business idea for enterprise collaboration

(Continued from 2002-07-08.) One of the biggest impediments to productivity is the lack of tools to facilitate collaboration. This was not as noticeable, when workers tended to be collocated with those they needed to collaborate. Physical collocation makes less sense today, when globalization requires companies to be distributed throughout the world.

Expertise is becoming so specialized that it is impossible to develop a broad range of skills in house and locally, so this creates a need to outsource and recruit teleworkers. Email, telephony, instant messaging, and intranet Web sites only go so far to facilitate communication with these remote sites. These technologies need to be integrated into business processes to facilitate wide scale real-time collaboration.

In a software development organization, there are very specific requirements that are unmet by today’s information technology. Software development tools tend to focus either on the relationship between individuals and code artifacts (e.g., integrated development environment) or the relationship between the code artifacts and the quality assurance processes for the software product (e.g., software configuration management). Over the past decade there has been a greater focus on analysis and design tools (e.g., UML modeling). However, modeling is a very small part of analysis and design. The majority of analysis involves the capture of requirements and use cases in the form of natural language (e.g., English) descriptions. This is a very iterative and interactive process among experts and analysts, and the information flows into design. Design is a very creative process among analysts, architects, and programmers in various areas of expertise (e.g., user interface, application server, database). The collaboration tools support for analysis and design are wholly inadequate today.

The software development community needs a Web based collaboration system for analysis and design. In the analysis space, Rational Requisite Web almost completely misses the mark for a requirements database. In the design space, there is nothing to facilitate the whiteboard-style interactions that are necessary during the creative process. Such interactions work toward evaluating design options and formally capturing the final design decisions. UML modeling is merely a visualization technique. UML diagrams are not in a format that is appropriate for communication between all stakeholders. Ultimately documents must be produced for the software architecture and the design of each subsystem. Collaboration tools are required for producing these artifacts as a team.

I have looked at using a Wiki to facilitate collaborative content creation. This is not a bad mechanism for authoring, reviewing, and revising content. However, it is wholly inadequate for taking that content and producing documents for publishing. Moreover, a Wiki alone is insufficient for handling all the various kinds of content that is needed for analysis and design (e.g., models, diagrams, code, user interface prototypes), and for managing the workflow.

I believe that this is a tremendous business opportunity. There is clearly a need for this kind of collaboration tool for software development. One can imagine this need extending into other engineering activities, and perhaps even into other disciplines (e.g., sales and marketing) within the enterprise. This is likely a $100M idea with a market window that is likely to remain open for quite some time. If I had the guts, I would probably pursue this one as my baby. I’ve got the perfect skillset and experience to make this happen.