Management becomes a much different process – ensuring people understand the rational & timelines for objectives, instead of focusing on managing tasks and task completion. The advantage is more empowered workers and a much more diverse information base for problem solving (which is vital in a globally competitive economy)– but it requires management that is open to new approaches which is a natural outcome of giving people diverse information and likely means managing boundary issues because that’s where the issues will arise. In doing that is shifts the skill sets manages require and possible changes the base of their authority.

Assuming the cultural and management issues are addressed the choice of technologies arises as you point out. Toronto has some people who’ve done interesting work in areas such as work flow and RRS – pushing information and to building tacit networks which leverage expertise while not diluting responsibility. Others have done work on tagging as an adjunct to taxonomies – because it is low cost while recognizing that departments may use unique names for identical items because of the way they use the item. Further a field there is also starting to be some very interesting work using voice enabled web services to speed up information transfer within and between organizations.

The thing I wonder though is how out-sourcing and collaboration align. It would seem to me that once companies have internal experience with collaboration approaches to project delivery that the issues quickly become trust and skill – and that is going to lead to a leaner corporation which leverages a network of trusted partners to reach its objectives.

Personally, I would love to subscribe to the various projects, departents, clients, etc. that I am working on as an RSS feed. If I could do this it would probably cut my email down to roughly 20% of its current load, which would be manageable.

I also think a serious survey in a specific enterprise of the relative uses of various forms of communication would be useful. So taking a look at all the various media from the standpoint of Urgency, Collaboration, Mobility, # of stakeholders, Synchronous/Non-synchronous, time-sensitivity, confidentiality, etc. For example, the way I work:

Face to Face: High urgency, Highly collaborative, best used for head’s up, issues, high-level strategy planning, brainstorming and complicated problems.
Voicemail: Very low urgency, non-collaborative, best used for me ignoring you.
Email: Moderate Urgency, moderate collaboration, best used for assigning specific tasks, document review and where a record must be kept.

I am sure there is a better way to frame this, but my suspicion is that most corporate cultures use various forms of communications, particularly email and meetings, for uses that can be better handled in other ways.

I would love to facilitate a meeting of the minds on this conversation with a group of senior exec’s. I would offer my service ‘gratis’. Perhaps an Executive Breakfast? Let me know what you think. Cheers, Brenda

The idea of a more proactive communication culture is an important direction that social media can probably help with a lot. Of course, to be able to go out and find information, the information has to exist. Currently only the most proactive create a significant amount of information. I wonder if we can significantly lower these barriers to entry with better designed and communal collaboration platforms. I’m hopeful that we’re already starting to see this.

On another topic, talk of holistic taxonomies always worries me a little bit. I’d hate for this to be a designed taxonomy. Hopefully it is organic, like del.icio.us tags, which are pretty reliable for search simply because of the massive use. With less highly used environments the taxonomy system might have to help searchers by clustering like taxonomic terms. I think it’s pretty important for participation that we find a way for users to build and use their own taxonomies.