"The nature of work is changing.

You work from home. You work from the office. You work on the road. You work weekends wherever you are."

Who is talking is Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove, one of the most interesting collaboration technologies available today in the marketplace.

He is answering questions from Tom Austin of Gartner who has come to find out in greater detail how Ray sees the impact of new collaboration technologies on the business world.

Here is my short excerpt from it, as Ray touched briefly, but effectively, on the core issues of online collaboration and its difficult adoption.

"It matches the way that people are feeling about the nature of how they need to get things done. There's an increasing number of people who are feeling that way, as opposed to, "I come to the office. I sit down in front of my terminal. I work tethered to my enterprise applications, and then I leave my work at work." Fewer and fewer people are exclusively desk-bound.

The way many corporations have deployed the web today, there's an internal Web portal. Yet in most corporations, employees don't have easy access to such portals and the information they contain when they're outside the organization, or when disconnected altogether. And the people with whom they work may be from a small outside consultancy. They can't get access to the portal at all. They can't get access to the team workspaces. That can't access to the things they need."

Here my short excerpted selection of Ray's key points about online collaboration:

Tom Austin: What collaborative tools, either here or in the future, are going to become natural appendages to how people work?

Ray Ozzie: "I built Groove because I believe a lot of the concepts in it are where things are headed. I built Groove because I think it has a chance to shape the future. And, to us here, it has already become such an appendage.

The core concept is to simply provide a way to quickly create a virtual workspace — a place for us to do work together. As simply as you'd say "create a message" in email. If my marketing director and I are talking and there's an action item we and several others need to follow up on, he'll just create a workspace, and with a few clicks will invite the right people. We'll interact in it for some period of time, and when we don't need it anymore it'll simply disappear. Groove is certainly not yet ubiquitous, but we very much believe in its potential, and we're working hard to make that happen."

Austin: How can collaboration related technology help organizations strike an appropriate balance between centralized control and decentralized authority?

Ozzie: "The devil's in the details. You have to really look at the type of organization and how it's structured and what its goals are to understand how to best inject collaboration into it. Certainly if you're trying to address issues related to core business processes, it starts with the CEO. People at the very top must first send out the message that it's a "good thing" to explore cross-organizational collaborative projects and similar things. Once they know that it's "safe" to do so, people at the edge of the organization will certainly take more risks in the process of accomplishing their objectives. They'll introduce collaborative technologies in a trial manner, in a way that's relevant to local goals and business goals. They'll figure out what works and what doesn't. ..."

Tom Austin spent part of the afternoon of 7 October in Groove's headquarters in Beverly, MA talking with the Ray Ozzie, the visionary who launched an industry and a new way of thinking about how technology can help people work better together - or apart.

Here the full story.