Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Wednesday, May 05, 2004Can Absence Make A Team Grow Stronger?.
The May issue of Harvard Business Review magazine has a fascinating article on virtual teams that's authored by Ann Majchrzak, a professor of information systems at the University of Southern California Business School, and others. The authors did a benchmarking study that reveals the following: it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually.
The article concludes:
"In this decade, the forgotten step, the small group, is suddenly the focus of advances in collaboration technology -- shared online work spaces, on-demand teleconferencing, real-time application sharing, and instant messaging -- which the massive investment in infrastructure of the late 1990s is now available to support. When small groups adopt the kinds of practices our teams have demonstrated, they can work faster, smarter, more creatively, and more flexibly than dispersed individuals or the enterprise as a whole."
[Groove.net Weblog]
Last week, my colleague Don Greer pointed out to me our tendency to associate familiar tools with the underlying task. Consider the following definition of collaboration:
Collaboration occurs when two or more people interact and exchange knowledge in pursuit of a shared, collective, bounded goal.
Face-to-face meetings, telephone calls, and email exchanges are means to an end, as are newer tools such as Groove and wikis. Each has strengths, weaknesses, benefits and costs. When we get in discussions regarding whether or not face-to-face meetings are superior to other forms of interaction, we're missing the point. What is the task at hand? Who are the required team members? Where are they? What is their relative expertise? What is the time and financial budget? These kinds of questions should drive the selection of the right combination of tools for the job at hand. New technologies give us a broader range of options to consider when designing the support mechanisms for collaborations. Competition and the increased pace of business demand that we become more adept at using them effectively. While a blind infatuation with technology is unlikely to yield the desired results, neither is blindness to the opportunities that new technologies yield.
