I was recently chatting with a colleague about the Internet social community of Second Life and the affect that a multiuser paradigm of avatar and simulation technologies could have on the workplace (such as, in collaboration, teaming, communicating and coordinating). My colleague's slightly haughty response was, "Wow, you have a lot of time on your hands to play video games, Betsy! I have real work to get done."

OK, OK, I am not suggesting spending all day on Internet gaming or checking out myspace or YouTube; but if you are focused on supporting user-driven applications, then you need to find ways to stay in-tune with and ahead of what your users are using at home, because sooner or later (good, bad or ugly) they are going to ask you to support this type of paradigm in the workplace.

By now, most of us have figured out that consumer technologies are having - and will continue to have — a significant impact on how we work and how we support people in our business workplace. Increasingly, users are driving adoption of instant messaging, videoconferencing, search-style interfaces for finding information, and visualization and dashboards for accessing business data - to name a few.

However, it isn't going to stop there. In fact, plan for these demands to increase. As more of the "next" generation enters the workforce and more of the "boom" generation adopts consumer technologies, IT and business must be ready for an ever-increasing demand for applications, interfaces, devises and tools that support how users really want to work (see "Key Reasons Why You Should Consider a 'Learning by Gaming' Strategy").

So, how are you going to get ready for these users? Play more! This year, dedicate 1% to 3% of your work week to playing with consumer technologies — that is, Internet games, hand-held devices, online media sites and Internet publishing systems. Find out what technologies your users are using at home for entertainment or for personal productivity. Know these technologies and become familiar with their strengths and weaknesses so that you are ready to discuss their use (good and bad) in your organization.

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Last week I broke my arm and needed surgery to put the pieces back together again. That led me to re-explore some technologies I'd looked at years ago — speech recognition technologies. Given that it was my arm and not my credit cards that were injured, I ordered a new copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) v.9 and had it within a day. I had heard others talk about how effective it was (for example, see David Pogue's "New York Times" review of DNS last summer), but I was skeptical. Earlier versions (much earlier) of the Dragon products were interesting but frustrating. So, too, was IBM's ViaVoice product. Then again, I noted that my general practitioner's office used speech recognition to transcribe the doctor's notes of his meeting with me. So, maybe these tools were ready for prime time.

This wasn't an issue of intellectual curiosity. Impending deadlines for research materials coupled with a useless (and painful) left hand drove me to re-evaluate working with speech recognition technology. DNS installed smoothly and quickly. Training took about 20 minutes and then it took DNS another hour to go through all my documents to understand my writing style. Was I surprised at how effective DNS had become! (Maybe it was necessity driving my impression — after all, it was still making mistakes that I had to correct.) But in the end, I compared my productivity without this tool with my productivity with it and realized I'd be lost right now without it. (I'm dictating this posting using DNS.)

This leads me to think about policies for standardization and user-installed software. I installed DNS on my company-supplied system — probably a violation of company policy. I never bothered calling IT support — after all, I knew they had better things to do than test whether DNS worked properly with all corporate-approved applications used by everybody in all departments. For all I know, DNS is incompatible with our corporate CRM system, but so is a useless left hand! (I am an analyst, not someone in sales and marketing, so CRM system support is irrelevant to me.)

Clients often call asking for estimates of total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment for a variety of technologies. DNS cost me $99. I have no idea what the true TCO of this product is (our TCO analysts are not going to like this comment), and I'm confident nobody's ever going to try to figure it out. Return on investment? It was a smart move given that I can now return to writing!

Given the surgical repair I had, it will probably be at least a couple of weeks before I can type again with my left hand. I wonder if I'll stay with DNS once the splints are off.

What's your policy on products like this? Have you assigned individuals to go off and test these products? Do you have a set of standards under which you will deploy these products? Do you block individuals from making this type of decision on their own? Do you bother calculating costs and returns? Or do you just let it happen, without explicit management?

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The emergence and adoption of alternate technologies is hard to ignore. Employees find technology to support their needs (such as desktop search tools, blogs or wikis for collaboration), explore what they can do and teach their colleagues how to use the tools so they'll have a way to work together, but these sorts of technologies are not supported by most businesses' IT organizations.

A technology subculture is evolving. CIOs concentrate on costs, business processes and governance, while employees say, "just do it!" If my kid can carry on discussions, swap homework and post pictures on the Web, then why can't I do comparable things at work?

