Collaborative Work Management

Gartner defines the collaborative work management (CWM) market as "the market for stand-alone software tools that provide task-driven workspaces to enable end users to plan, coordinate and automate their work."

Paraphrasing Gartner, collaborative work management tools provide "an integrated assembly of user-friendly capabilities for work planning, in-context collaboration, content collaboration, workflow and automation, reporting and analysis of work performed including useful dashboards, intelligent assistance provided by both good old fashioned artificial intelligence and machine-learning and LLMs, and use-case acceleration on a platform that handles data management and administrative operations. Tools are defined by their purpose (work planning and execution), target users and breadth of functionality."

Per Gartner, collaborative workflow management tools empower business users to:

  • Plan work activities
  • Collaborate with peers
  • Automate repetitive activities
  • Observe work activity
  • Operate at scale

Per Gartner, mandatory and common features of collaborative workflow management software includes:

  • Work planning functionality
  • In-context collaboration functionality
  • Workflow and automation functionality
  • Reporting features, analytics and dashboards
  • Content collaboration features
  • Intelligent assistance
  • Platform and operations support that aggregates system data
  • Use-case accelerators and prebuilt templates for specific work scenarios
Gartner provides the following Magic Quadrant for current collaborative work management software vendors


Here are links to the collaborative work management software vendors that are mentioned in Gartner's Magic Quadrant:
So I have interest in accounting, reporting, audit, and analysis.  If you look at collaborative work management in that context, I see the following currently available software:
As I have said, a fundamental reorientation of the state of affairs is occurring. This reorientation will include accounting, reporting, audit, and analysis.  I call this "modern accountancy". This overview provides details of that fundamental reorientation.

Work will be performed in different ways. Digital is different; "realspace" and "cyberspace" work differently.  In order to understand what is going on, you need to enhance your digital proficiency.  Specifically, I think there is a better way to create accounting and audit working papers and schedules. Think semantic spreadsheets.

Excel and other spreadsheets have been an excellent tool for the past 50 years.  And Excel and other spreadsheets will still be an excellent tool for the next 50 or 1000 or maybe even the next 1000 years.  But Excel has limitations, just like every other tool.  Some of the use cases satisfied by Excel will be satisfiable by different, more modern tools.  Excel was a stepping stone to more modern tools.

I see some fundamental flaws in these brand new collaborative workflow management software tools.  Here are a few flaws off the top of my head: (see this blog post)
  1. Interoperability.  Each tool is a stand alone silo.  Really? Is that what we need? More silos? Wouldn't it be better if your collaborative work management software interacted to other collaborative work management software, at least in come cases.  For example, what if audit management software would interact with the audit client's financial close management software.
  2. Document orientation.  Each of these stand alone tools still seems to have a document orientation as contrast to an information orientation.
  3. Still focused on "strings" rather than "things".  So folks, there is this thing people have been calling the semantic web.  Do these new collaborative work management tools work with the notion of the semantic web?
  4. Lack of standards.  There seems to be a general lack of standards in collaborative work management software.  That leads to vendor lock in and other problems.
  5. Knowledge graphs would be nice.  Knowledge graphs can do things that relational databases struggle with.  Knowledge graphs that are standards based that contain standard semantics are even better.
Maybe I am ahead of the curve.  But hey, that is what I see.  It seems to me that collaborative work management tools are primarily designed for the general work management needs; i.e. they don't really have anything to do with the actual work performed.  For example, imagine professional services tasks performed, such as an audit.  Collaborative work management tools have nothing to do with performing the actual work (creation of audit working papers), they more have to do with managing the work (project management of the audit).  What if you could both do the work and manage that work in the same collaborative system?

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