Attacks Add Urgency To Collaboration Technology Plans

The Sept. 11 attacks have led many businesses to reconsider their IT priorities, and Porter Novelli is no exception.

The public-relations company has offices around the world, including New York, and had been deploying collaboration technologies on a gradual scale. But in recent months, that schedule got a turbo-boost. "We've decided to expedite things," says Bob Elloyan, Porter Novelli's VP and director of enterprise technology. Full-scale deployment for technologies that would facilitate "virtual offices" was slated to take a few years, he says. Now it's set to take only a few months. "It's necessary for business," he says. "Our goal is to make sure we are available all the time to clients, regardless of the functionality of one location."

The company, which is a heavy user of Lotus Development Corp. technology, is accelerating its deployment of Lotus' SameTime instant-messaging product, which has audio/video capabilities. It's also setting up some of its clients on SameTime, allowing for enhanced internal and external collaboration. "We try to be sensitive to what clients want," Elloyan says. "Many times that determines what technologies we deploy, or at least how we deploy them." Porter Novelli is also stepping up its use of Quickplace to build ad hoc Web sites and extranets that let various teams collaborate on short-term projects.

"We are really moving toward being location independent," says Elloyan, who bounces between Boston and New York for his job. To that end, Porter Novelli is working on a plan to place master servers at a variety of locations. "If any server loses everything they have, if the entire New York City office loses its network connection--which happened Sept. 11--you can go to any hotel and get repointed to one of these master servers in a totally different city, and it's totally transparent to the user."