We've also put together a team of folks to look at the different software and hardware tools that we use across this LabNet enterprise. We have representatives from every site on that team, working on which tools they're going to use and how they're going to do it. That's been in place about a year.

And how is that working out so far?

Actually, pretty good. People truly do understand. We only have so much budget and you can't afford to buy different tools to do the same thing for all the different sites. It's just not cost effective.

What would you say has surprised you the most about your deployments of collaboration technology?

I expected the tools to give us more than they gave us, but what it boils down to is the culture of the organization. When you go across the country, you'll find different cultures in the different organizations that you're working with, even though they work for the same company. Until you get the cultures to agree to a common terminology and a common process, the tools don't enable anything to happen.

What have been the most challenging aspects of implementing collaboration tools?

That gets back to the culture thing. I'm currently in Anaheim, and have sites in St. Louis, some in D.C., and some in Seattle. They're all over the place. Each site has a number of tools and its own processes. And they came from other companies-- Rockwell, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, they had all their processes.

So these people, a lot of them are very experienced engineers, come into the environment with ideas and processes and procedures that came out of that heritage company and heritage site. We bring them all together and say, 'You're now going to collaborate and you're going to make this live virtual constructive environment, and all these labs are going to work together in this environment and they're going to produce this product.' And people stand up and say that sounds like a great vision. We love it. We want to work it.

Then you start putting the tools in place and they say, wait a minute; we don't use that tool here in St. Louis. You've got to use this tool. Well, where did that tool come from? What were the site processes? What were the engineering processes? And pretty soon, you've got this chaotic stuff going on because of the cultures that they came from.

So what we've had to do is bring them together and step back and say, 'Look, you're working at the enterprise level. Forget your sites. What is the enterprise process and what is the best way we're going to move forward on this?' And it's taken us a while to get there, but we've started chipping away the different tools, and people begin to realize the tool isn't the issue, it's how you use the tool that's the issue, and that gets into the processes and how you develop those processes.

And if there is one competitive advantage I think we've got it's the fact that we work across the enterprise and we recognize culture is probably the one thing that's going to stop us. We have to attack that first and foremost.Any company or enterprise that's going use collaboration tools, they're going to have to approach it that way. If somebody in the United States wants to work with India or Hong Kong, or anywhere else, you'd better figure out how you're going to [work together] first before you add a tool onto it, because the tool isn't going to do anything for you.