Meeting Maker Whitepaper

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Calendar Management:

Product selection based on best practices

"Working smarter not harder requires technology that automates and integrates tasks, so more can be done in less time with fewer mistakes." - Peter Drucker

Table of Contents

Introduction
Calendaring and Scheduling
The Needs of Today's Organization
The Human Factor
Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Communications
Mix of Rich and Thin Clients
System Characteristics
The Future of Collaborative Scheduling
Conclusion

Introduction

Time is worth more than money. We have effective means of obtaining and managing money, yet we inefficiently manage the valuable, fixed, and scarce resource of time. The business process is now 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Coordinating people's calendars, especially within the globally extended enterprise, costs far too much in human capital.

The most promising area for increasing productivity is the employment of calendar management. In fact, a company with an effective scheduling solution has a competitive advantage. Currently, we can find several dedicated solutions to the scheduling challenges that facilitate and monitor business process. Simply stated, the desired result is getting the right person at the right time in the right place.

Calendaring is well understood to be as fundamental to productivity and collaboration as email. While personal computers, hand-held PIM (Personal Information Management) devices, Internet and cellular connections, and other evolving technologies have increased the flow of business transactions and improved the rate of personal communications, their abundance and reach have also laid a burden upon the individuals who use them. Unfortunately, the successful deployment of calendaring and scheduling has failed to reach expectations. This document provides key information for selecting an effective tool for calendar management.

Calendaring and Scheduling Back to Top

The technology industry has responded to the time management dilemma by forming a category of productivity solutions that are intended to reduce the burden of calendar management for individuals and groups alike. These solutions, which are often grouped under the broad term calendaring and scheduling, essentially translate the printed calendar to the screen and supplement it with automated features that help the end user to visualize and manage their daily calendars. Over the past decade, these solutions have evolved into three distinct categories: personal productivity solutions, group shared calendaring solutions, and collaborative calendaring solutions.

In many respects, the three categories of calendaring and scheduling represent the evolution of the category itself. In the first category, personal calendar solutions essentially simulate paper-based day planners to provide the user with the tools needed to track appointments and manage daily tasks. Often referred to as "organizers" or PIMs, these solutions provide minimal personal productivity enhancement, and do nothing to link the user with the greater organization. Secondly, group & shared calendar solutions overcome the problem of the isolated user by providing views into multiple calendars. This billboard-style access to schedules is limited by the static quality of the information being sought. The user is unable to gain up-to-date insight into the greater organization. It has only been through the development of a third category, collaborative scheduling, that end-users have been able to utilize real-time connectivity and cross-platform integration to operate in a truly interactive and synchronous manner.

Calendar and scheduling categories

The Needs of Today's Organization Back to Top

Today's organizations, whether they are corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, or any other form of public or private entity, have the same core need for human coordination. In most cases, this coordination requires meetings that lead to the inevitable and often harrowing process of schedule coordination. From this process - which often involves the pulling out of calendars, the tracking down of people, and the exchange of written messages and phone calls - the question arises: "How can we make meetings easier?"

The Human Factor Back to Top

"Usability is more important than functionality and features. If we don't use the feature, then it's worthless. Just make it more intuitive!" - customer feedback

Collaborative tools are valuable only if they are widely adopted and used consistently. The success of groupware is not measured by scalability, but on overcoming organizational resistance. Never underestimate the inertia of a culture and the effort required to effect change. Therefore, the barrier to success is based on achieving a critical mass of users. This can be explained using Metcalfe's Law,¹ which is generally stated as, "The community value of a network grows exponentially as the number of its users increases."

The first step toward improving the meeting scheduling process is to look at the people and organizational behavior behind the process. It is important to understand how people work within their desktop environments, which platforms they use, which PIMs, if any, they use, and how much or little time they have to complete their tasks. Because each individual and department is likely to work in a slightly different manner, the desktop solutions they use must fit into their work habits and not change them.

Collaborative calendaring solutions must provide organizations with a flexible means to reach across geographic and platform-oriented boundaries so that individuals and their co-workers can view, manage, and coordinate their schedules instantly. Through an intuitive interface design, these systems deliver high-end functionality that fits seamlessly into everyday work practices. This fit enables users to not only use their collaborative applications to their fullest potential, but  to form best practice behaviors and share those behaviors with other departments.

Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Communications Back to Top

Beyond the issue of fit, an organization must also look at the ways in which their calendaring and scheduling applications are calibrated. Are the end-user exchanges asynchronous? Do they rely upon emails, voicemails, or other tools that impose a time gap between inception and receipt? Or are they synchronous, as a live conversation, allowing for an instantaneous, bi-directional flow of information? As stated earlier, with collaborative calendaring solutions, organizations can eliminate the lag time and static quality associated with asynchronous communications to achieve a level of real-time communications that inherently boosts the accuracy and value of every scheduling transaction.

