Who is on the Driver Seat? The Evolution of Collaboration Organizations

Abstract

This paper presents a historical review of the evolution of management thinking and collaboration technologies. This review shows that the gap between management ideas and the functionality available in collaboration technologies has been steadily narrowing since the late 1960s, opening up new opportunities for developers and integrators of these technologies as well as companies that use them. Management ideas have preceded and likely driven the development and use of collaboration technologies up until the early 1990s. This situation has been reversed since the mid-1990s due to circumstances related to the advent of the World Wide Web. One caveat associated with this new state of affairs is that it makes it difficult for companies to achieve or sustain a competitive advantage in their industries, particularly if they use standard technologies that are also available to their competitors. From a traditional management perspective, this is the equivalent to placing the "cart in front of the horses", so to speak. We argue that, to overcome difficulties associated with this situation companies need to instill a new management model into their management ranks. Based on the results of business process redesign projects involving over 10 companies in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Region, we provide a first step toward the development of a generic management model that takes advantage of features of modern collaboration technologies.