Crossroads 2002 A-List Award Winners

SiteScape, Inc.
Maynard, MA

SiteScape Enterprise Forum
> Web-based Team Collaboration

CUSTOMERS AT WORK

Large global organizations struggle with the cost and time that effective communication requires. SiteScape’s customers are reducing the time it takes for distributed project teams to meet their goals. An aerospace company, a petrochemical conglomerate, and a government agency were among the reference customers. Common strategic objectives included:

§ Managing collaborative data and documentation more effectively

§ Capturing and reusing project knowledge

§ Letting teams determine their collaborative processes

WHY SITESCAPE?

SiteScape provides Web-based collaboration software, hosting, and services. Customers leverage SiteScape to define collaborative business practices for their distributed project teams. Teams configure SiteScape Enterprise Forum to the way they want to interact with other parties, share documents, and coordinate communications. Browser-based SiteScape Enterprise Forum simplifies access to collaborative information and also expands the possibilities through support for CAD viewers, portal frameworks, and real-time Web conferencing tools. Clients organize their overall collaborative strategies with SiteScape’s permissioning and delegation functionality.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Near-term value: Even in a world of anywhere, anytime overnight delivery and pervasive telecommunications, global organizations cannot stay ahead by relying on paper documents, the telephone, or even email. By centralizing and simplifying access to project communications and documentation, SiteScape’s customers have reduced the logistical overhead that has hampered projects and employees in the past.

Enterprise innovation: Companies are using SiteScape Enterprise Forum as a foundation for collaborative business practices. Today, they are using SiteScape’s flexibility to allow teams to configure collaboration. Long term, the largest organizations will use their collective experience with SiteScape to identify best practices and encourage consistent adoption among their project teams. By moving collaboration to a digital environment, companies remove the noise from the process, and teams tackle more complex challenges in a shorter amount of time. One client has created more than 130 collaborative forums that serve more than 15,000 users.

Technology gains: The Internet has encouraged rapid dissemination of information and knowledge across organizations. SiteScape Enterprise Forum harnesses this innovation and allows companies to leverage it in a more formal way. By providing a common infrastructure for collaboration, IT groups enable the business to scale effectively. In addition to reducing cost of ownership, SiteScape’s customers are able to improve the global knowledge base. Project team leaders or forum managers are able to determine which resources project participants and all employees can search. In organizations where tens of thousands of employees are at work, recognizing knowledge resources quickly creates tremendous overall productivity gains.

SUCCESS FACTORS

Project strategy: Collaboration technology enables a world of possibilities. Global customers recommend keeping it simple at the start to avoid unnecessary complexity.

Learning: Managed outreach to potential participants, both internal and external, was a critical part of SiteScape’s customers’ success.

Resources: Early in the implementation process, each team should identify which collaborative processes they want to move online.

Fit: Geographically distributed companies should consider SiteScape Enterprise Forum as a means of organizing their digital collaboration strategies.

COMPANY INFO

SiteScape, Inc., is a private company with 35 employees.

978.461.9959
www.sitescape.com
Published: January 2002