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.

"It definitely is starting to break down barriers between departments," Bhatt said.

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.

Gartner Inc. predicts the worldwide Web conferencing and team collaboration software markets will grow approximately 22 percent per year through 2010. In 2007, revenue in the sector is projected to total $1.6 billion, a 22.3 percent increase from 2006. Most major software vendors have noticed the increasing demand, and are adding collaboration tools to their software suites - although IBM's Lotus line of software and Microsoft's SharePoint garner a large part of the market share today, according to Gartner.

Web conferencing and team collaboration software has also caught on with public-sector agencies seeking more innovative ways to serve citizens and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy.

"As more business cases and best practices develop around these technologies, they're starting to be seen less as a special service and more as a 'birthright technology' the way e-mail is seen now," said Tom Eid, research vice president for Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. "CIOs will work with other business executives to make them part of the business fabric. That means training, learning about best practices - all of the elbow grease to make it more valuable to the organization."

Although government sometimes lags in adopting new technology, Gartner's research suggests that the collaboration software market has started growing just as fast in the public sector as it has in the private sector, Eid said.

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.

"I started thinking about workspace collaboration to allow employees to share information online related to projects," Bhatt recalled. "We could move these documents from paper-based to Web-based so they are always accessible, and so people can look at and edit the same