Friday, March 19, 2010

Culture, Technology and Collaboration


Many people concede that the technology drives collaboration, but Will Kelly disagrees with them, he says corporate culture drives collaboration instead. Thinking about it makes sense. Technology enables tools to further processes used by people for the betterment of society. Although, using those tools within a corporation would require a certain culture set by the company that makes it conducive for employees to use the technology. The company culture will dictate to an employee whether it is alright to connect with clients with an instant messenger service after work hours or that may be too unprofessional in some companies. Although the prior choice gives the company an advantage in terms of getting things done much more quickly and efficiently while saving client a lot more money because they will be able to make a decision faster.

One form of online collaboration are wikis. Wikis are basically programs that allow people to create and maintain collaborative websites. Users can create and edit content to their specifications whenever they choose to do so. The main positive attribute of such a collaboration is that people have access to one repository of information at a single place without the time consuming searches needed to hunt for data from other sources. Such a program also has some negative points about it, some of which are the bias of the editors and the tendency of some people to deliberately or unknowingly put up wrong information on the site. Till these two attributes of wikis cannot be fully addressed, the verification of all information taken from these sites still needs to be a priority.

"Corporate Culture, Not Technology, Drives Online Collaboration – WebWorkerDaily"

"Column from PC Magazine: The Wikification of Knowledge - Columns by PC Magazine"

3 comments:

  1. First of all. i love the picture used in this blog.....i never knew what wikis were, i though they were wikipedia spots or something, i guess is another great online tool that enhances collaboration.

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  2. Corporate culture is definitely the key to successful online collaboration. There are dozens of technologies but employees need to know how to use them efficiently and effectively.

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  3. I would have to disagree because regardless of culture or not without the technology their be would be no means to communicate and interact with people. Its the employees that make the culture of the company not the company themselves and if they have the foresight to ahead and collaborate with their clients then they are the cultured and smart ones.

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