• Author / Uploaded
• Ronald Abletes

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CASE STUDY: The current business environment poses a number of challenges to the workplace, and businesses must offer new ways of accommodating flexi-timings, employees who work from home, the use of personal devices for work, and reduced numbers of personal meetings. Each of these challenges requires changes in the IT infrastructure to accommodate the employee. For example, if employees are working from remote locations, they still need to connect in real time to share their work progress and communicate with others. In such cases, a virtual space is required for employee collaboration. The National School of Healthcare Science (NSHCS) was established in 2011 by Health Education England (West Midlands) to provide new healthcare science education and training programs nationally. To implement this program NSHCS needed a way for people working in teams in different locations to cocreate documents and collaborate on scientific topics. This document creation involved a number of external associates who are involved in assessments, policies, strategic planning, and so on. Using email alone for such communication proved imprudent as it led to fragmented and disorganized discussions spread across multiple email threads. They required a better and reliable collaboration solution, and looked for it at the Digital Marketplace, which is the government’s framework for finding and hiring such services. After shortlisting a number of cloud-collaboration vendors and using predetermined multi-criteria scoring and multiple trials, the NSHCS settled on Glasscubes, which rated best in both price and quality. Based in Buckinghamshire, UK, Glasscubes has been offering collaboration services to firms since 2008. It has a large customer base of more than 50,000 customers spread globally in over 100 countries. The name of the firm is inspired by their vision of collaboration: to create a tool that allows users to visualize information and activities outside their cube (desk, office cubicle, or floor). Glasscubes means providing collaboration for individuals and groups who are isolated, allowing them to see and be seen. What Glasscubes offers its clients is an online workspace. Clients can invite anyone to join this workspace, be it their employees, customers, suppliers—anyone who needs to share information and communicate with the firm. Using this online space, people can share files, assign tasks, discuss ideas and topics, and organize schedules. The collaboration software provides a centralized repository for file sharing, and as the storage is on the cloud, there is no restriction on file size or number of files that can be uploaded to this space. The software can also automatically version the same file when it is uploaded after modifications.

Glasscubes’s Team Collaboration feature allows team participants to have conversations by posting messages on the workspace to be viewed by all team members, who can also comment on the post. New attachments can also be posted here. A feature called Workspace Activity Feed summarizes the entire conversation, displaying questions, comments, etc. as quick links, which helps in day-to-day team communication. An instant messenger allows users to communicate privately if they need to, and any number of people can be invited to join that conversation. Any new and important update can be highlighted in the workspace using the Workspace Announcement Feature. The announcement stays in a user’s workspace until they acknowledge it, thus ensuring that all team members receive important updates. The users can also set up a free conference class for up to 50 participants without any prior booking or billing. When a team is working on a specific project that involves a number of tasks, Glasscubes allows tasks to be assigned to individuals or groups as well. Users can specify details like priority, what needs to be done to complete the task, by what deadline, and by whom. On completion, the task can be marked as completed and its duration recorded. Glasscubes also provides project management facilities such as Gantt charts, critical path analysis, cost and time tracking of tasks, and comparison with estimates. Team members can share their individual calendars and overlay them to build a team calendar that shows everyone’s availability. All the contacts of the organization, including suppliers, customers, and partners, can be stored in Connect, a central place specifically for contacts. The client firm’s CRM data can also be transferred here. Glasscubes also offers cloudbased intranet, which means that users can access it anywhere with a device that supports an Internet browser. Data security is not an issue as all data is remotely backed up using SSL encryption. This can also be used as an extranet by extending invitations to users outside the firm to connect to the workspace and share information. According to Stuart Sutherland, who heads Information and Digital Systems at the NSHCS, Glasscubes’s document control handling worked very well, and adoption of the software by the firm was very smooth owing to its ease of use. Glasscubes set up multiple online workspaces for the NSHCS and invited its team members to access the workspace from anywhere, using any device. The team can now directly post their content onto the workspace, and thanks to the versioning of uploaded documents, they can now be sure that the content they get is the latest and most accurate.

Case Study Questions: 1. Discuss the features of Glasscubes as a collaboration software. 2. Why did the NSHCS require a tool for collaboration? Was Glasscubes a feasible option? 3. Name some other areas where such software can be useful. Discuss at least one such area. 4. Compare Glasscubes to other collaboration software. What features can you add for Glasscubes to have an edge compare to other collaboration software? Create a flowchart of the new features you want to add in Glasscubes.