Group items tagged

At least from my experiences, I believe that most businesses don’t understand collaboration. How many of your colleagues or customers are still emailing Word and Excel documents as attachments? If you are over 30 years old, chances are your business processes are still heavily influenced from the Microsoft dominated days of installed software more than two decades ago. The world is a different place now. There are plenty of examples of dynamic, young companies are prospering even when the partners are global dispersed, but they are still the exception.

Collaboration. It’s a $1 billion industry, according to an ABI Research study on worker mobility and enterprise social collaboration. And it's projected to grow to $3.5 billion by 2016. No wonder lots of ink has been spilled on this business buzzword on everything from how to start (hint: build trust) to doing it better with social platforms, to using it as a way to achieve that holy grail of business: innovation.

there’s a big difference between working alongside other staff members and actually collaborating.

n his book, Practically Radical, William C. Taylor (cofounder of Fast Company magazine) writes about collaborative leadership. Taylor believes that collaborative leadership is about ”collective capability,” not just collective intelligence.  That is, leaders create the conditions in which diverse people work together to solve a tough challenge.

The Palo Alto, Calif.–based nonprofit research center focuses on long-term forecasting and recently released a report titled “Future Work Skills 2020″ (available for free download here) that analyzes some of the key drivers reshaping work — including WebWorkerDaily’s greatest hits like connectivity, smart machines and new media — coming up not with specific, recommended professional paths but instead with broad skills that will help workers adapt to the changing career landscape. What are they?

A new study found that an overwhelming number of employees blame poor collaboration for failures in the workplace. Here’s an infographic that explores where these collaboration breakdowns happen — and how to prevent them in the future.

Technology Forecast: Transforming collaboration with social tools explores how to confront communications overload and boost collaboration potential by making best use of the new powerful social tools. Business is inherently social, which is why collaboration and communications that scale are so fundamental.

Description: Avatars at Work and Play brings together contributions from leading social scientists and computer scientists who have conducted research on virtual environments used for collaboration and online gaming. They present a well-rounded and state-of-the-art overview of current applications of multi-user virtual environments, ranging from highly immersive virtual reality systems to internet-based virtual environments on personal computers. The volume is a follow-up to a previous essay collection, The Social Life of Avatars, which explored general issues in this field. This collection goes further, examining uses of shared virtual environments in practical settings such as scientific collaboration, distributed meetings, building models together, and others.

The modern workplace isn’t a workplace at all. It’s a way of connecting - a way of collaborating with people you may never actually meet.

eadership is about how you “show up.”  In other words, it’s how we act and behave in everyday situations that define our leadership persona.

how do we “show up” as leaders in a world where work is increasingly done on a mobile phone or tablet, or using a video chat, web conference or Telepresence?

This Wiki outlines the criteria that must be considered when selecting a collaboration tool for a virtual team, various collaboration tool categories, types of tools and lastly, how to select from a set of candidate tools.

A chief collaboration officer would be charged with integrating the enterprise as companies scramble to innovate from within.

successful collaborations don't have to happen only on a movie set; they can occur in virtual environments too. But the trick is to pro-actively remove the barriers to collaboration.

collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood — in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task.

The Collaborative Organization which is the first comprehensive strategy guide to emergent collaboration in the workplace.

we can isolate the three main ingredients: information (CMS), communication (portal) and collaboration (web app). From my experience of helping large organizations rethink their intranet, I would had two more ingredients to form the five pillars of social intranets

The most effective consultant/client relationships tend to morph into partnerships, in which the consultant is truly an extension of the internal team. However, elevating a relationship from “vendor” status to a meaningful collaboration isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Thankfully, there are some handy tools available that can help you establish an effective team.