Team rooms support the three interdependent structural networks that constitute the organization itself: people-in-positions, teams, and organizations. Rooms meet the needs of people by supporting both social and task aspects of doing work together. Digital team rooms that capture the full range of internal structures and processes (people, purpose, links, time, meetings, and content) serve the need of the team as a whole to produce results. Virtual rooms also serve the organization’s needs by encoding the local team knowledge and enabling inter-team interactions.
Virtual team rooms can also retain role-based tactical knowledge as it unfolds through a changing cast of characters. This supports new people coming into existing roles, enables teams to retain and improve local knowledge and processes, and serves the organization’s need to hold onto the practical knowledge generated by people doing their job. Team rooms can trace an arc of knowledge from person in to person out encoded within a purposeful configuration of roles within and between teams.
In order for people in the organization to act and make decisions that work for the whole as well as the local situation, then the whole internal structure and process needs to be as transparent as possible. Transparency of the whole begins with the hierarchy network fully realized such that anyone can stand in the shoes of any position, from top to bottom, as with OrgScope displaying Finance/HR positional data. Teams, however, need relative privacy in a separate internal space to do planning, preparation, and practice of their output. Teams and networks of teams need to map their local complexity, but organizations only need the external team results to fit into the overall strategic purpose.
