schneiderism

Set aside your disdain for sticky web monikers for a moment. I have been following the “The Workplace of The Future” for a while now, and have been writing about it since last July. The Innovation Tours that I organize for my team are focused on surveying where boundaries are being pushed and how businesses are responding to changes in the ways people want to work and the resulting impact on meaningful workplace design. No doubt, the demands on the physical workplace environment are changing right before our eyes, being driven by rapid changes in technology, notions of work, telepresence, and shifts in workforce demographics. Intersecting these drivers is the concept of Office 2.0, which encompasses the increasing number of web-based collaborative work applications, such as the smart suite of web applications from 37 Signals. They are a fast, efficient way for users and teams to organize, manage, disseminate and develop information using a simple, intuitive interface. The value of these applications are that they let you work remotely with people in ways that make us less dependent on desktop workstations and organized offices. At their heart, they functionally support collaborative idea and project development and the efficient sharing of documents and files, but the potential for how they will potentially change the ways in which we work go far beyond the functional benefits and they will ultimately influence what work actually constitutes.

Google is in this space with the web-based offerings Google Apps, and Microsoft is throwing its weight behind a rekindled web-based initiative. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller start-up applications also struggling for attention. Start using these tools now. Familiarize yourself. Encourage your teams to do the same. In the imminent future more and more of our work will take place on the web, leveraging web-based applications, and less and less of it will happen within the confines of an office. Smart companies are already there, and are redefining their models based on their own understanding of how Office 2.0 benefits them. In the short term, the biggest benefit for companies is the liberation from legacy notions of space and real estate, in the long term a benefit will be a workforce distributed globally, not locally. Physical offices will become less about the housing of workers during working hours and more about space that supports in-person meetings and collaboration. Think about how you were working ten years ago, think about how you accomplished your tasks and contrast that to how you work now. Now recall ten years before that, and if you’re old enough, ten years before that. I think it is safe to say that we would be hard pressed to not acknowledge the dramatic change that continues to occur, only with increased speed.

There is an annual conference, aptly named the Office 2.0 Conference, focused on exploring developments around Office 2.0 which I am planning on attending this year.

Robert Scoble recently talked about web-based work apps in an article for Fast Company.