We live in a virtual world. It doesn't matter who you are, a new employee, a customer or the CEO, everyone expects to be able to do their job from anywhere at anytime. Technology enables a virtual workspace that encourages communication and collaboration. It helps us get things done. Without the communication, networking, and management technologies that we have available, we could not do virtual knowledge work.
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Definition: Technology is a process, tool, or way of doing things.
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This definition of technology moves beyond communication electronics, hardware, and software. Group process technologies, performance improvement technologies, even leadership technologies come into play. Here are the types of technology important to enable meaningful work:
Virtual Technologies
Teams need reliable and efficient communication and collaboration technology. Here are some things that are usually essential:
- Common, reliable technology is a must. Everyone on the team must have access to the same technology, and it must work reliably for each team member.
- Email, telephone, and voicemail are bare minimums. The team must also have technology to share documents and coordinate schedules.
- Real-time collaboration technology is very, very useful. Ideally, this software would be able to carry voice, text chat, whiteboard, and application sharing data. People need to be able to share and discuss complex issues in real time to solve problems.
- Task and project management technology is also essential. Accountability breeds results and automating as many tasks as possible allows the development of metrics to help insure success. This is even more critical in a distributed model. Team leaders need to be able to track all of the different tasks and work going on automatically, and this distributed technology is just about the only way to do it.
- Establishing norms and protocols is critical. The "process technology" of setting communication and productivity norms and expectations is possibly more important than the electronic communication technology itself. When everybody knows what to use, when, how, for what purpose, and agrees to the standards, communication works much better.