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Tom Austin spent part of the afternoon of 7 October in Groove's headquarters in Beverly, MA talking with Ray Ozzie, the visionary who launched an industry and a new way of thinking about how technology can help people work better together - or apart. It was Ray's handiwork, leadership and inspiration that lead Lou Gerstner and IBM to pay almost $4 billion for Lotus in 1995. Ray's at it again, this time with yet another startup, Groove Networks, working on perfecting the science, art and technology of augmenting cognitive performances. This interview provides unique insights into why Ray felt compelled to start fresh with Groove, why it's so hard to get this right, what types of situations spell failure for collaborative projects and how and why he thinks his team at Groove finally has it right The second installment can be found here. Interview conducted 7 October 2004
Tom Austin: Andy Clark has written a book entitled "Natural Born Cyborgs". In it, he argues that we absorb and rely on technologies and learn to make them "natural self-extensions". We incorporate technologies into our repertoires. Think of a baseball bat. With practice, you treat it like an extension of your arm. Think about your wristwatch. If I ask you "do you have the time?" You don't say "yes, I have a watch." You just look at your wrist and tell me the time. What information technologies do you see becoming second nature to us? Ray Ozzie: My immediate reaction is Google. I had just been talking to my wife about this, about how it has become a natural extension to what we do. My wife was at a reunion with some of her old kindergarten friends and a girlfriend of hers said "I wonder what so-and-so, a friend of theirs, is doing now?" In a couple of minutes, I brought my laptop over and asked "is this him?" She looked at it and said "that's scary." Google has become a natural appendage and I'm sure it's that way for many people. Email might be another. Austin: What collaborative tools, either here or in the future, are going to become natural appendages to how people work? Ozzie: I built Groove because I believe a lot of the concepts in it are where things are headed. I built Groove because I think it has a chance to shape the future. And, to us here, it has already become such an appendage. The core concept is to simply provide a way to quickly create a virtual workspace — a place for us to do work together. As simply as you'd say "create a message" in email. If my marketing director and I are talking and there's an action item we and several others need to follow up on, he'll just create a workspace, and with a few clicks will invite the right people. We'll interact in it for some period of time, and when we don't need it anymore it'll simply disappear. Groove is certainly not yet ubiquitous, but we very much believe in its potential, and we're working hard to make that happen. Austin: Well, fast forward ten years and focus on alternative devices. What's the world of devices going to feel like to us? How is it going to be different from what it is today? Ozzie: I think we're at the early stages of certain trends — particularly related to devices. Because both content creation and contextual awareness are fundamental elements of effective collaboration, I believe these "edge-based" wireless devices will play an increasing role in our interactions with others. For example, people are taking digital photos a lot more than they take film photos. It's really skyrocketed. In this country, camera phones have not yet taken off as dramatically as they have elsewhere. But having a camera phone with you lets you have a sense of continuous co-presence with people who are close to you: your spouse, your family and friends. Look at your recorder [referring to interviewer's digital audio recorder]. Why isn't your phone recording this conversation, along with the time and your location? How and why might voice notes be exchanged using communication technologies? How might voice annotations be used to improve the richness of context in a collaborative interaction?
Projecting your interruptability to others might be really easy if we integrated our handheld wireless devices with our varied communication services. Take, for example, the phone. Why isn't it possible — without navigating a million menus — to slip a little button on the side to select one of four desired presence or interruptability states, customized to you: I'm in a meeting; I'm available to my "intimates"; I'm available for any interruptions; or "do not disturb". This state could be easily published by your wireless operator, through Web Services, to the on-line buddy list of your IM or email programs, or directly to other people's phones. Austin: You've been working very hard at this since the early '80's, and you've created two successes, and it's been hard work for you, I'm sure. What hasn't worked? What's gone wrong? What's disappointed you? Why hasn't the industry progressed over the last 20 years as far as you probably thought it would have 20 years ago? Ozzie: 20 years ago, I didn't have the grand vision one might imagine. I surely knew what I was trying to accomplish in terms of enabling individuals to work together online more seamlessly - that is, in terms of collaborative productivity. But I didn't fully grasp the importance of such tools, for example, to such things as business process re-engineering at an organizational or cross-organizational level. These tools have had a tremendous impact, and to be sure, I'm amazed at how far things have come — particularly when recalling that we were using IBM PC AT computers in character mode when we began this journey. There have surely been a few frustrating moments. It took far too long for "the year of the LAN" to happen. It took far too long for us to understand and communicate the value proposition of our offerings in a meaningful way. It just seemed for so long that networks, which we knew would ultimately be global and ubiquitous, might remain as departmental or organizational phenomena for decades upon decades. But then email exploded. And the Web happened. And now, it seems as though the concept of "local" networks and closed email and information sharing systems are just quaint memories of the distant past. It's hard to imagine life now without it. And so, of course I'm tremendously pleased with how far we've come. What really does disappoint me is that we as technology users keep forgetting the lessons we learn; we've got very short memories. For example - issues of centralization versus decentralization, control versus empowerment. There's a pendulum that appears to keep swinging back and forth, and we keep polarizing the issue, when in fact we should have learned that both are necessary.
