Future of the Office

Future of the office according to me

I attended an event last week that considered the future of the office. I thought some of the content was very well presented but it did seem to focus on obvious targets such as the influence of security, compliance, technology innovation, globalization and environmental policies that nobody could ignore but these issues have been charging towards business IT strategists like a train for a good few years, so it would take an amazingly out of touch CIO to find this 'news'.

Rather than be objectionable in the meeting I pulled out my PDA and started jotting down a few notes on my own interpretation.

When I discuss with business executives the change factors bubbling under the surface of commerce in the early part of the 21st century I would say it is the shortage of talent - and the resulting limited access to innovation and creativity - that leaders are becoming most concerned about. Most business professionals know that, whilst processes should be optimized wherever possible, competitive advantage in Western world companies revolves around the pockets of creativity found in groups of people. In my opinion, harnessing this talent is going to have a huge impact on IT innovation and ways of working in the office.

Another transformation is the way organizations structure their operations to harness change. We've heard very little about knowledge markets in recent years; probably because business consultants like me have done such a good job of turning knowledge working into an academic debate and collectively blurring people's appreciation of the genuine commercial justification for change that exists. In the real world, knowledge workers are no more productive than they were 20 years ago and I think many people have satisfied themselves that creating knowledge markets that work is not an achievable ambition. I suspect however, particularly with great examples like InnoCentive Inc. that evidence that knowledge markets can be made to work economically, we will see the subject of knowledge markets return.

The evolution of knowledge markets will mean that more and more individuals will be employed to solve business questions who do not work for the company needing the answers.
Neither can anyone ignore the impact of the enormous desire for lifestyle change on the way people use offices. This has been evidenced by the increasing numbers of home workers and the emergence of what are becoming known as the ‘Alter-preneurs’ – people who go into business not to be a Richard Branson to create successful business empires, but do it to serve their life-style preferences.

This means – I think - the office of the future is unlikely to be a physical workplace that everyone travels to. Twenty years from now I can imagine many people working in communal workspaces for different companies. I can image these offices to be modeled around the workplace of today; benched areas and breakout areas that blend quiet personal spaces with public debating areas and conferencing.

In this environment secure access to data will be a big issue; given that companies will want to know that only authorized people are accessing their data. I can imagine the virtual workspace will blend informal social networking and collaborative portal tools with more formal closed portal areas where individuals contribute to their knowledge markets and accountable people networks.

Operating within these more communal physical workspaces (perhaps in office centres found embedded within communities where people live) will demand more formal protocols supported by technology to:
• Manage projects
• Enable people to find experts and like minded workers - fuelling demand for social networking
• Know who is accessing data - introducing a whole raft of new data and network security challenges
• Measure the productivity and contributions of knowledge workers
• Appreciate how individuals contribute to processes
• Enable virtual working and collaboration

I think we will see some genuine innovation in areas such as search and data visualization to make it simpler for people to find and make sense of information. I can imagine common dictionaries of industry terms forming over time to make it easier for individuals to find and organize their information. I also envisage innovation in knowledge voting systems that help workers to find the 'right answers' they are looking for.

So in summary I believe that the worker behavior will be influenced by:
• Collaboration
• Mobility
• Knowledge markets
• Innovation in visualization technologies bringing easier ways to access knowledge and voting systems to aid problem solving

The office workspace will retain its physical nature but as a communal environment embedded into communities. To engineer this change technology will evolve to support virtual workspaces that are:
• Always online
• Collaborative
• Employ integrated telecoms, social networking, formalized networking and information management tools

The factors of change in user attitudes and behaviors, of technology and of the business drivers for innovation will undoubtedly cause people to ask the question – “Why do we need a physical office?” Wherever an office is located it will never be ideally located near to the dispersed knowledge workers of a global age. There will be fewer reasons to manage assets onsite with many resources such as IT being managed off-site or fully outsourced. With the advent of virtual meetings and richer digital media experiences there will be fewer reasons for customers and suppliers to visit a physical office. In a world scarce on resources and with the breakdown of communities and village/town centres there will be strong drivers to remove the commute and encourage people to work nearer to their homes; to play a more active role in their communities.

So I finally come to my conclusion which is that the future of the office is most likely to be a communal one and the times of the corporate headquarters building that we know and love is surely marked.

Frictionless IT

I spend most of my time in board rooms helping management teams to develop an understanding of their customer value and golden threads that will focus the energy of their enterprise towards its success. Through a series of workshops I work with leaders to reach a small number of objectives and key performance indicators that will form the basis of a sustainable method of managing performance.

When the time comes to try to find the data to populate these KPIs, it is at this moment for management teams that the challenges of getting information the last mile really start to hit.

So we have a meeting with IT. They tell us that some of the information exists but it has never been brought together in that way before so it might ‘be difficult’. They say that for some of the newer KPIs the data has never been gathered before. Then one of the department heads says that he has some of the information on a spreadsheet. Another department head says the same. Then as we finally reach the end of the list we find that there is a requirement for new information systems to capture the data that doesn’t exist at the moment.

