Team Collaboration
Collaborating using the communication tools available to most organizations today (telephone, e-mail, document sharing, presentations) is expensive and time-consuming.
So we developed business models that rely on problem decomposition into objectives that can be delegated through hierarchical and functionally segmented organizational layers, minimizing dependencies so that we can assign tasks as independent packages of work to be executed by individual workers without collaboration.
While the Classical business model has generated great efficiency (e.g. assembly lines in manufacturing) and allowed organizations to tackle complex problems, it has underperformed in knowledge-based activities that cannot be easily analyzed and automated (sales and marketing being good examples). There are no incentives to share the responsibility and collaborate to find a solution to the collective problem, so people stick to their partial goals and objectives.
There is a need for solutions that help organizations to bring people to collaborate in achieving a common mission. The technology to support that has emerged and enabled a new class of tools: Corporate Wikis, Social CRM, Enterprise 2.0 tools, Social Intranets, etc.
By leveraging Social Technologies, a Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 tool can decrease the cost of collaboration among distributed teams. It allows for aggregation of community knowledge and its expression in context of a work task. That way, each and every worker has the information they need to make decisions without the need for excessive task segmentation to achieve efficiency.
