Before long, companies will no longer have to choose between the personal and intimate interactions found within a single building and the efficient though impersonal communications used to link outlying sites today. As the network has become a lifeline connecting corporate campuses with offices and individuals around the world, the promise of a truly connected, synchronized enterprise is now within reach.

The growing ecosystem of mobile devices, collaboration technologies, and nearly limitless bandwidth is on a trajectory to provide such a strong and seamless web of connectivity that geographically dispersed offices and people will soon feel and behave like one cohesive entity.

Envision lifelike, high-definition video conferencing becoming as ubiquitous as instant messaging. Scheduling a quick meeting will be as effortless as clicking a link that instantly connects geographically dispersed individuals no matter where they are. The visual cues and personal interactions present in face-to-face meetings will eradicate the geographical barriers that hinder effective collaboration. Regardless of location, employees will all have immediate access to the same applications, phone systems, and other corporate resources without compromising performance or security.

This vision holds the promise of dissolving the tension between a centralized and efficient organization and one that is innovative and decentralized. While technology is quickly evolving to make this vision a reality, corporate managers will need to take a fresh look at their organization, standards, and culture to create a truly close-knit, yet global, organization.

Harnessing Collective Innovation
Transitioning the enterprise to one that is close yet dispersed is analogous to moving from a client/server model to a peer-to-peer network, or from transitioning IT functions from silos to a virtualized infrastructure. Instead of imposing a traditional command-and-control structure, companies will harness the strength of all of their locations. Each endpoint will operate independently, while senior managers will work where it makes the most sense rather than be physically tied to the CEO's office. Companies can attract the best talent worldwide while responding more effectively to customers and shifting business needs. As each team is empowered to do what it does best and becomes more closely aligned with its customers, it will deliver more relevant, innovative, and competitive offerings to its customers.

In parallel, each location will form a seamless, borderless organization, with all stakeholders, including customers, employees, and the company, benefiting from continuous collaboration. This structure differs greatly from today's supply chain and instead becomes a "supply-enterprise" formation. Multiple teams and offices, and even partners and customers where practical, can operate as a single entity, combining resources from around the world to deliver the best, most competitive solutions.

A Global Collaboration Platform
As the peer-to-peer structure expands and gathers momentum, information will not be tied to a particular physical entity or location; in essence, the enterprise will be virtualized. Just like virtualized IT resources, the virtualized enterprise can quickly adjust to the effects of any one person or location leaving the network and avoid communication disruptions. The remaining offices simply find another path to communicate with the network.

To achieve this vision, however, there must be reliable, seamless, real-time communication. Just over the horizon exists limitless bandwidth, plentiful collaboration options, powerful search capabilities, intuitive enterprise software, and converged voice, video, and data on every device. Companies that embrace these technological advances and combine them with a reassessment of organizational principles and culture will reap the rewards of virtual in-person collaboration between far-flung people and locations.

The virtualized organization enables a wave of innovation that can have a positive impact on multinational corporations. Seamlessly pulling together highly specialized and empowered operations from around the world can result in significant beneficial change.

To remain competitive, companies must expend serious effort to create this platform of seamless open source creativity. Take the recent example of the social networking site Facebook. Unlike the more popular MySpace, Facebook deliberately opened up its code to developers. In little more than a year, some 400,000 globally dispersed developers created an estimated 24,000 applications that can be used by members, helping Facebook achieve significant gains in visitor traffic. It's clear that Facebook's strategy of harnessing the collective innovation of the global development community has precipitated healthy growth.

Getting From Here to There
To realize the vision of an enterprise that is both centralized and decentralized, local and global, companies must surely embrace new technologies and networks. However, the change in mindset, organizational structures, and company cultures may prove to be the biggest challenge. Many companies have discovered similar difficulties as they consolidate their functionally disparate IT functions into a common virtualized infrastructure. Technology is often less challenging than the required organizational changes.

First, transforming from a client/server to peer-to-peer model requires an entirely new way of thinking and doing business. Today, development teams reside largely near the CEO in the belief that physical proximity is required for true collaboration and teamwork. Although advanced video conferencing technologies and virtualized corporate resources will provide the personal interaction and responsiveness that naturally occurs in a single building, the concurrent change in mindset presents a bigger hurdle. R&D executives must believe that their teams can and should be spread around the world.

Inherent in the success of this evolution is trust. Innovation relies on sharing, not hoarding, ideas. For individual contributors to be effective in this new paradigm, they must trust each other and the system. A similar parallel is found as IT organizations consolidate the infrastructure and roll out virtualization on a large scale. No longer can technologists focus narrowly on their particular area of expertise. Rather, individual IT experts must learn new ways to work together to share their knowledge and experience, eventually creating a stronger, more flexible, and more resilient organization that can respond quickly to changing business requirements.

Next, companies will need to address the issues raised by a distributed collaborative model, such as global intellectual property protection. As workers find it easier to change jobs without moving, enterprises and regulators will have to establish new methods and governance standards for safeguarding intellectual property.

Finally, even as the peer-to-peer organization enables the intimacy and responsiveness of a single location, employees will still need to accommodate time zones and respect cultural differences. Along with advances in work-related personal interaction, there must be improvements in management's ability to guide individuals toward accepting differences in personalities, work environments, and cultures.

As more enterprises explore the many ways they can benefit from globalization, there will be those who quickly embrace network and technology advances while adopting new ways of working. Companies that fully utilize collaborative technologies and overcome the organizational and cultural evolution required will execute with the speed and scale required by the leaders of tomorrow.