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Q9 2025? 67

appropriately? Do you want someone identified to store minutes of meetings? Or to remove com-
pleted tasks from a task list? Or to keep the task list in agreement with current planning? Consider
these and similar needs and, if needed, appoint such a person before problems develop.
Remember this example as a future business professional: In commerce, we are never selecting
just software; to put that software to use as a system, we need to create all five of the IS components!

Q9 2025?

So, how will we collaborate in 2025? Where will the current trends take us? Clearly, free data
communications and data storage will make collaboration systems cheaper and easier to use.
One consequence is that by 2025 face-to-face (F2F) meetings will be rare.
F2F meetings require everyone to be in the same place at the same time, and both of those sames
can be problematic. When employees work in different locations, bringing them together is expen-
sive in travel cost and time. Employees standing in line in airport security or waiting in their cars in
traffic are hardly productive. And bringing everyone together is unfriendly to the environment.
Even when employees work at the same location, they may have schedule conflicts or they may
not work at that location at the same time. And, unless employees are providing an in-person service,
such as physical training, or surgery, or construction, why do they need to work in the same location?
Furthermore, what happens when you finally do get employees together? Say you bring the
top managers into the home office for training. They no sooner sit down than their cell phones
ring, and off they go to the lobby to handle some raging problem back home. Twenty minutes
later, they’re back for another 5 minutes before their phones ring again. Meanwhile, a good por-
tion of the managers who stayed in the meeting are texting their offices throughout the training.
In 2025, employees whose services need not be provided in person will work at home, if not
full time, then at least several days a week. Nearly all corporate training will be online. Most will
be asynchronous.
A mining company (that chooses to remain anonymous) in Washington State provided an
international example back in 2011. The company is located in the United States, close to the
Canadian border, but owns several mines in Canada. For its annual audit, the company needed
the services of a Canadian-chartered accounting firm from Vancouver, British Columbia. During
the audit period, the border crossing was crowded, and the auditors were billing dozens of hours
of expensive time while sitting unproductively in their cars at the crossing. To reduce the audit
expense, the company eliminated most of this travel by storing audit data in SharePoint libraries.
But, by 2025, why be unproductive in your car? By then you should be able to use the full ca-
pabilities of whatever collaboration tools you choose on any mobile device. So, as long as you’re
not driving, you’ll use your device in your car, or your golf cart, or your boat to get work done.
Further, as the example provided shows, by 2025 collaboration systems will greatly ease interna-
tional business. If teams meet virtually most of the time and if it doesn’t matter where team members
are located, then projects can involve the best, or perhaps the most affordable, workers worldwide.
Further, work can follow the sun. Workers in the United States can submit documents for feedback
from team members in Asia. The Asian workers can contribute their feedback during their normal
workday and pass the documents along to European team members for review during their normal
workday. All the reviewed work will be available to the U.S. workers when their next day begins.
Business travel will be a shadow of its former self. The travel industry will reorganize for
mostly recreational travel. Even conventions will become, well, virtual.
Because of these trends, now is a great time for you to learn online, asynchronous collabo-
ration skills. It’s also a good time for you, as a future knowledge worker, to prepare yourself for
global opportunities . . . and global competition. And, finally, when you’re buying commercial
real estate, buy that hotel in Hawaii, not the one in Paramus, New Jersey (unless, of course, it has
a water slide for kids, a spa, a nearby golf course, and a casino)!