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.

The Perfect Business Application

I had an interesting conversation with a management consultant a few weeks ago that is still playing on my mind even today, hence the blog. He was describing Encanvas to his customers. He said that it was an excellent way of rapidly developing an interim information management platform until the customer found the perfect solution. Boy that bugged me.

I had to ask myself, what is a perfect business application?

Ask most IT people even today and they would probably point towards shrink-wrapped software solutions as being the closest thing we have to perfect solutions out of the box. These pre-templated solutions are meant to be ‘plug-in-able’ and instantly improve the way that people work – because the software vendor knows best. Of course, this ignores the fact that most of the end users of any system have more experience of how they do what they do than ANY software house could ever hope to develop. What arrogance! The best people to scope a system must surely be the practitioners that work in the discipline the software is designed to support.

To my mind most corporations have still to come out from the other side of a 50 year love affair with the idea of shrink-wrapped software solutions. This has resulted in the biggest IT hang-over ever. Many corporations have been left with more than 50 software supplier relationships and IT infrastructures that look like my worst bolognaise.

Most shrink-wrapped business applications involve data, databases, reports, charts, numerics, query and search, visualization, workflow and a hefty amount of business logic. These core building blocks have recently been enriched with geo-spatial information management and of course mobility features. Whilst these building blocks are consistently present across the majority of business applications, corporations still buy software applications ‘shrink-wrapped’ from different vendors for every business process they want to automate.

It's a sad fact that almost 30% of the cost of any business application goes into integration with other systems. It's also likely that less than 60% of the capabilities found in applications ever gets used. And any businessman knows that many vendors appear to think that the data they hold in the database you bought from them somehow becomes their property!

What will it take for business leaders to revisit the merits of the truly bizarre love affair they have with shrink wrapped software?

The answer is simple. They have to have a realistic alternative. That’s where Encanvas comes in. Yes, Encanvas is probably the fastest way there has ever been to build a database centric business application. And there is no doubting the fact that the benefit of working across-the-desk with users is the surest way of guaranteeing the end-system is a perfect fit for users. But more than this, Encanvas is corporate ready, and that means that it passes all of the essential security, scalability, resilience, accessibility and IT hygiene parameters that corporations must insist upon in order to secure business continuity.

So I come back to my original premise – what is a perfect application?

I think a perfect application is one that works in a way that users want it to work, that provides the information that people need at the right place, right time etc. and that delivers economies by removing tasks that can be automated. It doesn’t need to cost a fortune to create a perfect application – Encanvas proves that – but what it does need is for IT people and business people to work together and take accountability for delivering 'outcomes', not 'contributions'. Once we tackle these human issues, mastering the technology becomes a cake-walk.

Back in the saddle

I confess, I've not had time to look at my blog page for a number of weeks due to the number of plates we're all currently keeping in the air at NDMC. It's been a busy time organising the new offices, keeping the consulting projects rolling in and helping to establish Encanvas SA. Glad to see Anthony and the guys are really finding their feet now with Encanvas and closing their first deals.

Promise to spend a bit more time in July blogging and catching up with what's been going on with my family whilst I've been chained to the desk.

Is that.. 'sky' outside? Has it been there all along?

My Web 2.0 Trip

I went to New York for the first time in my life last week to attend a conference on Web 2.0 called AJAXWorld08. New York was probably as I expected it. In some parts you could smell the money, whilst in other areas it was obviously lacking. Amidst the very thoughtful layout of streets organized into a grid system (almost Milton Keynes like in its logic) one encountered examples of transport networks that appear to have evolved organically, untamed by man.

I have to say the conference was well organized. There was a rich tapestry of Web 2.0 speakers and a great many brave young start-ups. But the focus of the conference was deeply technical and appeared very light on corporate interest. Where were all of the end-users? It points to the fact that the IT industry is very good at convincing itself about the next big thing but can leave the business world behind. This absence of ‘business context’ left me naturally feeling like the proverbial square pin surrounded by round holes.

At NDMC we only ever think about technology in terms of the business context. Perhaps this is because Nick and I are not ‘gadget’ people. Given the choice we would both probably use a paper diary and print our reports unless there was a good reason why not to. I like paper (there, I confessed!). I think there are many examples of technologies that are NEW but do nothing to move forward the usefulness of computing to organizations and consumers. Take for example Windows Vista. Sure, it does more things than Windows XP, but XP is reliable and works reasonably well. I don’t think Vista has improved my user experience or saved any time. It has probably cost me more time with drivers not working and applications failing to execute. It hasn’t fixed any of the usability failings I would identify in XP.

I would argue that we all need to be more critical of technology. We should all expect more. (Would Captain Kirk be happy if his people spent an hour a day working on spreadsheets? I never saw that part of every day life in Star Trek when I was growing up in the 1970’s.) Where did we go wrong? Do we assume that Microsoft is cleverer than the rest of us - and so if they don’t offer it, we can’t have it?

When I attended AJAXWorld08 I was expecting to see some revolutionary technologies. Perhaps I did see some ‘small steps’ that might one day morph into giant leaps but in the micro-minutiae of technology presented over the 3 days it was difficult to filter out the business drivers from the technology pitches.

And I suspect that’s why the corporations weren’t in attendance. They don’t get it yet. What’s the story on Web 2.0 in terms of banking more business, reducing operating costs and achieving cashable efficiency savings? The messages are far too detailed at this stage in its evolution; the technology is much too young. Corporations need it packaging up into easier to eat chunks. And they want to see proof. Perhaps this is what we will see at AJAXWorld09 - Web 2.0 becoming Enterprise 2.0.

But of the people that attended this event in a blustery New York in 2008, which of these people – the adventurers of our generation - will become the software billionaires of this Century? Somewhere in the crowd I am sure these people were there - in which case we will say, “We happy few…”

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.