By comparison, FBI Director Robert Mueller recently acknowledged to Congress that he doesn't know when, if ever, FBI agents and analysts will be able to use the agency collaborative case management information-sharing system, Virtual Case File (VCF), and how much more than the $170 million already budgeted the system ultimately will cost. One possibility already being suggested is that the system will have to be discarded and rebuilt from scratch.
For most consulting firms, collaboration hasn't proven nearly as difficult or as costly. Basic tools such as e-mail, IM (instant messaging), and Microsoft Outlook, which includes calendar and task-tracking functions, are all they need to get started. After looking at more elaborate collaboration products, SystemExperts, which specializes in computer and network security consulting, opted for Microsoft Outlook for e-mail along with IM and conventional conference calling to facilitate collaboration among its 25 consultants spread coast -to-coast. "We looked at other tools but decided they were not worth the cost or the effort," says Jonathan Gossels, president, SystemExperts Corp., Sudbury, MA. The Microsoft choice proved to be easy and convenient, he adds: "The way Microsoft dominates the market, you pretty much have to go with their products just for compatibility."
At Valtech, a French-based company with 1,200 consultants spread across offices in Europe and North America, collaboration is crucial for keeping everyone working together. The company has evolved an extensive collaboration system by combining tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange with tools like WIKI, an open source product that lets Valtech consultants access and edit online pages. It also uses a variety of paid and free IM tools, including MSN Messenger; Skype, which provides voice communications (VoIP) with IM capabilities; and Interwise, a desktop collaborative environment. The range of tools lets Valtech consultants participate in both formal and informal collaboration.
The combination of tools "takes the pain away from working while being widely distributed," says Ken Howard, Valtech senior vice president. For example, consultants can use Interwise for formal project kickoff meetings and use IM when collaborating informally on different tasks. They can choose among IM tools depending on which attributes they want, voice and text or just text. The FBI's VCF is an information-sharing system similar in concept to many of the collaboration systems consulting firms such as Booz, Valtech, and others employ to share information among staff for the purposes of facilitating collaboration. Technically, however, the VCF was intended primarily as a document management system to expedite access to relevant information collected by FBI agents throughout the organization.
"We were an early adopter of e-mail and knowledge management systems in 1991 and 1992," says George Tillmann, vice president/CIO, Booz Allen Hamilton. Those systems proved popular, and they quickly proliferated. "We ended up having lots of little systems, which caused us to step back and rethink the whole architecture," he continues. Booz hired a team of its own consultants, at full rate, to lead a study and reevaluate the firm's knowledge management approach. With the study now completed, the firm is rolling out its new collaboration infrastructure across the enterprise at a cost — even using commercial off-the-shelf software — that will run into tens of millions of dollars. This is a staggering figure, to be sure, but nothing like the $170 million the FBI has spent.
By using commercially available, off-the-shelf products, Booz expects to keep the costs in line and avoid the problems that plagued the FBI's VCF, which was built by San Diego–based Science Applications International Corp. In widely published news reports, U.S. Dept. of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine blamed bad planning and management by the FBI for most of the problems encountered in the design of the system, a situation Booz, almost halfway through deployment of the first phase, has certainly avoided.
Various industry commentators point to two key mistakes the FBI made: (1) the agency decided to build it from scratch, rather than use available commercial products, and (2) the project was conceived as a single monolithic system, a Big Bang initiative, rather than a phased, incremental approach. In his testimony before Congress, Mueller acknowledged these criticisms and described a new, phased approach that would get some of the functionality up and running quickly. The FBI has also initiated a review of commercial off-the-shelf technology.
Booz understood at the outset the importance of its collaboration systems and what they entailed. "Our production systems are the collaboration systems," says Tillmann. With that in mind, Tillmann dispatched the Booz consulting team working on the project to survey the customer base and come back with the requirements for the system. Although the initial plan was to survey a sample of the Booz workforce, "I insisted they survey everybody," says Tillmann.
The 2004 timing of the effort coincided with the aging of the firm's legacy knowledge management systems. "Our knowledge management was old. It wasn't integrated at a point where we needed tighter integration. It definitely was time to redo the system," Tillmann explains.
Another complicating issue was the gradual change in how Booz personnel worked. "Today we're being asked to provide more services further out at the end of the wire," says Tillmann. He expects that before long the firm will find itself providing those services beyond the end of the wire through the use of wireless technology. This was yet another reason to leave the legacy knowledge management systems for something that would be more flexible and more mobile.