The gulf between the employee's and IT organization's view of corporate computing is growing. The CIO has the responsibility of keeping the company's computing infrastructure healthy and secure, and keeping back-office operations running, while employees are concerned with figuring out ways to streamline their work processes, make them more interesting and exploit new technologies to help them. Many of these new tools are easier to use than what the company provides - if not actually filling a void the company does not address altogether.

Although some IT departments are beginning to think about these resources and ask us, for example, if folksonomies can be used internally to the corporate advantage, we don't hear the question often, and we hear about deployments of such social technology even less often.

The two views - MIS-centric vs. employee-enabling - need to converge if a company's IT resources are to be aligned.

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At the Vista kickoff, Steve Ballmer was asked, "How important is BitLocker?" In his typical booming response, Ballmer said, "hugely important." For those of you that don't know, BitLocker is Vista's tool for whole disk encryption. It was created as a direct response to the plethora of lost data resulting from lost or stolen laptops. BitLocker provides protection against data loss by encrypting the entire disk, thus protecting data from prying eyes.

This is a particularly interesting response in light of the fact that BitLocker is only available via Microsoft's Software Assurance (SA) program aimed at large enterprises and the Ultimate version. Ultimate carries a pricing premium of 66% over the Home Premium version, includes every option of both home and business versions and is not targeted at typical home or SMB users. This means that small businesses and home users of Vista won't get the benefit of BitLocker's protection. If Steve Ballmer says it is hugely important, then why is Microsoft excluding so many of its clients from one of the major security functions on Vista?

Are there pieces missing which would be required for the tool to work with home or small and midsize business users (such as Web-based key recovery), or is it part of Microsoft's attempt to sell up to SA across the board, locking more users in for the long term?

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I was chatting this week with a few colleagues in the High-Performance Workplace (HPW) research area and we started wondering how people think about the application of tools, practices, processes and methodologies to support end users in an HPW.

It seems to me that some of the basic software types are easier to link to a value. In most cases, we know how this software "applies" to a business need. For example:

• Infrastructure software, or software that makes hardware and other software systems run (networks, operating systems, enterprise management, database management systems, middleware brokers, security). These are "keep the lights on" software, and they aren't difficult to justify buying because they're often the backbone of the organization.

• Enterprise/business applications or software that's designed to support specific business processes (ERP, CRM, supply chain). Again, the application to the business and the impact on end users' needs are generally clear.

• Development tools or software that can be used to build other software applications (portals, Web development tools, service-oriented architecture — SOA). Their purpose is to create new applications — which, in most cases, have a clearly defined purpose in terms of the impact on businesses and users.

And then … there's a "weird" class of software that's sometimes called "tools" — meaning software that people can use in many different ways. How tools are specifically applied to support the business isn't always clear.

Think of these software "tools" as you would a hammer. You can use it to build a house or hang a picture — in other words, it can be used for and applied to thousands of purposes and benefits. The types of things we might put in this category include word processing, spreadsheets, business intelligence tools, search mechanisms, communication and collaboration tools, some of the mobile devices, gaming and instant messaging, to name a few. The problem for buyers and senior managers is that there often isn't an obvious and direct link between the "tool" and its benefit, making it difficult to justify the costs associated with acquiring them, and difficult to define.

As a result, many organizations have had a hard time figuring out what people are "doing" with these tools. For lack of a better definition, these organizations have been calling them "productivity" tools. However, in many ways, this misses the point because it doesn't drive us to determine the added business value of enabling users to be more innovative, and to discover, lead, learn and team (see "The High-Performance Workplace Defined").

We need to ask ourselves how these tools "apply" to our business needs. The idea of an "application" for use in supporting an HPW isn't a "package application," but rather the application of processes, methods, resources, practices and technologies to support a business need. In other words, how can the various types of applications (that is, "applied," not packaged application) of these tools, processes (and so on) support business needs from a top-down view? This business need may be innovation, competitive intelligence, strategic planning and discovery, research and so on.

Is there a new way of thinking about application? Will our idea of buying software have to change? How does the evolution toward SOA or consumer technologies affect how we think about applications, or apply tools, people and processes?

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We are a society where enterprises appear to care about their employees' home lives (at least - a cynic might unjustly say - to the extent that employees experience personal catastrophes that impact their work productivity and effectiveness). As people come to use more and more devices to do a mix of business and personal work, and as the dividing line between what belongs to which enterprises and what context gets fuzzier and fuzzier (whether we like it or not, we are moving toward what GE's former CEO Jack Welch described as "boundaryless" enterprises), how many of you are thinking about how to provide - at arm's length, of course - general advice to your employees on how to deal with their personal IT, particularly if they are using it for business purposes?

