**2. Collaborative environments**

To collaborate effectively, people work in various virtual teams, created quickly, spread around the world, and comprising colleagues, customers and partners. Working in these global team-based environments, people establish relationships that may be short-term project-focused or long-term and are evolving over time. With each new relationship, companies invest in selecting the right people, learning how to work together, and determining how to extract the most value in terms of revenues and profits (Pflaging, 2001). Integrating collaborative services with business functions allows companies to gain a significant competitive advantage. Information is shared more effectively, communication is more efficient, and companies can make quicker, more informed decisions. More specifically, companies can shorten sales cycles, accelerate product development, generate more transactions, increase partner/customer retention, and expedite problem resolution.

Effective collaboration requires actions on multiple fronts: early involvement and the availability of resources to effectively collaborate; a culture that encourages teamwork, cooperation and collaboration; effective teamwork and team member cooperation; defined team member responsibilities based on collaboration; a defined product development process based on early sharing of information and knowledge; collocation or virtual collocation; collaboration technology.

Collaborative enterprises differ from other businesses in a number of ways and collaborative working needs to be simultaneously a business philosophy, strategy and operational working. Resuming, collaborative enterprises are (Pflaging, 2001): (1) networked and collaborative; (2) - core-competence focused and virtual; (3) - transparent to customer and partners; (4) -customer and partners centric; (5) - multi-disciplinary, (6) community and team-based; (7) - strategically agile; (8) - change resilient and risk taking; (9) - knowledge creating and sharing; (10) - web-enabled; (11) - empowered and responsive.

The more collaborative the environment is, the more knowledge will be available to make right decisions the first time (Collins, 2004). In non-collaborative environment, a large knowledge/decision gap exists early on. Using enterprise collaborative techniques, it is possible to make better use of a group's core understanding, thereby raising the starting level of knowledge available on an initiative and closing the gap.

Establishing business processes and strategies for collaborative environments supposes : (1) - defining virtual collaboration and what it means for an organization; (2) - assessing the activities, tasks and initiatives that would benefit from virtual collaboration or virtual team work; (3) - examining work practices and the cultural implications of working within collaborative environments; understanding the role of trust among virtual team members for better awareness of group dynamics and social interactions; (4) - exploring with senior management the benefits of collaborative environments and teamwork, and their impacts on business models; (5) - developing a set of guidelines and a framework for a clearer definition of the changing nature of current work practices; and (6) - incorporating the performance metrics and the success of virtual collaborative environments.
