The authors give an overview of the benefits of an electronically linked organization working in teams on projects. The book is written in an upbeat style to describe the process, which starts with face-to-face team building and then evolves into working through electronic exchanges and specific focused visits to achieve project goals.

The best attributes of the volume are that it is a well-written, understandable message by two managers with long experience in electronically coordinated project teams. They describe the development and operation of electronic teams and the issues in forming them and sustaining them over time. They emphasize that the constraining resource is time and the necessary competence is relevant knowledge. To engender free and easy access, they recommend developing a “capability based environment,” which is a goal-congruent group that wants to share knowledge, is comfortable with electronic media of all sorts, and is proactive in reaching solutions. They posit that the architecture for such a group is the ability to stay in touch independent of time and geography together with access to technology that reduces the routine work to 20 percent of their workers’ time so they can spend 80 percent of their time on innovative work. The technology and the group have to evolve together in a guided fashion through an integrator. The authors claim direct descent from Englebart’s ideas of electronic group support. The message is presented clearly and forcefully.

The drawbacks are that their cases are somewhat superficial and the authors are so enthusiastic that they assume the reader accepts their ideas on how to augment groups because they say so. They jump around a bit in discussing how one unfreezes a group or develops the model they are moving towards, as well as about training people on the technology or making it accessible. They also miss the base competence issue of how one would go from no linking to complete linking. It is clear that their DEC experience does not provide them a basis to appraise the great unelectronically linked world that exists in most environments. This book will appeal to the converted and be confusing to the unconverted.