The solution lies in effective collaboration.

Give a careful thought to what we were actually do when we exchange mails, chat or exchange docs or presentations. We are working on a activity. Simple as it may sound, its quite difficult to conceptualize in organizations day to day work. The activity may range from a simple task of deciding the layout of a web page to devolopment of a project module. The problem lies in how we conceptualize the activity.

Instead of making the technology work in manner we want, we work in a manner that is suitable to a particular technology. We get a word file, off we go create a folder for it thinking its logical, comprehendable and can be easily relocated, untill ofcourse we end up with a huge number of folders, one may be having all the FRD's, one with all the PPTs but how are we supposed to chat transcripts and emails and then correlate everything with each other. I am not suggesting its impossible to work that way, but its certainly not the most effective way.

Welcome to the realm of activities. Where you are the one who decides how the technology works for you. More than a technology its a approach, approach towards effective collaboration within and outside an organisation. Lemme get a bit more specific, we go back to our web page designing example.

Well you and me have a chat, they all go in one place and the place is certainly not yours archive niether mine. You ring me up and tell me about a URL that was particularly useful in yours analysis, the URL is stored in same central space, we exchange mails and yeah you guessed that right they go in the same central space. No more we store all the word, ppts etc in ours respective hard disks they all lie in the space. Now how to arrange all that material in a logical manner. We arrange that in a hierarichal manner, your views, my responses to your views, my views your responses, stage wise devolopment. A new devoloper comes in, what we share with him, the URL. Yeah only the URL and he can trace back to the step one of ours devolopment cycle. We save on, obviously on the dollors but also increases mine, yours and the new devolopers efficiency and overall the comapnies efficiency. Now comapny wants to know why the web page is white, simple go back to the URL find the activity designing web page and thats it. Every bit of information that the employees were able to lay hands on, lies captured there. Nothing and nothing of companies business logic is ever lost. Now you are in command how you wanna structure the tree of information, how the tree grows and what the tree captures. The technolgy allows you to bring all the storage techniques under one umbrella namely, emails,chat scripts, urls, pictures, word documeents, presentations, customer feedback etc etc. Now the most impressive thing of all, you never leave the url, yeah you never leave the url to open a word doc, not to play a video file, not to open presentaions etc.

Lets discuss the advantages of such a system in place.

Reviews : Reviewer asks you about the mehodology you followed, show him the URL.
Easy no more messy searches through mails, harddrives, networks etc.

Templates : How about getting all the templates being followed unknowingly within the organisation recoginsed and put down at one place. Can include almost
everything, Procedure to make claims, procedure to work towards a bug
fixation problem etc.

Time Effectiveness : Effective collaboration obviously brings in effective time usage in the
comapany. No longer employees search for the information at
different places. Also it saves on time to search for softwares to render
that information.

Cost Effectiveness : Time is Money as they say. The scenarios have changed a bit today.
Money to time proportion has grown rapidly, so the more time you save
you save much, much and much more money.

Unending support for kind of Information : Imagine a new kind of format rolls in. Simple
provide the application server the new plugins, thats it, Activities
supports the new format.