Virtual collaboration for a distributed enterprise

The geographic diversity of many military enterprises, along with that of their partners and customers, has made virtual collaboration indispensable for conducting daily operations. Virtual collaboration tools can enable intrasite and intersite collaborative analyses, allow for sites to provide more effective surge capacity, and allow the regional expertise developed at each site to be applied wherever necessary across the enterprise. But communication between non-colocated (virtual) teams poses important challenges, including potential difficulty building cohesiveness and trust among team members and difficulty establishing a common understanding of information or situations. This report addresses these challenges through an assessment of three modes of virtual collaboration, computer-mediated communication, audioconferencing, and videoconferencing, and recommends several ways for intelligence enterprises to tackle them using virtual collaboration tools.