Shortfall of Collaboration Tools

You should control the tools (of your trade), tools shouldn't control you. But with software, people often wrestle with inadequacies or put up with idiosyncracies to get their jobs done.

Meetings and phone calls are still the bests means to collaborate. But for many people, they are not practical in the modern work environment when getting shared time is very difficult. There are plenty of software tools to fill the gap: Email, instant messaging, file sharing, project management, (intranet) web publishing, conferencing and mobile messaging. Using these tools typically takes up most of an information worker's day. Email (most popular activity on the Internet) carries the lion's share (183 billion per day). The other tools work very well in some situations but fall short in many others. Email carries the slack. (Think of the number of times you got a document as an email attachment that could have been sent with another tool). Email has problems too. This puts a lot of burden on the employees to struggle with all these disparate tools to get their job done.