Distance Collaboration
Thinking a lot about virtual communities these days. With all the web applications nowadays it has become much easier that our minds connect quickly over large distances. Everyone is using email instead of the former letter. The next step is instant messaging. If you have your workgroup or your friends connected to an Instant Messenger everyone is able to see your online status. While knowing when the other is available you can then exchange information instantly.
The next level to foster distance collaboration, friendship or built a virtual team spirit is to connect on a social networking platform like Facebook.com. One glance at your profile provides all the information people need to get better acquainted with yourself: you can share your music, your photos, your interests, your blog, your online bookmarks. The ultimate state of letting your friends and colleagues participate in your life then is Twitter.com. Post "what you are doing" in a few words from the web, your mobile phone or your Instant Messenger to Twitter and your friends or the whole world will get informed about it. Plazes.com is another tool to connect. It can help not miss friends when you are by chance in the same Starbucks location surfing through the Net, starring at your screen not realizing the world around you. It provides your location to anyone who wants to see it and you can also update via text messaging.
So what is all that about, just time wasted? Working in virtual matrix organizations that span around the globe to accommodate ever increasing business speed and complexity collaboration becomes the buzzword of the 21st century. It is THE key skill for the modern knowledge worker and not imaginable without the internet. There are tons of online collaboration tools available that make virtual teams effective today. The social networking tools mentioned above may be seen as a fun factor but being member of different virtual teams I am already experiencing that many of them connect me well to some of my fellow colleagues. They substitute the live hallway talk but definitly also provide business value. There are more than 2000 Sun employees on Facebook.com. I am using instant messaging with the team of one of my clients and it is very effective. Many of the above mentioned tools could be integrated in a professional enterprise application. Something which we are currently driving at Sun.
Posted at
10:06PM Jun 21, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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