Research and Opinion Paper4

Week 8 Research and Opinion Paper4 

Collaboration allows people to telecommute, and several studies and anecdotal reports show that telecommuters often are more productive than in-house staff.  Investigations conducted by various telephone companies found productivity gains from 30 to 65 percent.  However there are numerous disadvantages to this way of working. 

Some disadvantages include: procrastination, without “big brother” watching over their every move people are more likely to put off what they could be doing right know. Piracy or other collaborators stealing or changing work without permission, which is generally avoided because most collaboration software saves files in “versions”. Miscommunications can easily happen when body language interpretation isn’t available, but much collaboration software allows video/audio conferencing. Software error, or down time, some online collaboration will have down times for updates and improvements, this is generally done at night as to avoid this.