Can Groupware Survive
Japanese Groups?


Business culture is a reflection of society as a whole, and Japanese business culture differs in many ways from typical Western business patterns. Scott Nash offers a look at some of the cultural aspects that complicate the selling of groupware such as Lo tus Notes to Japanese corporations, and suggests how consultants and in-house groupware advocates can address these difficulties and ease the implementation process.

by Scott Nash

In the US and Europe, spurred by the push for reengineering and the high degree of penetration by local area networks, groupware has become a hot computing concept. Essentially, groupware attempts to apply the time-saving aspects of computing to users wor king together in teams. There are various types of groupware programs, ranging in scope from simple uses (such as e-mail) through relatively intricate operations (including group scheduling) to complex applications (departmental workflow planning and info rmation sharing).

With an installed user base of 2 million users, and predictions of a worldwide user base of 20 million by 1997, Lotus Notes is one of the most popular and best known groupware products. Although Lotus Notes is a demanding application, both in terms of har dware requirements and software setup and maintenance, its performance-enhancement and cost-saving advantages are undeniable. Studies have shown that companies implementing Lotus Notes have received an average Return on Investment (ROI) of 179% and achiev ed payback within two years.

When a strength
becomes a weakness

While Lotus Notes enjoys great popularity in the US, it is only beginning to penetrate the Japanese market. Upon reflection, this should not be surprising. Business culture is derived from social culture as a whole, and the dynamics of the Japanese compan y are wholly different from those of Western counterparts. Consultants attempting to sell Lotus Notes systems in Japan face the very real possibility that groupware won't work in Japanese groups. Certainly, it won't be applied in exactly the same way that it is in the typical American company.

In North America, one of Lotus Notes' biggest strengths is that it encourages a freer exchange of information among groups, thereby enhancing the efficiency of flat organizations by empowering employees. Among Japanese corporations, however, despite the s eeming boom in Business Process Reengineering (BPR), such concepts as free information exchange and employee empowerment are still alien. Some businessmen consider BPR to be just another variant of Total Quality Management (TQM), and they will tell you th at their company has already done it. Others view BPR as a process for making existing projects more efficient, rather than for questioning whether some of those projects should be done at all.

A fundamental truth is that, in spite of the zeal with which corporations have embraced reengineering, the Japanese business structure remains essentially unchanged. The Japanese business model remains hierarchical, with most employees clearing all decisi ons with their supervisors.

As an example, in an American corporation, if I wanted to ask Nakada, who works in another department, to attend a client meeting with me, I would ask him directly, and he would then inform his boss of his plans. In Japan, while I would still mention it t o Nakada informally, to get him to the meeting I would instead have to go to my boss, and ask him to ask Nakada's boss, who would then instruct Nakada to attend the meeting with me. Not going through the proper channels would risk the ire of both Nakada's boss and my boss. This enforced rigidity of the Japanese business structure negates much of groupware's flexibility.

An additional obstacle is that the ease of communication among staff and the openness of accessibility touted in Lotus Notes is not necessarily an advantage in Japan. It may even be viewed as a weakness. If you've ever read Funny Business, you will unders tand the truth of this statement. The author, Gary Katzenstein, is a bright young man who won a prestigious scholarship that enabled him to work in Japan (at Sony) for a year. The stipulation for the award was that the candidate could have no previous exp erience studying Japan -- a gold-medal recipe for disaster.

After months of being assigned busy work and jobs that did not challenge his technical abilities, Katzenstein decided that he would meet with Akio Morita, the head of Sony, to try to work out his problem. After all, he reasoned, Morita worked in the same building; all he had to do was go up and make an appointment with the secretary to see Morita. He did just that -- and was fired the next morning! A quick and memorable lesson that not going through the correct channels can have serious consequences.

Of course, Japanese managers do encourage comments and suggestions from their employees -- that is, in part, what helped to fuel Japan's manufacturing success over the past two decades. But this may happen only through the pyramidal hierarchy; just as in the military chain of command, Japanese workers are expected (required) to report to their bosses, not go around them. At one large Japanese corporation, it has been reported, the company president actually erases without reading any e-mail sent by someon e whom he doesn't know personally. (Ironically, if Lotus Notes is to succeed in Japan, its messaging capabilities may need to be scaled down by using Notes macros to restrict e-mail privileges.)

Selling Japan on groupware

Without being able to tout the two main advantages of Notes, Lotus Japan is searching for the proper way to sell Notes here. The problem is easy to understand: Notes is hard enough to describe with words alone. But when its two main features go against th e grain of traditional Japanese business culture, promoting Notes becomes even more difficult.

Lotus Japan still hasn't decided how to market Notes in Japan -- which is both a problem and an opportunity for consultants. Lotus Japan's not publicizing good strategies for selling Notes means you will have to spread the word yourself. But it also means that your competitors will have little idea of how they can promote Notes, so with a bit of vision and some good examples, you will be able to offer superior service and products first.

Another of the problems Lotus Japan faces is that Notes represents a very nebulous concept. It is not simply a mail system, nor strictly a workflow/forms engine -- and for this reason, the Japanese are having trouble envisioning its potential uses. As a c onsultant, you can address this problem by supplying a set of realistic applications for customers.

For example, meishi (business cards) are an integral part of business here, yet there is no included database for tracking customer's cards (only one for tracking card orders). Also, given Japan's emphasis on the ringi system of memos -- in which managers are asked to sign off on their commitment to a particular project -- an included demo or template for this type of system can go far in selling Notes to Japanese clients.

