Office of the Future
"The tile guys are here." My wife had somehow turned off her alarm and forgotten to tell me that the kitchen tile job she'd been postponing for 5 years was about to get underway. Within a few minutes our house was teeming with 4 workmen, 4 cats, 4 dogs (don't ask, we took in a stray dog for 2 days 2 months ago who produced 3 puppies a month later), and 2 daughters telling me to please be helpful.Of course, I had a meeting scheduled in an hour with a Magic Quadrant, no time to be helpful and get to the office, and no home office to barricade in (again, the puppies and their barking protective mother.) Grabbing my iPad and iPhone, I headed for the Office of the Future: McDonald's.Actually, it was the parking lot where I set up shop, foregoing the blaring Fats Domino soundtrack emanating from the ceiling. The car offered quiet, the Bluetooth speaker system for the voice call, and close enough proximity to draft off the free WiFi. My devices beeped with a fifteen minute alert, and I decided to split the two halves of the communications setup between the phone and the pad.Opening the meeting message on the iPad, I clicked on the GoToMeeting link for the slides. Remember: the iPad just says no to Flash and I briefly wondered whether I would have to pass on the visuals, knowing the last time I'd gone to GTM that I got the dreaded Blue Question Mark Box of Death. But wait! This time I was redirected to a page with two buttons, one for those (me) who hadn't installed the new iPad app, and one for those who been this way before.Clicking the first button took me to the App Store; a minute later it was installed. Back to email, click the link, click the right button, and I was in, waiting for the organizer to start. Now for the voice call, but with 8 minutes to go, I flipped to Techmeme and noticed a story about Skype releasing an iPhone update that not only supports free Skype calls over 3G but uses iOS4 multitasking to support simultaneous chat and Skype calls while running in the background even when the phone is locked.In other words, I could use Skype as a back channel with colleagues in the meeting. About the same time, my App Store icon lit up with 3 updates waiting including the new Skype code. Needless to say, I clicked the Update All button, which also works in the background. With only a little bit of trepidation (how far can I push this multitasking thing) I went to the meeting email and clicked on the call number.
As I lurked on the conference call with Mute on, I realized the ease with which Apple has taken down the Office model. Not only does iOS4 stub out Flash, it also renders Windows, Silverlight, and Office as second class citizens in this new work environment. Push notification becomes the main interrupt mechanism, and in effect the new file system. No longer are you storing files in a location but rather a notification paradigm. Instead of folders, you're traveling through filters.
The new Office of the Future works by delivering social context in place of previous infrastructures. Whatever the system looks and feels like, the value is transmitted by harnessing social cues that prioritize based on the social status of those who created and consumed them. In the new language of streams, any item has a time of entry, implicit time until it moves outside the window of opportunity to consume in realtime, and metadata that can be mined to determine how important that item or thread is to the user or group.
Email creates a new hierarchy each time a thread is started, with cc's and to's parsed to determine intended roles and potential workflow. The protocol of adding, promoting, or demoting is the primary way social cues are injected, but each new email starts the process over. In a stream architecture, social cues are built up over time as a broad range of participants manage their own presence and individual contributions as part of an ongoing realtime record. The filters tease out the value and relationships by noting not only who posts and replies but also who doesn't and in what contexts.
Expertise can be inferred and offered as a service based on these signals, and the success with which those ideas and services are consumed produces a powerful intuitive map of the group, company, discipline, or project. Where Office of the Past created static documents that are then replaced by updates and modifications, the Office of the Future “document” exists across many items and threads. Insight continues to be the primary value, but now it's a more organic process of realtime discovery.
The iPad's opaque file system and current lack of multitasking feels broken and immature, but do the thought experiment of what this new Office of the Future would feel like if implemented with the current tools. One obvious red flag is the lack of stream technology in the current Office. People don't use Outlook to scan Twitter or Facebook; they use mobile devices to scan when they can steal a few moments on the go. By contrast, the iPad encourages filtering and alerting as a way of notifying you what is relevant since multitasking must occur within the page or application.
My Office of the Future call could not have taken place with the previous generation of tools. Not only was I able to go mobile with information capture and communications, but I was also able to update and improve my tools on the fly. Push notification is not just of messages, but also of code and improved filtering services. And iPhone 4's WiFi services, especially FaceTime, suggest a powerful combination of video, audio, and text realtime services can be orchestrated across multiple channels and locations to make possible business processes that will soon migrate to product offerings.
No wonder iPad sales are outstripping Apple's ability to manufacture them. No wonder 80% of enterprise companies are testing or deploying. No wonder social computing is accelerating as a better way to create and sustain relationships. And no wonder Microsoft is wondering how they're going to retain ownership of a corporate environment where the next wave of hires is wondering why they can't download that Office app they haven't heard about.
