May 20169 The company that puts together a project team made up of members from the far flung reaches of the globe is no longer on the horizon of the future; it is very much here and now. People work from home; people work in co-working spaces; people pop into offices and work from the road; people work how they want, often when it best suits them. The tools are now in place to enable people this freedom and to give companies the capacity to monitor and maintain this regime.This liberated workforce brings with it some challenges for organisations, especially in terms of security and project management, because people like to use their own devices and preferred platforms. Fluid, ad hoc arrangements can be struck on how workflows are managed because we now have flexible tools that allow us to be device and platform agnostic: file types and formats can be easily managed on any device, on any platform.CollaborationSilo thinking has been busted in the past few years as more and more businesses wake up to the benefits of collaborative models of innovation.Collaboration can be a matter as informal and low-key as colleagues from different teams or departments getting together to share cross-enterprise insights; or it can involve mass-scale initiatives bringing together multiple stakeholder organizations with thousands of people working on a billion-dollar project. The important thing is that people are given the space and tools to work together, share data and exchange ideas.There is a strong tradition of open working models in the IT industry and this mode of working has started to find its way into other industries. One of the underlying requirements of open and collaborative models is the need for commonalities that enable people to work together without worrying about technical barriers or security issues. As more companies seek to utilize collaboration as a driver of innovation, the need for connector technologies will also grow.To paraphrase Bill Gates, the future of work is already here, we're living it and already using the technology that has made it possible. We now have the tools to take advantage of it. The number of platforms and devices generating data is set to grow dramatically with the advent of the Internet of Things
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