You will also want to concentrate on customer tracking functions and explain that, because of Notes' search capabilities, discussion databases can evolve into "know-how" databases that are usable as a future information source. These are representative of some of the topics in which many potential Japanese customers have shown interest.

Lacking experience in concrete examples of how to use true groupware like Notes, the Japanese currently define the groupware concept as group scheduling. However, whereas in the US scheduling originated with personal time trackers and later evolved into g roup scheduling, Japanese firms are primarily interested in a group scheduling solution over individual time tracking needs. Therefore, the simplistic calendar databases included with programs like Lotus Notes are not sufficient.

Unfortunately, creating a true group scheduling application on top of Lotus Notes is not feasible; the programming tools are simply not robust enough. One potential solution, often used in the US, is to bundle Notes and Organizer 2.0. Because Organizer 2. 0 has not yet been released in Japan, an alternative might be to use Adjustage, a Notes-compatible scheduler that has been released by Kodansha (phone 03-3222-7578). Adjustage integrates personal, group, and conference room scheduling with Notes' mail not ification. The inclusion of a separate product like Adjustage also emphasizes that Notes has capabilities far beyond scheduling.

Crucial limitations

There are other factors that affect how Notes is and will be used in Japan. The degree of penetration of PCs in business is not yet high, and at many companies there are multiple users for each machine -- something that Notes does not yet support graceful ly. While there is a freeware product called System Switcher 2, available on CompuServe, that allows users to switch preferences and workspace files for Notes, it doesn't support double-byte languages. This means that Japanese users cannot enter their nam es or directory paths in kana or kanji, which severely limits the usefulness of the utility. There is another option of using multiple .INI files in Windows, but this workaround, too, has its share of limitations.

Many Japanese users complain that the address books will not display names in kanji. From the Lotus viewpoint, their decision to use ASCII address books is logical; otherwise, names entered in a localized language become unreadable in another country's ve rsion. However, the inability to see names in Japanese is potentially a big turn-off for computer-phobic executives. Fortunately, the CNAP Group, a division of CIS Corporation (phone 03-3438-0531) has developed a Notes add-in, Kanji Address Book and Advan ced Mail. This add-in allows users to create Japanese address books and to use kanji names in a Notes mail database. The product will ease the transition of users from a paper-based system to working with Lotus Notes.

One hallmark of Japanese computing consumers is their preference for customized software. This preference stems from the mainframe dominance in Japan, when nearly all software was custom written and tailored to the clients' needs. Lotus Notes is customiza ble, but quite a few people complain that what they really want to do is set up the workspace in lieu of the Windows interface and run their most frequently used applications directly from the workspace. While you can launch other applications via Smart I cons, setting up application icons in the Workspace is not yet feasible. (Demand is great enough, though, that Lotus may address this capability in version 4.)

Finally, many Japanese do not consider Notes a secure system. This might seem strange given Notes' certification and encryption capabilities, but if you consider that the Japanese are unused to working with computers and passwords, their reasoning becomes clearer. Most executives, who rarely use computers, commonly give their passwords to their secretaries or choose an easy-to-guess word; therefore, employees cannot really know whether a given document was truly written by the executive. In Japanese busin esses, people rely on the hankou (the personalized seal used to authenticate a document) because they know that the executive will guard it carefully, locking it up physically to prevent others from using his seal to authenticate documents without permiss ion.

Also, many workers never bother to change the passwords they are assigned. At one major company, everyone's network password is their birth date. There are several ways that this problem can be dealt with -- bundling a hardware ID system (e.g., a pad for recognizing signatures) with Notes, using a software hankou system, or emphasizing the hankou metaphor in your sales and training to reinforce in the users' minds the need to protect and change their passwords -- but the fact remains that Japanese workers have serious doubts about computer security.

Overall, Lotus Notes has great potential in the Japanese market, but there are obstacles and mindsets to be overcome. With just a few changes, Notes could become the product that redefines the way that the Japanese do business.ç

Scott Nash is a Notes evangelist and Groupware Project Manager at CAC, Inc., a Japanese consulting firm. He can be reached at snash@cac.co.jp, or through his Web page at http://
www.st.rim.or.jp/~snash.

Tips for finding information on Lotus Notes

There are several Internet sites that carry information about Lotus Notes; including:

http://www.lotus.com/
This is the Lotus corporate site. It has information on all major products, including press releases and demos, and -- more importantly -- it includes the ability to search customer support databases for finding answers to problems.

http://www.iris.com/
Iris, the subsidiary of Lotus that created Notes, also authored the Internotes add-ons that allow users access to Notes via WWW.

http://www.turnpike.net/metro/kyee/NotesFAQ.html
Frequently asked questions, and answers.

http://www-iwi.unisg.ch/delta/
Contains a set of links to a number of electronic Notes resources, as well as a future Notes FAQ.

http://www.disaster.com/lnotesl.html
This is the home page for the Lotus Notes Mailing List.

ftp://www.worldcom.com/
This archive site for the lnotes-l mailing list includes a good number of demos.

Also, check the comp.groupware.lotus-notes.misc newsgroup on Usenet.

The article's author has designed an introductory tour of Lotus Notes, using screen shots to show what it can do and how it can help increase productivity and enable teams to work together efficiently, even when they are in different offices or countries. An English version is available at http://www.st.rim.or.jp/~snash/Notes, and a Japanese version at http://
www.st.rim.or.jp/~snash/JNotes.

While there are very few books on Lotus Notes are available in Japan, the Foreign Buyer's Club in Kobe will special order books (at ¥100 to the dollar; very cheap compared to bookstore prices) and have them delivered to you within ten days. Call the FBC at 078-857-7944.