Collaboration alone is not enough
Summary
But when I first started work, I also remember (showing my age now) paper-based case files in which one side held all the documents, external correspondence and forms (recording the process). Instead there often seems to have been a slavish transference of existing ways of working from one technology to another – desktop to mobile, email to chat, etc – under the banner of transformation, but in reality missing opportunities for more fundamental change. With IoT and AI, by persisting with an artificial disassociation between unstructured and structured activities, and between collaboration and process, this misses yet more opportunities for improving the workings of business. With the right collaboration framework, sensors and monitors, working with AI agents, can initiate discussion with and among human participants, experts and managers when exceptional circumstances or data combinations arise. To fully maximise the transformational opportunities afforded by new technologies requires whole systems thinking, ensuring all the elements of communication, process and knowledge are harmonised.