Paul Wilkinson wrote an article on his blog recently entitled ‘What’s the next disruptive idea for collaboration’.  Paul’s blog is normally focused around collaboration for the construction industry, but it made me think about collaboration more generally.  Below is my reply I posted on Paul’s blog.

Paul, your blog post made me think about the convergence of a number of collaboration technologies that I believe is happening – particularly in the SaaS/Cloud space.

SaaS/Cloud solutions are either established or gaining traction for many specific tasks. For example, the delivery of Document Management (there are many), maps (Google Maps)…

Collaboration in the workplace has changed tremendously and is still evolving at a rapid pace.

Thousands of years ago people communicated face-to-face and by drawing on cave-walls. Over the years there has been a progression to letters, memos, telephone calls, telex, faxes and during the last +/-20 years email and applications on mobile devices (including SMS and MSN Messenger).

A lot of business people are now also using newer technologies to collaborate.  For example, public access solutions such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype and LinkedIn allow for communication between people.  There are also similar ‘enterprise social network’ solutions for corporate…