Video Collaboration Brings the Workplace Together
Author: David Mario Smith
Date: December 31, 2013
Topic: Collaboration
Research Note Number: 2013-53
Issue: What collaboration technologies and architectures should enterprises leverage?
Summary: Video is playing a larger role in the workplace and workers are using individual and group video to get more done internally and externally.
The world we live in is becoming richer and more interactive, and the workplace is no exception. Partly because consumer devices include video and mobile networks do a better job of transmitting video, people are using video much more than even two years ago. This research note discusses the shift that is occurring and how video collaboration can be a game changer.
In his famous piece, “The World Is Flat: A Brief History Of The Twenty-First Century,” Thomas Friedman speaks about the flattening of our world due to the level playing field created by globalization. Geographic distances are now irrelevant, with collaboration tools that enable real-time interactions between people in different cultures, geographies and time zones.
The Workplace Gets Closer
While emerging collaboration tools like video are making the world flatter, they are also making it a much smaller place than previous generations experienced. This shrinking is dramatically evident in the workplace, where enterprises find themselves in a much broader ecosystem of organizations.
Even more noticeably, people in global organizations find their teams expanding to include co-workers in many different geographies and time zones. My co-workers are no longer in the same building or department as me. The new worker has to be much more collaborative across groups, organizations and distances.