Collaborative technologies are changing the way people interact, and key elements of successful implementations will have both presence - to allow communities of people to interact with “one click”- and persistence - which will enable a memory or continuity of that interaction.

Already, collaborative technology has enabled productivity increases, but the true transformational changes will be evolutionary from today’s contextual collaborative through the year 2020, when a variety of social factors combine with technology.

Among these social factors are today’s youth - raised on SMS, text messaging, IM and chat - joining the workforce.

For businesses to make sense of this progression, they need to think in three- to five-year cycles of advancing technologies and develop collaborative as “a continuous, purposeful series of tasks tied to a process.”

Find out more about what Gartner has been predicting for the future of Collaboration Technologies.

Kevin Rudden of InterWise reports from New York Chelsea Piers.