Wikis, Blogs and Collaboration
There's been a fair bit said about the potential of Web 2.0 based collaboration, on this blog and on a whole range of other forums. Now we are beginning to see some real data showing the business impact that successful adopters of these technologies have experienced, and the results are impressive.
The most recent McKinsey Quarterly article on: "..Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch" contains not only the views of some heavy hitters in industry and academia, but also some quantitative data from US and Global companies and even public sector agencies. Trend No 3, for example, which is called "Collaboration at Scale" describes initiatives that are especially interesting in the context of some of the earlier articles on this blog.
As "knowledge work" outpaces the growth of production or transaction oriented growth, many organisations are experimenting with video and web conferencing, which, the article states, is expected to grow by 20% annually over the next few years. One company that actually deployed video-conferencing and shared electronic work spaces in efforts to reduce travel for its sales staff, recorded a saving in travel budget equal to four times its investment in technology and 45% more customer contacts per staff.
Most organisations strive to develop and maintain a culture that leads to a focus on continuous improvement. Link Asea's experience in working with clients is that a key determinate of whether an organisation can continuously improve its work quality and outputs is the extent to which it values learning. 