Ultimately, by providing a system that takes human behavior into account - providing an intuitive means to create and schedule meetings - and matching that with a fully synchronous connection, organizations of all types and sizes can dramatically improve the pace and accuracy with which their employees schedule meetings. Moreover, they can boost workforce productivity and ultimately raise the bottom line by creating more time for profit-generating business activities.

Mix of Rich and Thin Clients Back to Top

Research has shown there are distinct roles within an organization when it comes to calendar management. While two thirds of an organization can be labeled as a casual acceptor, the remaining one third are dedicated users. The latter group can be further broken down into two sub-categories, namely proposer and administrative assistant. A proposer is generally a manager, team leader, or project coordinator who performs scheduling tasks for a group. The administrative assistant manages the schedule of a busy executive, often involving coordination with other executive's calendars. These two sub-categories drive process for the organization. Interestingly, they generate an inversely proportional amount of calendar usage. These dedicated users require more than a thin client due to their unique needs and approach calendar management as a productivity tool.

Meanwhile, the majority of the organization's casual calendar users, the acceptors, have minimal requirements. Often, they have  readily available time on their calendars and can easily accept the few proposals they receive without conflict. This group can effectively be addressed using a thin client, such as an HTML based product. Because of the mix of rich and thin clients, a robust scheduling engine that operates exclusively on the server is vital, since the majority of users are best supported by Web Services within a portal or intranet environment. This server will need to provide services such as Free/Busy Time Access, Notifications and Reminders, SSL Data Security, Time Zone Resolution, and Web Services Integration.

Operations concentrated on the server, supporting end-users
on multiple platforms and in multiple time zones with the same real-time data.

System Characteristics Back to Top

Ultimately, the product must be easy-to-use, while being a secure and effective means to improve company productivity. Groupware products that failed to be adopted met organizational resistance due to difficult and non-intuitive user interfaces. The system must integrate into organizations of any size, fitting in among multiple enterprise systems and mixed platforms to securely deliver immediate results. As the user load expands and contracts, the system can be modified with the addition and removal of servers, making it a truly scalable solution.

• Ease-of-Use - Because of its intuitive design, most end-users can learn the product in a matter of minutes and can continue to operate with little to no training and support. This minimal ramp-up time leads to instant organizational efficiency and a quick return-on-investment.
  
  
• Integration - The product performs across platforms, so all end-users instantly see the same information regardless of their operating system. This includes both rich and thin clients, as well as integration into the portal environment.
  
  
• Real-Time - End-users can instantly view the availability of company resources, including conference rooms, meeting support tools (such as overhead projectors), and personal schedules. With a few clicks, the meeting is booked and adjusted, if need be, to the time zone differences of the people involved.
  
  
• Investment Security - SSL encryption keeps critical company information locked within the firewall. Additionally, the product's client/server design protects from email-borne viruses, so that scheduling information is kept out of danger. Together, these features protect an organization's operating information, while at the same time making it available to verified users through multiple channels, including desktop applications, Web interfaces, PDA devices, and other technologies.
  
  

An intuitive and attractive UI makes it easy and rewarding for
end-users to adopt calendar management.

The Future of Collaborative Scheduling Back to Top

Collaborative scheduling technology will continue to evolve as product developers continue their research into human collaborative behavior and translate their findings into meaningful functionality. As advances in networking technology continue to take form, these product developers will be able to support their design goals with the latest technologies so that end-user productivity can be improved in virtually any meeting-centric work environment.

Among its future initiatives, collaborative calendaring functionality will evolve into a Web service that will be safely, yet universally accessible, from any Web-enabled location. The evolution of such Web Services and the development of the Enterprise Information Portal will result in the use and efficacy of collaborative "to dos" in the work environment. These features will extend the power of calendar management from the meeting arrangement process to the meeting facilitation process, helping end-users easily generate and manage agendas and any action items that result from their meetings.

Conclusion Back to Top

For the past two decades, the computer industry has attempted to provide solutions to the never-ending challenge of meeting coordination. In an effort to reduce the burden of meeting coordination, companies have adopted a range of solutions, including personal and group/shared calendaring systems that have been aimed at streamlining this process. However, due to their largely email-dependent nature, these systems have failed to deliver the accuracy and context needed to effectively schedule and manage meetings.

It was not until the advent of collaborative calendaring that companies could experience the effects of real-time, low-bandwidth meeting coordination. This technology has not only improved the rate and accuracy with which meetings are scheduled, but also created a means of interaction that has become indispensable for companies everywhere. End-users have grown more productive, and by adopting best practices for human coordination, have turned collaborative scheduling into a time-saving asset for their companies.

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