Then the Web happened, and suddenly — largely driven by lower deployment and maintenance costs — the browser is the answer to every question, whether it makes sense or not. Centralized control and lock-down becomes pervasive, as users lose control of their tools for reasons that are, in fact, quite sensible in many ways. But then users start placing rogue WiFi access points on corporate networks. They use USB memory devices, smart phones and cameras to carry around documents and presentations. They post confidential information to public Web mail accounts to transfer files, because firewall security is so tight. They start bringing their personal home laptops into work and into meetings "so they can get work done". The same edge-versus-center tension has happened in the realm of business solutions. The greatest amount of value that Lotus Notes ever provided, besides the email infrastructure, was as a rapid application development platform that people at the edge of the organization - in a business unit - could use to whip up an application that solved their problem instantly. Just-in-time, disposable solutions. As Notes was more embraced as central infrastructure, IT buyers demanded that end-user design capabilities be re-shaped to target the needs of professional developers. Notes environments became "locked down", and people closest to the needs lost their ability to do "self-service" solution development. With Groove, we've brought that back. Some problems are best solved centrally, others are best addressed locally. Enterprises have needs at the center; people and business units have needs at the edge. The smart CIO embraces both and understands how to weave the two together appropriately within their own environment. Austin: It's not just IT that behaves that way. There's a dynamic tension inside organizations, whether they're big or small, but it tends to be more pronounced (?) in the bigger ones. Real breakthroughs occur in non-routine work, by exception. Examples: Coming up with a brand new product strategy. Coming up with a new marketing approach. Coming up with a new twist on a way to sell a particular client. Coming up with a better way to design a particular process. All of these things are non-routine, cognitive behaviors, yet the essence of most organizations is just the opposite. They want to routinize things to be able to manage them, control them, predict them, which is just the opposite. It's not just IT. IT just is the best example you and I think of because that's who we deal with all the time. Ozzie: It's always best to seek out the right combination of the centralized and decentralized — the center and edge — for a process, a business unit, or an organization. Centralization is not the only answer or the best answer for everything. And decentralization can cause complete chaos under the wrong conditions. The challenge is: how can you best use a mix of centralized and decentralized models to accomplish the objective that you've got for the business? Austin: Tom Malone's written a lot about predictive markets. They're an example of chaotic systems where, essentially, people vote with money inside. So, rather than setting up a formal bureaucratic structure whereby people make decisions centrally and hand out resources, you allow all the different organizations to bid on particular opportunities. So, it's chaotic. The markets are chaotic. But, it turns out that chaotic markets sometimes work a lot better than centralized control. How can collaboration related technology help organizations strike an appropriate balance between centralized control and decentralized authority? Ozzie: The devil's in the details. You have to really look at the type of organization and how it's structured and what its goals are to understand how to best inject collaboration into it. Certainly if you're trying to address issues related to core business processes, it starts with the CEO. People at the very top must first send out the message that it's a "good thing" to explore cross-organizational collaborative projects and similar things. Once they know that it's "safe" to do so, people at the edge of the organization will certainly take more risks in the process of accomplishing their objectives. They'll introduce collaborative technologies in a trial manner, in a way that's relevant to local goals and business goals. They'll figure out what works and what doesn't. One of the best examples of where this is happening today is within the U. S. government. With rare exceptions, doctrines, policies and processes have been shaped over the years specifically in a vertically-integrated manner. Yet the enemy is a complex network form — far more highly decentralized. Post-9/11, the mandate within government has become clear: share information, and conduct joint operations. Reshape processes and practices to find the best "network form" — the best of centralization, and the best of decentralization, toward agility in joint discovery, analysis and action.
