How does the future workspace influence the client/colleque relationship?

An interesting question is to what extent the future workspace will influence the relationships between clients and employees and between colleques theirselves. On the one hand you could argue that personal contact is an very important element in doing business and that will most likely not dissapear. On the other hand there are also developments in business that personal contact has been almost eliminated. Take the banking environment; personal contact and the telephone used to be the main interface to deliver services to consumers. Nowadays this has been completely transformed in an online environment.

ICT provides great opportunities for future workspaces. It will make collaboration between colleques or with clients more effecient and effective. Research in this field includes workspace awarness research. Workspace awareness research aims to create awareness of others' activities when multiple persons are working together on the same task. Shared workspaces provide functionality for synchronous interaction. Research on asynchronous interaction explores the possibilities to use the same factors that validate synchronous interaction, for asynchronous interaction with the aim to improve the mutual understanding in online personal relationship management.

References
Shared workspace
Collaboration @ work 2005