By the time we get to the end of the sheet our timescales for the change programme are in tatters. We are facing a serious risk of all the momentum of the strategy communications programme, the energy and vibrancy that we started with on the first day spent with the management team plotting to take on the world with their great customer offer, all of that ebbing away.

I should like to introduce to you a new paradigm called ‘Frictionless IT’.

Frictionless IT describes a theoretical information management environment where all costs and restraints associated with aligning information systems to emerging business needs are non-existent.

Let me recap and describe precisely what I mean: I’m talking about a situation where people networks – collaborative groups of information workers who share a common goal or outcome - are able to train their information systems to always fit their changing information requirements.

In the next 5 years we will see Frictionless IT become a reality. But for Frictionless IT to happen you need what I call ‘Rubber-Walled IT’.

In our management meetings we used to use the term rubber-walled building to describe our requirement for office space which, as a fast growing business, always needed to be sufficient for the people that we employ but not excessive so that we were paying for space that we don’t need.

Unfortunately, most buildings don’t have rubber walls so the choice for tenants is to estimate the size of office space they think they will need over the next 3 to 5 years and hope that they guess right.

We’ve come to apply the same terminology to describe the needs of organizations for their information systems. Rubber walled IT is the ability of an information management system to always fit the needs of the organizations. It describes an information management platform that expands and contracts in a similar way to our rubber-walled building.

The technology to power rubber-walled IT exists today. Technology that enables your key workers to serve themselves with the information they need without having to make do with inappropriate tools like Excel and Word to use as information management tools?

What I’m talking about is what people are now calling situational applications. (You see the difficulty with new technologies is knowing how to describe them! Thankfully IBM did a great job in providing terminology to something that we’ve being doing for a few years now but never really managed to explain it. Thank you IBM!)

As organizations experience change, small groups of users find themselves requiring new information management needs. Products like ENCANVAS – our own software – exist to create these applications as new requirements emerge.

Situational applications typically have a short life span, and can be created within the group where they are used, sometimes by the users themselves. As the requirements of a small team using the application change, the situational application continues to evolve to accommodate changes. Any significant changes in requirements might lead to abandonment of the application altogether as with agile software tools it’s often easier to develop a new one

The fact is, most IT service providers and internal IT departments have a truck-load of small IT project requests to deal with that are either too difficult to justify so they sit on the shelf, or they don’t have time to action; so there is a huge pent up demand for situational applications.

The ultimate outcome of situational applications software like ENCANVAS is the creation of a rubber-walled information management platforms that deliver Frictionless IT.

composite application frameworks come of age

Gosh is that the time!

It has taken me a while to get back to blogging. Some really good reasons for by blogging holiday. I finally finished the book AGILIZATION which managed to get listed in Amazon and WHSmiths websites even before the ink had dried. At NDMC we've had a really busy time launching our new website at www.ndmc.uk.com that we're really happy with - and we've launched IT Directions too, which is a breakfast club for IT leaders across Europe that helps IT manufacturers and suppliers to get a better understanding of the European IT market - particularly at SME level.

And with all of this going on we've been putting the finishing touches to the 2007 edition of encanvas. And we are SO excited about the new multi-sourcing capabilities and the new-look interface.

When we first trialled encanvas in 2005, few IT people had heard the term composite application framework. Even fewer had come across mash-ups! But suddenly, with media interested fanned by the huge investments of IT industry titans, encanvas and products like it are rapidly becoming the new black dress of IT.

A Composite Application Framework (CAF) is a computing platform used to design and operate applications composed of information gathered from different sources that form a new process or information flow. They vary in size, completeness and scope of use. Most of the major software titans - SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft - are committed to the development of their own enterprise integration toolkits that now closely resemble Composite Application Frameworks. In addition to this traditional set of enterprise computing software players, there are a number of software heavy-weights such as Cordys, Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems and Ingres that also provide enterprise scale platforms.

What makes encanvas particularly different is that it has been designed for repeatable authoring of platform agnostic information flows by non technical users and does not require coding skills. Business analysts are able to author prototype systems that can eventually be deployed as live systems without the need of a coding phase. achieving remarkable results is made simpler by the baked in applications that encanvas provides out-of-the-box such as multiple data-sourcing, filtered context search, reports, business intelligence, GIS, web content management and shortly document management. But for all of its simplicity and ease of use, encanvas delivers corporate ready solutions that have the security, scalability, resilience and administrative controls for enterprise-scale applications.

The market for SOA integration tools is hotting up and is expected to touch over 95% of large organizations by 2011. Analysts anticipate more than $17.1 billion will be invested in the technology over this period. That means most organizations will be selecting a composite application framework of one form or another to fit their needs. Naturally, we expect a high proportion of these will be adopting encanvas!

Well that's me done for now. Time for a holiday. Back in two weeks.

Just in case today is one of those days!

With sincere thanks to Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital, for allowing me to use this thoughtful sound-bite for my book 'Agilization'. It has provided me with the necessary confidence to keep going on those days when you just feel like you're pushing elephants up the stairs!

[Entrepreneurialism]

“It’s about having the confidence to persist in a vision of the market and your contribution to it, which is not widely understood in the early stages. I have learned to trust my inner knowledge, but one must have patience and not be swayed by what others think.”