Would implementing groupware in our organization be more trouble than it would be worth - Essay Example

Topic:  "Would implementing groupware in our organization be more trouble than it would be worth? The working environment is such that it is imperative to communicate effectively among the various persons for achieving the targets for business to be profit-oriented. However, there are scores of problems with the inter-personal skills and cross-communication for effective teamwork. Also, there is increasing number of cross-cultural teams working together to bring together solutions in highly time and resource-constrained environments.

There is an increase in cutting down the costs on infrastructure, human resources and loss due to inefficient communication among the team members. Today’s work environments are nothing but groups of individuals working together to put together intelligent and complex systems and increased flexibility is one concern they all face in terms of communication of team goals, progress and even support on projects. Enterprise-wide softwares are becoming popular to enable the smooth working between the different groups within the organization, even the branches spread across the globe.

Without these intelligent softwares, the work becomes time-consuming, complex and inefficient in relatively bigger projects.Even a small enterprise usually has different groups working on various projects and need to communicate for efficient teamwork. Then there are the different departments that need to share information and monitor the processes of the organization. As Coleman (1993, pp 31) notes House’s observations, “new enterprises use information technology as a strategic advantage and further exploit faster, better, less expensive access to critical information.

And Groupware solutions based upon advanced communications and computing technologies are emerging to make this possible”. Groupware is nothing but a collaborative software used by the teams to “work on the same application or system” (Tech-FAQ, 2009). Groupware systems are “classified according to time-space matrix or the 3C model” (Borghoff, Schlichtzer, 2000, pp118). However, the use of this high-end technology depends on the comfort level of the user to efficiently utilize it to the full potential.

Given the exposure to various kinds of enterprise-wide softwares for almost every kind of work in the field of information technology, there is little doubt that the employees of a team would find communication using these groupwares difficult. On the contrary, using groupware in organization enables uniformity in process and workflow, improves access to information, speeds-up the business processes, enables uniformity in language and ensures uniform standards of working (Coleman, 1993, pp 18-31).

This further can enable the more successful technology use like telecommuting, and also increase efficient use of infrastructure and other resources of the organization. Grudin and Poltrok (n.d.) observe the five trends guiding the evolution of groupware and they are “improved communication, using multimedia, common language, structure or workflow process and standard interoperability”. With groupware for enabling these features in teams working together and highly distributed, there is advantage in terms of cost-cutting, efficiency and speed of communication, decreasing bureaucracy and increasing independent decision-making responsibility of the employee who knows better the aspects of work than the non-members, faster product roll-out times, distribute population across the globe and also increase quality of service and products (Coleman, 1993, pp 18-31).

It can be seen that email, teleconferencing, video-conferencing, etc. are the different communications enabled by groupware and the success and failure of this technology depends on how it is used within the constraints and freedom that this technology offers, as there is increased visibility and communication with these kinds of technologies (Grudin and Poltrok, n.d.). References- 1. Borghoff, M.W. and Schlichter, H. J. (2000). Computer-supported co-operative work. Published by Springer. pp 118.2. Coleman, D.D. (1993).

GroupWare ’93. Published by Morgan Kaufmann. pp 18-31.3. What is Groupware? Published by tech-FAQ. 2009. Available online at http://www.tech-faq.com/groupware.shtml.4. Grudin, J. and Poltrok, S. (n.d.). CSCW, Groupware and Workflow:Experiences, State of Art, and Future Trends.