Collaborative Information System: centralized or decentralized?

Jean-Michel Davault and Fabrice Barbin, both MVP Groove experts, have recently co-signed an article published in the French IT magazine “IT-Expert” for its September / October edition 2009. The article entitled “Collaborative SI: centralized versus decentralized” deals with the advantages and limits of Centralized and Decentralized information systems. Following this analysis, both authors propose their conception of company information systems, allowing for a solution which balances usage and a company’s IT resource management.

Centralized architectures play an important role in the approach of business intelligence, in particular in the capitalization of strategic information within the company.
In contrast, decentralized information systems which are often more agile, allow a better reactivity and a better adequacy with the open and distributed aspects of companies (in particular for telecommuting workers, mobile collaborators and within environments with limited connectivity).

1. Centralized architectures

Advantages :

• Economy of scale
  Objective: To realize resource pooling and consolidation (technical and human resources)
  Result: Shared resources allow more competitive costing and constitute financial and organizational benefits
• An exhaustive and strategic information structure
  The centralization of information allows for the creation and improvement of the company’s knowledge capital.
• Simplified access and security
  Centralization facilitates information accessibility. Indeed, security policy definition (including the access authorization) has been simplified and in most environments is consultable in real time.
• Integrity and uniqueness of information
  The centralization facilitates the creation of a global referential, in assuring the uniqueness of the information and in simplifying the control of integrity. Indeed seeing that the resources are in local access, technical verifications can be made in real time.

But centralized architecture presents some limits…

In the article, the authors make a point of noting that despite the advantages of centralized architectures, company information systems need to be more open and intelligent. New needs are emerging today, for tomorrow, aligning work and organizational trends:  mobiles workers or dispersed collaborators in multiple sites, telecommuting workers, workers without enough network bandwidth work or unreliable connectivity, etc.

A decentralized information system adapts itself better to the changes linked to the economic fluctuations.

2. Decentralized architecture

Advantages

With a decentralized approach, users can immediately access pertinent and exploitable information even without a network connection.
From a technical and organizational point of view, this approach is interesting for mobile users. Indeed this model ensures information availability and resource continuity even if in case of a network problem, while securing the company data and its access (contribution, copyright, electronically certificate…). Moreover this approach leans on the matrix management model and not a hierarchical model.

But organization and coordination are necessary. In spite of its advantages the decentralized approaches present several limits:

• The lack of supervision and control
• In a professional context, rules must be respected (technical and organizational)
• Security and sharing information must be verified (norms, indexation, etc.)

Illustration of a mixed approach through the Microsoft collaborative solutions

Finally the article concludes on the complimentarily of the Microsoft collaborative solutions: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Groove and Microsoft Services Online.

The complimentarily of this solution is a positive illustration of a mixed information system, allowing companies to improve its capacity of knowledge management in a strategic objective.

These technical solutions associated with HOMMES & PROCESS’s expertise allows possible global solutions, agile and efficient, linking up management requirements in the company and the best practices for the users and the collaborators.