Jeffrey Rayport of MIT’s Technology Review wrote a great article on how collaboration technologies will be a company’s competitive advantage. He talks of the “human cloud” that comes out of collaboration – which I think is a great concept. He also touches on a new series of articles that Technology Review will be addressing going forward that will highlight seven important topics:
- Consumerize everything. Just as workers have flexed more muscle in their choices of smart devices and online resources, their expectations have changed even regarding the physical appearance of many workplaces.
- It’s all about the culture. International Data Corporation, an IT research firm, argues that we’re entering “a new phase of business collaboration” based on the “intersection of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and collaboration tools to form the social business.”
- Cherish your experts, not your documents. The most compelling promise of the human cloud is that peer-to-peer networks (or networks of networks) will create value in a business.
- Build the 24-hour knowledge factory. I borrow this quaint phrase from the title of a 2004 research paper by two MIT scholars, Amar Gupta and Satwik Seshasai, who observed that managers at businesses with workers in both the United States and India once believed that the misalignment of time zones was a barrier to collaboration.
- Mandate structure within the social cacophony. Businesses should not be lulled into thinking that social media’s conversational metaphors eliminate the needs for structure, discipline, and protocols.
- Tap the wisdom of your crowd, and any crowd. Think of crowdsourcing as mass-market collaboration. Either talent or inventory can be sourced on demand.
- Keep it real. The downside of knowledge work—the lifeblood of technology-based collaboration—is its intangibility.
I highly recommend that you check out the full article HERE.
