A quiet transformation is under way within Chicago's city government. In his first 18 months on the job, CIO Hardik Bhatt has taken major strides to change how the city's 35,000 employees in 46 departments interact not only with documents, but also each other.

Work teams that previously shuffled paper or e-mail attachments between departments now create project-based document repositories using Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software. The project focus eases access to group presentations, schedules, written comments and project status. One immediate benefit is that employees working with colleagues in other offices communicate more frequently and with less confusion.

Harnessing Collective Wisdom
In the wake of the broad economic forces of globalization, quicker times to market and greater worker mobility, corporations have started investing more money in technology to manage enterprise content, keep far-flung co-workers in sync and harness their collective wisdom to solve problems.

Many early adopters have been in local law enforcement, emergency management and the Department of Defense. Public safety agencies are creating fusion centers that use portal software to aggregate law enforcement information and provide better support to first responders. They use instant messaging, chat rooms, whiteboarding and video conferencing to bring responders from various agencies together quickly so they can assess situations and make decisions mutually.

Web 2.0 social networking and wiki technologies will continue to change how workers access both content and colleagues, Eid believes. There are demographic reasons: Young people are more accustomed to working with technologies and want their work environment to be more flexible, he said. People are more willing to share things about themselves both in their private lives and at work. "It's a sea change that will impact how people interact in their work," he added.

 
Project Focus in the Windy City
Appointed Chicago's CIO and commissioner of the Department of Business and Information Services (BIS) in February 2006, Bhatt initially met with Mayor Richard M. Daley to discuss how IT could help serve citizens better. In addition to improving connectivity and access for field crews, another way was increasing productivity of office employees -- how they work on projects and handle administrative tasks.

The first project last fall involved the 300-employee BIS' own IT projects. Program managers started moving project-related information -- such as status reports, issue tracking, schedules and comments -- into SharePoint to be used by BIS and agencies involved in the IT project.

The city also plans to take advantage of the software's ability to maintain threaded discussion histories about the projects.

 
Transition Point
Much of the push for new collaboration tools has come from users themselves experimenting, rather than from IT leaders suggesting their adoption. For instance, Web conferencing was traditionally done outside IT because it was usually a hosted service. A sales and marketing team could buy a block of time without involving IT. That dynamic, however, may be changing.

 "We are at a transition point," said Jeff Rogers, director of public-sector industry solutions for the IBM software group. "Much of the impetus has grown up from working groups, but CIOs are seeing the phenomenal growth and realizing they have to get policies and procedures in place about how they are used," Rogers said. "Power users are leading the adoption of social software, such as wikis, blogs and social bookmarks, but that may change, too, and policies are being formulated around their use."

 
Web Conferencing in Lincoln
A good example of someone outside IT bringing collaboration tools to his department on his own initiative is Tom Casady.

In June 2005, Casady, Lincoln, Neb., Police chief hung two 50-inch plasma screens in an office at police headquarters for use during assemblies, which are daily briefings for