Gartner predicts: Productivity will increase from Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is a collective (rather than hierarchical) approach to making decisions. Knowledge workers choose to allocate their time and resources to tasks where their skills can best be used, based on corporate needs. It is believed that this more-efficient use of resources can increase the quantity and quality of work output. Gartner research predicts that by 2015, collective intelligence breakthroughs supported by technology and new management practices will drive a 10% productivity increase.

Prerequisites include:
The use of Wikis — simple text-based collaborative systems for managing hyperlinked collections of Web pages that enable users to change pages or comments created by other users.
The open-source movement — a cooperative group of contributors with no single central authority.
Prediction markets work on the principle that the aggregation of information from members of a broad network enables better decision making for less money and in less time as the market pulls together strands of information on an issue.

Collective approaches will dramatically improve many group document-creation and decision-making activities.

To exploit the trend, work out which applications and business operations can benefit from it, identify how to integrate collective responsibility into traditional procedural workflows and establish new types of reward systems for the corporate environment.

Early indications are that individuals working in a collective environment can allocate their time based on skill and availability better than can be done via a central management approach. With communication, decision making, resource allocation and accountability operating in a peer-to-peer fashion, the need for management roles will be significantly reduced.

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