Are you a team person? Are you at your best as part of a small, tightly united group of devoted workers? If so, the future may hold more for you than you think.
High technology, some said, would make teamwork a thing of the past. That’s happening in those areas of business and data processing where one person and a computer can replace a team of workers.
But else where, teamwork is very much alive. High technology hassled to a new type of teamwork in a number of fields, including advertising, scientific research, engineering design , and ocean exploration.
Through computer networking, scientists, engineers, and technicians at different places, often thousands of miles apart, can work on the same project at once. They can exchange ideas, try out different designs, and test their results.
Examples? An engineering team can now design and try out a robot system, a new manufacturing process, or an entire factory before it is built. A medical team can simulate(模拟) a dangerous operation before performing it on a patient.
Of course, computer-assisted team effort doesn’t end with investigation and simulation. It now usually continues into actual design, manufacturing and testing. “Computer-aided design and manufacturing functions,” explains Dr Prakash Rao, an engineering manager at General Electric. “Interdisciplinary(跨学科的)teams and engineers follow a product from concept to production. Everything is interconnected like a network.
Sometimes, a computer-aided effort can extend beyond production. A team that produces robots may use them to explore space and ocean depths. For high technology teamwork, the future seems limitless.