Where does the understanding of how to apply the technology really come from? Ozzie: Generally not from the technologists. It comes from the business experts. The domain expert drives the creation of a specific application within an area because they understand the business processes and practices of that area. It takes a technologist to build it, but it takes business experts to know what needs to happen. Having been through both the Notes experience and the Groove experience, I know the most important person is the customer or integrator that understands how to match the capabilities of a specific technology to what's needed. Austin: Over the next ten years, if the current trends continue as we expect they will, the number of managers, that middle layer, will continue to shrink and the edge will keep growing. We see IT organizations dramatically shrinking as automation gets applied and removes a need for many jobs inside IT. Outsourcing is replacing other jobs within the IT organization. The IT professional ten years from now has to be much closer to being that domain expert that you described. And maybe they don't even work in a central IT organization. Maybe they will work in the line of business or its equivalent in a government space. Ozzie: Corporate IT in major enterprises gets involved at the front end and at the back end. At the front end, someone in a line of business will recognize, for example, how they might want to leverage a product such as Groove. But corporate IT doesn't want anything on their network until they know that it's safe and secure, no matter what its benefits. In Groove's case, because we've been in-market for a while, our long list of reference customers helps them to make the right decision. A domain expert - frequently in line-of-business IT — will rapidly evolve the solution to serve local needs. This is where value is very powerfully delivered to an organization; these IT professionals are key — whether they work for the enterprise or for a VAR or integrator. At the back-end it's different. After several business units, find value in the product, and it begins to spread, IT will frequently re-engage so that they can create a standard service offering, and to deploy it more broadly, manage it in a more standardized way, or integrate it with enterprise systems. In short — although central IT continues to play a large role, the most important decisions for the business are made closer to the edge, at the line-of-business level. Austin: You alluded to another problem that we're having as an industry on the whole, and that is the central IT organization is spending most of the money it receives on operating and maintaining existing systems. From a statistical point of view, we're seeing that that number has gone from a little over 60 percent of the IT budget — the expense on keeping the shop running — to almost 80 percent today. That growth threatens the ability of the IT organization to take on any new projects. That's a major inhibitor on new creative applications and technology. Ozzie: Absolutely. Moving forward, we have to be able to regard technology as something that can be used by a business unit — tactically and locally — to accomplish an objective. Start locally. Ultimately, the things that should become infrastructure, will become infrastructure. With very few exceptions, the days are gone where a vendor will be able to go in to corporate IT and convince them to deploy something broadly before the people at the edge have already proven that the technology is measurably and materially beneficial to the business. Austin: One of the ways around Draconian central control is users going out and accessing applications up on the internet. Far less blockage and control there, although in some organizations, they completely control Internet access.
But even in those cases, people still do whatever they want from home. Austin: What kind of demand indicators are you seeing for collaborative technologies being available over the internet rather than through a local installation on a variety of peer machines or departmental or corporate servers? Ozzie: It's hard for me to get an accurate answer for that. Although I know how people are using Groove, I don't have measurements for other products and services. People are drawn to Groove because our message resonates: the nature of work is changing. You work from home. You work from the office. You work on the road. You work weekends wherever you are. It matches the way that people are feeling about the nature of how they need to get things done. There's an increasing number of people who are feeling that way, as opposed to, "I come to the office. I sit down in front of my terminal. I work tethered to my enterprise applications, and then I leave my work at work." Fewer and fewer people are exclusively desk-bound. The way many corporations have deployed the web today, there's an internal Web portal. Yet in most corporations, employees don't have easy access to such portals and the information they contain when they're outside the organization, or when disconnected altogether. And the people with whom they work may be from a small outside consultancy. They can't get access to the portal at all. They can't get access to the team workspaces. That can't access to the things they need. So people at companies like this are looking at Groove, downloading it and using it. It just works, instantly Austin: Don't you see a lot of those problems disappearing in the three to five year timeframe? Ozzie: Absolutely not.
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