The ecosystem of digital collaboration tools and its evolution in the coming year.
These days, it’s lightweight tools and techniques for working together that are in vogue again. The reasons are complex but can mostly be summarized partially as a push back against the perceived scale and complexity of newer and more strategic forms of collaboration and partly just because better formats and user experiences for collaboration continue to be discovered and developed.
As a result, simpler forms of communication and sharing knowledge, well demonstrated by the growth and popularity of services like Dropbox, Box, and now Slack shows that innovation in collaboration isn’t slowing down. In fact, I find that offerings are continuing to proliferate, instead of consolidating, like we’d typically expect in an otherwise mature market.
This is largely driven by two key forces: Collaboration has a) become central to the high functioning of today’s knowledge worker (the worker that usually creates most of the bottom-line value in companies today), and b) continues to evolve as the arrival of new collaborative models is found to create high levels of differentiation and leverage to business operations.
