There are new opportunities that don't exactly match existing departmental units for interdepartmental collaboration. Outsourcing means many projects cross even boundaries between companies. But a new class of intranet-based applications, called teamware, does fit this new need. With teamware, you can use Web access to build a team, share ideas and documents, brainstorm, keep schedules on target by prompting and fine-tuning, and archive the results so you can keep institutional memory alive long after everyone on the project is gone. And when the process is all over, you can break down all the information.
Dispersal brings together a host of special problems, especially for teams.
For one thing, general U.S. business culture rewards competitive behavior more than teamwork. But this is exacerbated in the dispersed model. In the old forms, team members worked for the same employer and worked together on a number of projects. The glue that binds project teams is weakened or missing entirely. No product can ever erase the challenges of this highly dispersed model.