The Dark Side of the Distributed Workforce: Overcoming Employee Alienation in the Enterprise

The firmly bounded and easily understood organizational chart that exists at every major organization is an operational mirage. In the quest for better talent, greater innovation and organizational flexibility enterprises have remade themselves into amorphous, distributed, project-oriented entities. But tools for communication and collaboration have not kept pace. The emergence of mobile workers and the distributed workforce is a global phenomenon, but how many applications have evolved along with employee working habits? Mobile email is the only mobile application that has achieved anything approaching mass-market adoption despite the fact that 50% of workers spend at least 20% of their time away from their primary workspace.

I. The Evolution and De-Evolution of E-Mail

Personalizing Collaboration Through Social Networking

II. The Innovation Conundrum: Your Peers Are Redundant; Strangers Are Priceless

Expert Location: The Needle in a Haystack

Where Does a Fortune 50 Company Sleep? Anywhere it Wants

Top Down or Bottom Up? It Depends on Who You Ask

III. Conclusions and Recommendations

Recommendations for Enterprises

IV. Further Reading