• Contextual collaboration will usher in a tighter integration of collaborative features with business process applications like customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications."
  - Robert Mahowald, senior analyst for IDC's Collaborative Computing program
• Collaboration will become increasingly important for users to handle demand-supply constraints, and in the long run collaboration will evolve into a fundamental capability rather than an application category.
  - AMR Research .
• Global collaborative applications market, which comprises software for integrated collaborative environments, team collaborative applications, stand-alone enterprise e-mail, stand-alone service provider e-mail, real-time data conferencing and group scheduling, brings in an estimated US$3 billion a year
  -IDC.
  

Asynchronous collaboration is normally associated with repository-based or document-centric collaboration. Users collaborate indirectly with one another using an intermediate object stored in
a repository such as a document or discussion thread. One person makes a change, the others
view this change, and then make a further change or response. The cycle of changes may be
only minutes, or a matter of hours or days. When the object of primary focus is a document, and
time lag and bandwidth are not issues, the asynchronous method of collaboration is very
effective.

The documents and projects used during the collaboration process are stored and managed in a centralized repository and are accessible via a Web browser.

Collaboration: The essence of business:

"In the long run collaboration will evolve into a fundamental capability rather than an application category." -AMR Research..

Business segments such as Technology, Automobile, Power, Consumer durables, defense, Pharmaceuticals, engineering , aerospace, manufacturing -- utilize a network of contractors, vendors and partners to deliver products and services to their customers. Enterprises spend trillions of dollars to accomplish their business goals and objectives through a globally dispersed network of companies.

Over the next few years, many collaborative features, such as Document exchange, Knowledge sharing , Telecommuting, real-time conferencing , virtual workspaces, presence awareness and instant messaging will be embedded into other business applications through service provider integration of multiple applications and partnerships between collaborative and business software vendors and internal end users and developers. The common goal will be ad-hoc, user-driven, seamless collaboration within the context of business processes, applications and Web sites
.

Pioneers in the recognition of emerging e-business models, Gartner research analysts were the first to identify the far-reaching benefits of Web-enabled collaboration. Widely acknowledged as the world's most authoritative e-business strategists, Gartner analysts are on the cusp of the c-commerce curve - uniquely qualified to predict evolving collaborative commerce principles and to share their findings with organizations that seek to deploy them.

Collaborative Strategies defines collaborative e-commerce. Many of the vendors in this market utilize Web call-back systems (PSTN-based), live text chat, voice over IP (VOIP), and e-mail response management features to supply prospects and customers with critical information for more informed buying decisions. The recent fusion of e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and call center technologies have dramatically enhanced Web-based sales and support processes by "reintroducing" human-to-human contact into these processes.

Early research results suggest that collaborative e-commerce tools (and the services surrounding them) greatly improve customer satisfaction and increase online sales in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business contexts. However, no vendor yet dominates this market, and no "killer application" has emerged. Many analysts believe that as e-commerce revenues rise towards a trillion dollars in the next few years, customers will demand better service and information within a format and context of their choice.

C-Commerce applications synchronize and optimize activities among a dynamic set of buyers, sellers, partners and customers and thereby optimize and increase the speed of the associated business process execution. Those firms that are fully harnessing C-Commerce capabilities are outpacing their competition today by expanding their reach to a broader set of customers, enhancing their customer retention and as a result gaining revenue and profit improvements.

Contextual Collaboration

The contexts for the efficient running of a business are what a firm sets out to accomplish, the direction it sets for itself and the goals and objectives it has decided to accomplish.

To attain them, the business develops a work plan for itself and objectives for other enterprises with which it will consult, share, partner, transact or otherwise interact. Normal collaboration is simply restricted to people sharing data and information. However, in a multi-enterprise environment, businesses need to execute by contextual collaboration.

This is particularly true when business processes are not fully owned and controlled by one enterprise, as is the case during business acquisition activities, large-scale custom projects and the product development lifecycle. These situations require considerable, iterative knowledge exchange to eliminate ambiguity and ensure perfect clarity to feed networked organizations so that decision-making can be distributed and the resulting outcomes effectively managed.

Handling Information

Today's business environment is largely driven by individual interactions. This is contrary to the ambition of every business to be dependent on its processes rather than being limited by individuals. Not everybody has real-time, fingertip access to the information required to make timely decisions.

Considerable time and effort is spent simply locating the information, packaging it into useable form, sharing it with team members, and managing the communications which help its transformation into knowledge that is then available for decision-making.

These activities are compounded if information is transacted solely with documents because naturally concurrent interactions turn into serial processes -- increasing interaction costs and time.

Moreover, whenever there is the need for knowledge-based collaboration, the right people may not be easily accessible, and even if available, may not be in a position to immediately grasp the entire context of the collaborative efforts because the evolution of the knowledge-exchange is incompletely captured.

Business processes and the associated knowledge exchanges also suffer as smart people become increasingly mobile across project assignments and rapidly migrate within and across corporations. In short, personal and individual objectives drive interactions and business processes without continuous guidance and control from overall business objectives.

Organisational Networking

In today's work environment, the bulk of the created knowledge asset stays trapped in the "people network" instead of the business process network. Contextual collaboration is critical to modern businesses because it abstracts people from the grind and minutiae of information handling.

If the true value of organizational networking -- reduction in interaction costs and time -- is to be realized, contextualization must occur at several layers:

• -Krish Hegde is the founder of Technology Incubation Center (TIC) , a research outfit in the fast emerging Collaborative applications space.