I'm the staff artist/analyst for one of my companies major programs and
being that the company is large and spread out geographically, we use a
lot of technology to communicate. While the concept of a fully attributed
"intranet" may not fit what we have, I personally am able to provide my
services to remote individuals using a combination of E-mail, telephone
and fax machines.
The key to working in teams seems to be the acceptance of the iterative
nature of the work. Being an artist, I expect and even promote the idea
that any given idea, picture or set of ideas will have to go around and
around a few times before it matures and if anyone expects to get it right
the first time (or even the first few times) they are expecting nothing
less than magic, which is terribly expensive these days and in very short
supply. So changing a picture-usually abhorent to the creative and
artistic sort is something I demand if the team is to get it's message
(rather than the artist's message) across.
Staying in tune with every person involved is the other point. The idea
of teaming is that you arrive at consensus-which means everyones ideas are
important and no one can be left out or under-valued. I suppose one
concern that might crop up is-how can you tell if the electronic
facilitation of this work on the corporate intranet is being done
properly? With everyone in the same room it's easy to tell if someone
isn't really participating or if the facilitator is biased.
As for training... Most of ours is in the form of text tutorials and more
recently files that can be read by adobe acrobat which permit cross
platform access and include text and graphics. Again, the quality of the
design, the search logic built into the document (so you can find what is
important to the user) is the kicker. I'm always glad when there is a
phone number of a live person somewhere in the document so I can call to
fill in the missing peices (because there are always missing peices). I
have participated in a number of video conferences where all way
communication with words/sound and one way communication with pictures is
the norm. It works pretty well for training, although remote users tend
to be a little hesitent to ask questions fearing that their ignorance will
be broadcast over the entire world.
I'm not sure this is quite what you are after, but I't my 13 cents. hope
it helps.
--Michael Erickson sysengr@atc.boeing.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>