The High Performance Workplace is the Virtual Workplace

The Economist published a special survey in January 2006 on Collaboration and the High Performance WorkPlace.   Two quotes from that survey seem especially compelling.

• "The speed and efficiency with which effective teams can be brought together to resolve problems is crucial to the success of the modern organization,"

and

• "The more workers interact with each other often, the more likely they are to solve the problems of complexity of the modern organization." 

Advancing technolgies in knowledge management, Web 2.0 collaboration and social software, web-based meeting services, workspace and portal software are all evolving to address the potential needs of the modern knowledge worker who must, to be effective, work in a collaborative and team-based manner.   That work puts a premium on efficient methods of assembling a team, getting quick access to proper resources and accelerating results through enhanced interactivity.   

The workplace software of the 90s focused on making the individual productive, and giving them simple to use, yet robust presentation, word processing, presentation and calculation and e-mail communications software. 

We're in an era now evolving to advance team productivity and it's rapidly becoming a key construct.

Knowledge workers today:

• often participate in teams with members that are external to a core organization: customers, partners, alliances, members of out-sourced business function, suppliers.   
• members of  multiple, dynamic, shifting teams, with shifting reporting structures as well
• cope with teams whose members are often  cross-time zones, cross-cultural, and operate from disparate IT infrastructures.

Web 2.0/Office 2.0  whatever the nomeclature.  the tools needs to address these business needs.

Comments

[Catherine]

Nasha,
Your comment arrived just as I was headed to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference, and the 2.5 days were devoted to this topic; the emergence of Web 2.0 collaboration and social media applications within the enterprise. I'm excited to know this is an area of interest for you as well.

I've been keenly interested in the mechanisms and methods for creating vital, interactive, virtual team workspaces for the last three years. One of the last product development and marketing projects I worked on last year involved an Australian-based development group, an Indian-based (Bangalore) QA team, I (as product manager) was in the Silicon Valley and the business development arm in Seattle. It's the way we work.
Hope your conference was a good one too.
Catherine

[nasha]

Good article Catherine. It has taken about 20 years for the internet to re-invent itself as an information (knowledge) sharing platform - the basic idea with which it was started :) ... it is fundamentally becoming social and has professionally grown since inception (from static to dynamic to being interactive) ... In Hyderabad, India: there is a User Interface design conference next week where one of the speakers from Colayer talks about "Web 2.0 for Virtual Workplaces" - the idea of building virtual workspaces sounds interesting ... with globalisation I see more and more employees working virtually