Virtual Collaboration - Applications

Applications

Business: Virtual collaboration is widely used in corporate businesses for its efficiency, innovation, and ability to gain or keep competitive advantages in the market. Businesses commonly use virtual collaboration technology to facilitate problem solving between teams within the company, and also to collaborate with other companies. Virtual collaboration improves profit margins by increasing operational efficiency and productivity within the company, either by means of innovating solutions or through the increased sharing of knowledge through virtual means. For example, IBM, one of the leaders in using virtual collaboration to promote business processes, has developed many systems to help employees collaborate more easily across boundaries. IBM’s use of virtual collaborative spaces, such as 3-D meeting rooms and use of avatars, in their Virtual Universe Community provides employees with a way to collaborate which has resulted in more production.

Education: Virtual collaboration is often used to connect experts in a scientific field to others that wish collaborate for researching or educating purposes. Many colleges and learning institutions use virtual systems to host information where both students and experts can share information on a certain subject. Both wikis and virtual conferencing have shown to be effective in sharing expert information to educate students or other individuals interested in the subject. Experts can also virtually collaborate with other experts, across subjects, to discover new things that were not apparent when the collaborators were isolated. Virtual worlds are also now providing platforms for people to collaborate using easily accessible visual analytics. Virtual worlds also provide an arena to observe social science as it pertains to the collaborative efforts of a community.

Wikis: Wikis are a form of virtual collaboration because they enable people to contribute to an online document that can be seen and edited by other users via the internet. Wikis are considered a Web 2.0 technology, and fall into virtual collaboration due to the collaborative process that documents go through when put into a wiki. Wikis may be described as “open virtual collaboration,” which is based on the theories of living systems and includes concepts such as self-organization, chaos theory and emergence. Open virtual collaboration allows persons with a connection to the internet to seek out participation from others in the design and development of new ideas, processes, products, and services for personal and commercial purposes. Information technologies such as tagging and filtering ease the process of finding collaborators online. International Business Machines (IBM) and Procter & Gamble were early commercial beneficiaries of the practice of open virtual collaboration. By accessing the collective intelligence and wisdom of non-affiliated humans connected via the internet companies are able to access knowledge and expertise that might otherwise require significant cost and effort.