When disaster strikes, create an Activity!

Suzanne O Minassian  December 20 2007 07:00:00 AM

There was an article in CIO Magazine about the Lotus Connections, and I wanted to share an interesting use case for Activities. You can read the whole article here.

The FAA’s Audit Problem

The long-term security story of Web 2.0 will be playing out for several years. In the meantime, enterprises like the FAA have to find Web 2.0 software that end users and IT can live with in order to solve business problems.

One example: The FAA needed a better solution for the auditing process after a disaster, [Giora Hadar, knowledge architect at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)] says. To submit purchases via an expense report during normal times at the FAA, employees must undergo a rigorous approval process. But in times of emergency, disaster recovery workers must act quickly to buy supplies like generators, ladders, or scaffolding to rebuild damaged FAA sites. “They use a credit card, rather than go through the normal process,” Hadar says.

But after the disaster, an auditor from agencies like the Government Accountability Office or the inspector general needs to collect documents and receipts that detail every penny spent. “Whenever this happened, [employees] had to look around and find where they’d put all the receipts, e-mails, trip reports and instant-messaging logs,” Hadar says. “It was spread all over creation.”

That’s when it occurred to Hadar that an application in IBM’ s Lotus Connections software, called Activities, might be useful. Activities behaves like a couple of Web 2.0 document management apps, such as 37signals’ Basecamp. It operates as a user-friendly repository for groups to share and collaborate on a given project, a refreshing departure from more complex, traditional document management systems (which Hadar says disaster recovery workers certainly wouldn’t want to wade through during a time of crisis).

With Activities, all 200 FAA disaster recovery employees can upload their IMs, e-mails, invoices and other documents detailing how much was spent. (After the disaster, hard-copy receipts can be scanned in back at FAA headquarters.) “If there is a hurricane this month or next month, when someone comes to investigate, we can hand them the Activity folder and say, have at it,” Hadar says.

The Activities feature in Lotus Connections shows how IBM approaches Web 2.0 in the enterprise. A Web 2.0 application usually means a hosted offering accessed purely through a Web browser. But Connections for the most part is software that lives on-premise and allows administrators like Hadar to control access. (It can be accessed on a Web browser, securely behind the firewall.)

“It’s really more about the spirit of the technologies,” Yankee Group’s Holbrook says of IBM’s collaboration tools. “They [IBM’s tools] are very collaborative and give the end users a little bit more control over how they communicate with their colleagues, but they are on premise and server-based behind the firewall.”

• Comments [0]