The Necessity of Pervasive Collaboration

Technological innovation has dramatically altered the composition of companies, changing how business is conducted and how resources are deployed. The communications revolution has created an incredibly interconnected marketplace in which the geographical location of people and data has become almost irrelevant. Many successful firms have progressively moved toward flat and decentralized organization structures in which tighter collaboration between increasingly specialist resources has become paramount. New collaboration platforms are being deployed not just to harness the collective capability of employees within company boundaries, but also to tap into the collective intelligence of the public to create content, solve problems, or complete business-related tasks.