients and suppliers, groupware can do that too. David Johnson, co-owner of Johnson Johnson Crabtree Architects, an architectural firm in Nashville, works with as many as 50 subcontractors when designing a hospital or a medical center. It's a healthy business, generating $1.5 million in annual billings. But mailing diagrams, blueprints, and reports to outside engineers, suppliers, and clients and then getting them back again can take days. Not to mention, says Johnson, "the problems and confusion caused when 15 people in 15 far-flung locations each has a copy of important material and then somehow can't find the document when you finally get hold of them."
Using Lotus Notes, Johnson wanted to build a knowledge base of information on a project, from blueprints to photos, that everybody could tap into or update any time of day or night, from anywhere. "I wanted it to seem like we were all in the same office," he says.
First, in April 1995, Johnson hired groupware consultant INFOadvantage Inc., in nearby Brentwood, to design an application to fit his business. (He already had just about all the hardware he needed.) Then his 12 staffers spent two months learning the basics.
Second, Johnson's computer consultant expanded the system to incorporate every phase of the work process (total cost: about $60,000, including design, installation, and training, plus a server). Next came the big show. Johnson called a meeting of about 20 outside engineers and subcontractors. "We said, 'We believe this is the way to do business, and we'd like you to join us,' " recalls Johnson. As an added incentive, he offered to help install a free copy of Lotus Notes and provide monthly training sessions, at a cost to Johnson of about $1,500 per location. Ten people signed up right away.
Johnson tried the system out on a project designing a 60,000-square-foot medical-office building, in Florence, S.C., linking the owner, structural and mechanical engineers, and the contractor's main and field offices to his system. It worked like the proverbial charm. Before, when everyone had to review the necessary drawings and product samples for a project (that means windows, light fixtures, and the like), each individual would look the materials over and then mail them to the next person. With the new system, people just had to look the information up in the knowledge base and make their comments. And unlike traditional databases, there wasn't just one master copy of the data to tap into; everyone had his or her own copy, which was updated at frequent intervals. An architect in Tennessee and an engineer in South Carolina, for example, could each look up the same information at the same time and make changes. Everyone else's copy would be updated the next time each person opened his or her file. And when Johnson was on the road, he could respond to questions about a project by consulting meeting notes on his laptop. At the same time, Johnson could produce the agenda for the next meeting, knowing that the notation would be replicated in everyone else's database almost immediately. The result: the building took eight months to design and construct, about four months less than it would have in the old days.
Now Johnson is using groupware for all his jobs, and most of his subcontractors and clients are on the system. (INFOadvantage has turned the application into AdvantageWARE groupware for the construction industry, which should be available this fall.) What's more, in the past year Johnson increased his staff by only 20% while increasing the firm's volume by over 36% -- growth that he attributes in part to the use of groupware. "We're going to make the system a condition of doing business with us," says Johnson. "Working without it is too cumbersome."
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The Big Picture
A picture on a computer not only is worth many words, it also can do wonders for collaboration. That's what Greg Voisen, owner of North County Financial Associates Inc., a financial-planning firm, in Vista, Calif., with $1.5 million in gross premiums, discovered. He hooked his eight employees up to a groupware program that presents information visually, showing relationships among clients, prospects, projects, and salespeople. Over six years Voisen tried various programs to track the status of his salespeople's work with clients and prospects. In 1987 he installed a $795 contact-management program called ACT!, from Symantec Corp., onto eight workstations hooked up to a server. That program kept a record of addresses, phone numbers, and other key information. Two years later he switched to TeleMagic, from TeleMagic Inc., for $1,295, when a colleague convinced him that that contact-management program would handle more information more efficiently over a network.
But Voisen knew he needed something more. He wanted a program that would not only keep track of background information but also show the progress of each project, so that anyone in the firm could tap into a central repository of data and immediately see where he or she stood in relation to the rest of the puzzle. Then, after looking at more than 200 choices, Voisen found a new groupware program called Vineyard, from Data Fellows of San Jose, Calif. (408-244-9090), at the Com-dex Trade Show. He bought a copy for $1,000 and paid approximately $3,000 to two computer consultants (Advanced Access Automation Associates, in San Diego, and Pathfinder Projects Inc., of Calgary, Alberta, Canada) to migrate the data from TeleMagic to Vineyard. (It now tracks the status of 6,700 prospects and clients.)
