Sports teams form huddles to discuss tactics. One UK-based
start-up has recognised that business people do the same, forming
creative, task-based teams to hothouse ideas or work on business
projects. Such team work might be easy internally, face to face in
an office - should your infrastructure and culture support it - but
is less easy when teams are distributed globally and involve
networks of partners and suppliers.
My workspace
London-based Huddle.net was
formed two and a half years ago by CEO Alastair Mitchell and CTO
Andy McLoughlin. The company offers private online workspaces for
secure team collaboration, knowledge management and group
discussion, plus a variety of Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis. It
targets all types of organisation.
In October 2008, Huddle became the first non-Silicon Valley
company to partner with LinkedIn, the social platform for business
networking. The following month it was named in Gartner's "magic
quadrant" for social software.
"We [Mitchell and McLoughlin] were both working in large
companies," says Mitchell. "I was managing a team of 300 people.
That company found it hard to work with its partners and customers
using traditional means: phone calls, face-to-face meetings,
teleconferences, and so on, and we found we began using social
technologies such as Facebook to communicate rather than more
inward-facing enterprise systems."
Anecdotally, this is true for many companies:
Web 2.0 adoption often comes from the bottom-up rather than a
top-down, strategic decision.
So why is it easier for some to work "socially" than to use
on-premise applications? "It is about globalised work and sharing
documents. A huddle is a secure workspace on the web, and in each
of your huddles you bring together all the people you want to work
with - on the internet it does not matter where they are. You have
access to whiteboards, wikis, documents, and so on, so it is like
working in the same room as them."
Nevertheless, security remains top of most strategic IT
managers' list of priorities. "Security is the biggest single
issue," agrees Mitchell, "it is our whole business. Even one
failure would be a critical failure." At this point, he repeats the
mantra of the hosted service: that hosted applications are more
secure than most enterprises because they have to be.
The security question
That may be true, but the last two years have shaken public
confidence in data protection generally, not to mention witnessed
high-profile brands such as Virgin Atlantic and British Airways
devalued by staff indiscretion on social networks such as Facebook.
The issue is human error and mismanagement rather than
technology.
Mitchell says that security is built into every aspect of
Huddle. Far from being open groups that anyone can join or abuse
(as is often the case with online groups and discussion boards),
Huddle allows users to set strict permissions: who can and cannot
see data, or read but not edit, and so on. "You have to be invited
into a Huddle space and authenticated," says Mitchell, "and then
everything you do is audited and can be controlled by other users
and by the manager of that workspace. You can have it very open at
one level all the way down to very locked down."
An alternative to enterprise IT
For some sceptical businesses, another underlying issue is that
Web 2.0 technologies and processes favour flat organisations and
peer-to-peer interaction, which can be anathema for large,
hierarchical enterprises with top-heavy management and a
disenfranchised workforce - one that is "partitioned off" from the
strategic or creative process. The other challenge for such an
enterprise is that on-premise systems tend to represent the
organisations they serve, and so rigid business practices become
encoded or hardwired into the system itself and stifle other ways
of working.
"Enterprises now come to us and want to get the best out of
their partners and suppliers," says Mitchell. "For example,
LinkedIn wanted to grow beyond mere sharing of CVs and contacts to
sharing work via their platform."
Huddle claims that far from being a time-wasting exercise, Web
2.0 technologies make business communication more efficient as
"reply all" e-mails become pointless and everything rests in a
single place. Internal e-mail traffic can be slashed by as much as
50%, says the company.
He cites Procter & Gamble as a good example of Web 2.0
usage, "The Connect and Develop platform invites in partners and
suppliers. It is all about meeting in the middle and being
outward-facing, not inward-facing."