Once upon a time, collaboration was really difficult, time consuming, and expensive. For one thing, people often had to travel great distances just to talk through the details of a project. In an optimal situation this might mean a drive across town and the loss of only a day. More typically it meant the hassle of a cross country flight, and the better part of a week or more in lost productivity, not to mention the expense of a round trip ticket and hotel stay. And that’s just the beginning.
Here’s how it would go- the project manager from the home office on the East Coast flies out to the engineering team on the West Coast. Monday is a lost day getting ready for the trip, getting meeting documents together and making whatever other arrangements needed to cover a week out of the office. Tuesday is a travel day, so if our hapless project manager is lucky, they’ll get to the West Coast office just about in time for everyone to head out. Wednesday is a meeting day, but only half of the people needed are actually in the meetings, because no one had the correct schedule. Adding to the confusion, the 50-plus pages of printed meeting documents are wrong, the numbers are all from an earlier analysis. The Thursday meetings go slightly better, but by this time things are badly off track, and anyway there’s an afternoon flight back home to worry about. By Friday our poor project manager is back in the office, exhausted and with only half of the goals for the trip accomplished, and at tremendous time and expense. Seems crazy, right?
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After years of devices that didn’t quite live up to expectations, the smartphone revolution is upon us. With the mass consumer penetration of BlackBerries, iPhones, and other next-gen handhelds, smartphones are changing the way we interact with information, and businesses who don’t adapt to this new environment will find themselves falling quickly behind their competition.
