Collaboration: A Closer Look

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

The goal of collaboration has always been the same: get things done better, faster and cheaper by bringing together a variety of resources and harnessing their collective knowledge and abilities. Effective collaboration improves productivity, streamlines and optimizes decision making, and helps capture valuable intellectual property, all of which directly contribute to the proverbial bottom line.

Going back all the way to the time even before we first evolved spoken language small teams of people who worked closely together for a period of time--typically in the work space or geographical locale--could always do this with just a little guidance and leadership.

But how do you do this when work and organizations keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and more and more technology dependent? In the 1970s and 1980s, the rapid expansion of computing and communications technology created a means for more and more collaboration across geographic boundaries. Unfortunately, at it turned out, much of that collaboration wound up being focused on the implementation of the very same technology.

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