Advantages of digital communication

What will be an ideal response?

Advantages of digital communication are numerous and dramatic. Within firms, the advantages include the sharing of more information and speed and efficiency in delivering routine messages to large numbers of people across vast geographic areas. Discussing ideas with colleagues in other cities is much faster and less expensive with teleconferencing or corporate social media than when the colleagues must travel to be at the same location.

For example, Microsoft's SharePoint allows companies to create websites that enable employees to collaborate on web pages, documents, lists, calendars, and data. Hitachi Solutions Europe helps client companies create SharePoint platforms to quickly respond to changing business needs and reduce their training costs.21 Groupon, IBM, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield use the online platform Candor to gather ideas anonymously before participants meet in person to discuss.22 This approach tends to yield a wider range of potential solutions.

Some research indicates that more data sharing and critical argumentation occur with a group decision support system than is found in face-to-face meetings, resulting in higher-quality decisions.23 But anonymity tempts participants to make careless, rude, or ill-advised Page 434 statements, so employers may require identities to be revealed or limit access to social networking technologies. However, a growing number of companies see services such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook as necessary for staying in touch with the hundreds of millions of people who use these services—especially younger generations of co-workers and customers who are likelier to check tweets and texts than voice mail and e-mail.24 Complicating this trend is how employees use their own mobile devices and applications in the workplace (see "Multiple Generations at Work").