So you try to connect the departments. If you're smart about the Web, you can have documents linked in the sales Web site and the engineering Web site. A salesman who is interested in a product can find out why the engineers made a particular design decision and annotate it. That is what I would like to see in an organization that runs well. I agree with Berners-Lee and more.
Engineers are information integrators.
I see the web changing how engineering is done and how companies do business in several ways. Engineer to engineer collaboration though out the supply chain. The thing that slows engineers down the most and causes the most errors is synchronization of who is doing what, when. Engineering will go from a serial process with lots of time delays between steps to one that is nearly instantaneous. When parts are changed that affect assemblies somewhere else, the people working on the assembly will know immediately.