Question 1
a. A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal. It may include people from finance, marketing, operations, and human resources departments. Typically, it includes employees from all levels of an organization. Members may also come from outside an organization (in particular, from suppliers, key customers, or consultants).

Technology manufacturers use cross functional teams because of these reasons;

- To be less unidirectional - Today organizational have flatter structures and companies have become less well defined. The teams are becoming more independent and multi directional and encourage consensus within teams. Also the directives given to the team tend to become more general and less prescribed.

- Greater scope and depth of information
Greater flow of information coming from each member of the team. They need to draw on information from all parts of an organization’s information base. System integration becomes important because it makes all information accessible through a single interface.

- Greater range of users
Cross-functional teams consist of people from different parts of an organization. Information must be made understandable to all users. Not only engineers use technical data, and not only accountants use financial data, and not only human resources personnel use HR data. Modern organizations lack middle managers to combine, sort, and prioritize the data. Technical, financial, marketing, and all other types of information must come in a form that all members of a cross-functional team can understand. This involves reducing the amount of specialized jargon, sorting information based on importance, hiding complex statistical procedures from the users, giving interpretations of results, and providing clear explanations of difficult. Data visualization systems can