Collaboration Software Market Analysis

The concept of the knowledge worker has been used to describe many of the changes to working practices and organisational goals over the last decade. Organisations at the leading edge of knowledge management now recognise that most employees flourish - and benefit their organisation - as part of a knowledge-sharing community. Such communities of interest or communities of practice are providing the context for new organisational structures and innovative technologies that support knowledge sharing and creation.

Even organisations that have less interest in formal knowledge management programs are increasingly interested in collaboration tools, simply as a mechanism to support project teams. This becomes particularly important where teams are spread across multiple locations, different time zones, and sometimes distributed worldwide.

There is a significant opportunity for vendors to use the Internet and intranets to provide a consistent and well-managed environment for the effective exchange of information and for team-working. This means that they must improve the ability of users to connect to knowledge resources (information or human experts) as they need them. They must then be able to work with those resources in a collaborative environment, with the same level of intuitiveness that they have come to expect from their personal productivity tools. Over the next few years these collaboration tools will achieve the popularity that personal productivity tools and email currently enjoy.