Google Apps Gets Important Endorsement

Google Apps Gets Important Endorsement

It makes sense. As a technology enthusiast, I always delight in finding new ways on how information technology can be used to improve business efficiency.

Bringing collaborative features of a Wiki to MS Office-addicted crowd

If GoogleDocs were just positioned as an online MS Word replacement, it wouldn't have created enough strategic value for an IT Consulting company like Cap Gemini to endorse it.

While I worked at BEA as Systems Engineer, I had to write a lot of Proposal documents. For those of you who don't know, a Proposal document for an IT project is always result of collective work, because in IT projects, multiple company would form an alliance and bid for the project together. Since MS Word doesn't really have collaborative feature (revision doesn't count as one), the "Zip and attach to email" standard procedure caused a lot of miscommunication. After a while, no one would have knowledge on which "copy" of the document is the most recent and legitimate ones. Frankly, most of my time as project management role has been wasted on figuring out which is which.

For geeks like me, I would just say: let's use a Wiki. Truly, collaborative features of Wiki is why software development powerhouses like Google, Microsoft and SAP rely on it so much. But unfortunately, in business world, not everyone can grab the concept of what Wiki is. People still think about document.

GoogleDocs, in my opinion, fits in this particular area. While not being especially feature rich for a word processor, GoogleDocs maintained useful collaborative features of an online Wiki system, creating an interesting and unique value proposition.

Multiple participants can join and edit the same document at the same time, and a detailed log of revisions done by each participants is maintained. Since there is only one online copy, there is no need anymore of a periodical "merge" of different version of documents. Communication overhead is dramatically reduced, and the project manager is no longer the bottleneck of the bidding process.

Seems nice and simple eh? Not quite. For many corporate cultures/mentalities/myths, collaboration equals less control. At the end, it is our mentality that constraints us. This is something that Cap Gemini should address. How does the highly interactive nature of GoogleDocs merge into the corporate world? Hopefully more and more IT consulting firms can join the boat and work with Google to come up with a "Best Practice".