Running a large news organization in the midst of a rapidly changing media, finance and tech ecology in the late 1990s, it struck me that the only way for the journalists to remain relevant was to speed up their ability to collaborate to absolute real-time, and across disciplines. The culture has caught up with us, and I see Twitter being used in just such a way as I applied mIRC, but in an open source way. More about that in this link here.

http://knackeredhack.com/2007/12/19/66-characters-in-search-of-a-story/

My main advice for managers would be to understand in detail the nature of the problem to be resolved, and to observe with great care the individual interactions. Collaboration needs a light touch from the manager to allow a particular type of personality to emerge that can hold a team together. That person won't necessarily be someone normally found in a supervisory function and may be as important as the functionality of the tools chosen.