Businessweek says virtual collaboration is now hot
Stumble It!Collaboration is one of the 6 key areas being exploited by Web Smart 50 companies
Businessweek reports in The Web Smart 50 that..."the Web is not only cool again: It's hot. Sure, this time around it's different. The excitement, so vaporous in the bubble years, now pays dividends in hard coin. Productivity soars, costs plunge, and new markets come to life".
COLLABORATION is one of 6 key trends Businessweek identify which cut across industries and include CUSTOMER SERVICE, CUSTOMIZATION, STREAMLINING, MANAGEMENT and CUTTING EDGE.
Masters of virtual collaboration
The Web Smart 50 represents Businessweek's view of the most innovative projects within corporations - so-called "masters of the Web” and includes projects at Procter & Gamble, IJIS Institute, Intuit, Linden Lab, Amber Alert Consortium, Dresdner Klienwort Wasserstein and Schlumberger as 'pacesetters in collaboration'.
The article also includes a virtual collaboration case study for R. Bird and Company (a brand identity company) and the positive user experiences they are having with BaseCamp, the collaborative project management service, from 37signals from Chicago who have assembled a very interesting portfolio of products and tools for collaboration which includes backpackit.
The power of crowds attracts Businessweek's attention through a San Francisco startup digg which, according to Businessweek, has 80,000 members who unearth around 700 interesting topics on a daily basis with the 15 most popular ones being pulled together on the digg home page and attracting some 500,000 visitors per day.
Social networking is also seen as hot with the example of MySpace being used to offer music and allow communication between rock bands and their fans.
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Seven team decision-making methods
The way a team decides to decide is one of the most important decisions it makes. In the excellent book, “Why Teams Don’t Work” the authors, Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, identify seven key decision-making methods for teams.
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Related News & Media Articles
Virtual Peer Collaboration Startup Launched
Thanks to Cory Sorice of Invequity.com for pointing me to a Fast Company report: The Wisdom of Crowds (Beta Version) , published December 2005, which reviews a radically different internet startup called The Business Experiment (TBE) which aims to create new ventures through the power of totally virtual peer to peer collaboration (P2P).
Is email dead
Probably not with 50 billion e-mails dispatched every day wordwide but the signal to noise ratio is getting pretty bad with The Times, July 15, reporting in ONLINE, ON THE PHONE, ON THE UP that 88% of them are junk.
Small businesses more open to virtual teamwork
UK Small companies more open to virtual working practices than big ones
According to Online Recruitment, “Big businesses are left behind as smaller firms pioneer the remote office”, May 31.
A survey of attitudes to teleworking in UK business, carried out by Mitel, finds somewhat surprisingly that small businesses (72%) are much more open to remote and flexible working practices than their larger counterparts (44%).
One might think that the larger companies more advanced IT and communications infrastructures might make them more amenable to teleworking?
However perhaps mindset may be more important than technology with the bigger companies preference for ‘command and control’ and “if you can’t see it you can manage it” holding them back in new working practices compared with a more ‘self-managed team’ approach popular with small entrepreneurial companies.
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