There are numerous professional services automation (PSA) tools on the market today that provide consulting firms with the ability to more efficiently manage engagements and staff and track work progress from initial prospecting through customer sign-off. Many offer easy, Web-based views of what is going on with a particular client, project, or consultant. They give managers unprecedented insight into resource utilization, cost and profit metrics, and schedules and problems.
Given all the capabilities available to consulting firms today, Tillmann was surprised when the Booz consultants reported their findings. "Much to my chagrin, they came back to us with a recommendation for Microsoft Exchange," he says. Microsoft Exchange is a messaging and collaboration system. Primarily an e-mail product, it also integrates with Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration tools. Exchange is built on Microsoft's .Net architecture, which also provides the foundation for Microsoft's CRM product. As a result, it wouldn't take much effort for a consulting firm like Booz to integrate its Exchange collaboration with Microsoft's CRM solution should it want to, notes Dave Batt, Microsoft's senior director for CRM.
In the end, what Booz staff really wanted was not CRM but collaboration. And they wanted to do it in a flexible, unified e-mail system that used the familiar Windows interface that they already knew, not in an elaborate, custom-built collaboration system loaded with enough bells and whistles to accommodate everybody's wish list. (The consulting firm had previously transitioned successfully from Mac to Windows desktops.)
Tillmann's chagrin arose from the choice of platform, not from any discomfort with e-mail or with Microsoft Exchange per se. "We're a Unix shop. So now we're going to become a Microsoft Exchange shop," he points out. The first phase of the project called for replacement of the existing e-mail and messaging infrastructure, in effect replacing multiple e-mail and messaging systems with Microsoft Exchange. "We started with e-mail, calendar, and IM," says Tillmann. This was accomplished with strictly commercial off-the-shelf technology.
The second phase of the project will target increased collaboration. Again, Booz is thinking strictly commercial off-the-shelf, most likely using Microsoft's SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal.
Only when Booz gets to the third phase of the collaboration effort will it consider anything beyond off-the-shelf products. "This is where we look at the things we can't get with off-the-shelf products," Tillmann says. He doesn't know at this point what those things might be. It will depend on what the consultants think they need at that time.
Despite its decade of investment in various knowledge management systems, which it augmented with considerable custom development, the company has struggled to share information across the entire company. "We have groups clustered around certain areas like government and commercial, and they don't know what each other are doing," says Tillmann. Situations would arise when project teams would want to tap resources across different groups, "but they didn't have the visibility to do that," he continues. The new system will allow Booz to tie together the various groups.
Booz already has succeeded in moving 7,000 of 16,000 total company personnel worldwide to Exchange. Everyone will be switched to the new e-mail collaboration system by this spring. To expedite the deployment, Booz enlisted implementation services from Microsoft consultants. Although some of the partners swallowed hard when confronted with a price tag running into the tens of millions of dollars, everyone understood the need for the new system and the way they went about determining what it should be. Tillmann sees no reason why the system won't be fully deployed and functioning as planned very soon. Unlike the FBI, Booz is not facing the prospect of eating a $170 million collaboration mistake.
For other consulting firms, collaboration often is handled through a combination of many of the same tools selected by Booz, particularly Microsoft Outlook and Office. Business Innovation, Woburn, MA, for instance, relies on the usual combination of e-mail (Microsoft Outlook), and IM along with conventional tools like white boards, at least for now. "We have corporate meetings and make to-do lists in Outlook, which lets us assign due dates," says Randy Gravlin, president. The consultants also share Excel spreadsheets to manage projects among themselves.
However, things are likely to change now that the company has expanded into Canada. "The people in Canada can't see white boards on our offices here in Woburn, so we're getting to the point where we have to do something else," Gravlin continues. Specifically, the consulting firm is looking at secure shared collaboration space on the Internet, such as provided by eRoom. "We would make it into a virtual project office for each project," he explains.
Although nobody is suggesting that all the FBI needs is a robust implementation of unified e-mail and IM, that probably wouldn't have been a bad place to start — and certainly that's where most consulting firms begin. From there, avoiding the mistakes made by the FBI, they assemble the rest of their collaboration tools using off-the-shelf components whenever possible and build it out in pieces. This seems to be the approach that works for consulting firms ranging from large players such as Booz and Valtech to small boutiques like Business Innovation and SystemExperts.
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