T oday we live in "Web time" where everything moves at the frantic pace of a speeding electron. Because of the Web and the instant communications medium it fosters, everyone expects projects to speed up, no matter where the project team members are located. Organizations that can't make faster decisions and get products to market quickly face a profound competitive disadvantage. In the Information Age there will only be two types of organizations: the quick and the dead! For the past dozen years, asynchronous collaboration tools-tools like e-mail and Lotus Notes, which are the digital equivalent of telephone answering machines and corporate libraries and/ or bulletin boards-have dominated networkbased communication.But the I'Net age (the combination of the Internet, intranets, and extranets) supports real-time or synchronous interaction. Synchronous interactions are those in which a response typically occurs in less than 10 seconds. Relying on a standard Java-enabled 4.x browser, many organizations are collaborating in real time on decisions, proposals, customer service, e-commerce, marketing documents, and more. As defined by our consultancy, Collaborative Strategies, the functionality of a real-time collaboration (RTC) tool resides between the phone and email. RTC tools help communicate graphical and text-based information in a synchronous fashion. To date, users have typically run interactive sessions in conjunction with a conference call, since voice over IP can have unreliable quality, especially over the Internet.
THE MANY USES OF RTC TOOLSThe users of RTC products are fielding distance training, software demonstration, customer support, e-commerce, and sales applications. The need for distance training is especially acute: The demand for educated employees is forcing training departments to find new and less expensive ways to educate and keep employees up to date.Organizations interested in using RTC tools should first decide how they would be used. Some RTC tools are tailored to support one application over another. RTC tools really cover three distinct but increasingly intertwined functions: audio conferencing, data conferencing, and videoconferencing.Our research indicates that, conservatively, the data-conferencing tool market grew by more than 110 percent over the past year and should grow to represent more than a $1.8 billion market in 2002.The chart in Figure 1 shows what functional needs these products are filling for companies today, according to a recent survey we conducted. Corporate training/communications and Web-