Security, privacy, encryption, authentication and protection from malware (including, but not limited to, keystroke capture software) are all high on the list of issues users should think about, whether they're using corporate-provided technology for corporate purposes or personal technology for personal purposes, or any mix of corporate and personal technology. When it comes to security, most users are as much at risk from losing their "stuff" (be it personal or corporate) as they are from the other Malthusian-like threats modern computer users face.

I like David Pogue's recent "New York Times" article on personal backup-to-Web technologies (log-in required). It's not complete, I'm sure. And it fails to examine - in excruciating detail - all the possible problems these technologies might create (for example, the local device drivers for these packages may conflict with custom drivers we've implemented for other purposes, and corporate legal officers may become concerned that corporate content, subject to e-discovery, might get "misplaced" onto the "X" drive). However, it also provides some reasonable advice for users to do personal backups.

Do you provide guidance (or simple guidelines) for your users on how they can protect their personal IT health (on non-corporate systems and for non-corporate information)? If so, do you create the content or turn to various Web sites for reasonable guidance? If the latter, then what sites do you frequently search for material for your users' general use (not limited to corporate issues)?

Have you ever known of personal IT health issues impacting your users' productivity?

Is this an issue you care about? If so, then let me know.

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Just like preparations for the Christmas holiday season seem to come earlier every year (at least among retailers), the influence of Lotusphere on the IBM Lotus faithful gets bigger and earlier each year. The eyes of most Notes/Domino users will be on Orlando, Florida, in January, mainly to see how real the long-promised Hannover (now known as "Notes 8") is. The Lotusphere extravaganza promises thrills, chills and lots of news - if demos of portal-ready collaboration objects are the kind of thing that send thrilling chills down your spine.

At the moment, IBM really doesn't have much to say, because it is holding the big announcements for Lotusphere. In fact, it didn't have much to say for most of the fall either, given the pressure to have lots to say in Orlando. This concentration of effort has gotten worse since IBM decided to drop Lotusphere Europe several years ago. This focus on one big yearly event is hurting the Lotus product line in two ways.

First, IBM saves up its important news until Lotusphere, creating a marketing news vacuum for at least 25% of the year. Second, IBM seems to figure that all users will make the pilgrimage to Orlando, or at least closely follow the announcements there.

I spoke with a customer who did not go to Lotusphere and, consequently, knew nothing about the new features in Sametime 7.5. IBM knew it was considering alternatives, but did not make an effort to inform the client about the new version. The client regretted going with another vendor when he or she finally heard about it, but by then it was too late.

Microsoft - IBM Lotus's main competitor - is not constrained by the need to have a single "big bang" event with a fixed date. Microsoft uses this advantage effectively, staging announcements and launches when it suits the company. Lotus's role in supporting remote collaboration makes its attachment to this real-world meeting all the more curious. The dozens of streamed presentations on the Internet belie the focus on a fixed event at a fixed place and time.

IBM would be better off not relying on a single event to inform and excite its users. Users would also benefit from a steady stream of announcements and the opportunity to get more information closer to home.

Also, it would mean I would have to go to Disney World less often - a definite benefit as far as I am concerned.

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I recently had a humbling experience as an analyst, which is usually a good thing. I wrote a note in October that I expected would generate a bit of interest, and maybe even some outrage (see "Some Web Conferencing Products Present Privacy Issues"). It described a potential privacy issue with some Web conferencing products that tell meeting organizers when participants have clicked to another application on their computer, without telling participants that they provide this information. However, several weeks after publishing, I haven't received a single inquiry on the issue and no one from the trade press has picked up on it. The vendors tell me they have not received any questions on the issue either. In fact, one vendor told me it expects to get more prospects from people who want access to that kind of potentially intrusive functionality.

Now, this will not be the first time that something I thought important did not register with clients; that happens. I really don't believe that the world is hanging on my every word just because I am a Gartner analyst. This is not a particularly grievous invasion of privacy. It does not expose truly sensitive information like credit card numbers or confidential personal information. Still, it could be embarrassing if the CEO knows that you weren't paying attention to his or her corporate strategy presentation.

The lack of interest in this issue is surprising, however. When I did an informal poll of other analysts and friends as to how serious they saw this, reactions ranged from "An issue, but not a big one" to "Good God! How dare they? We must organize a boycott at once!" No one dismissed it as irrelevant or trivial. I expected that concern about privacy issues was growing among most users and figured someone would be interested.

But maybe this is just another little concession that we are collectively willing to make. Most people agree to provide personal information when there is some benefit provided. We accept cookies to make Web surfing better. We provide information about ourselves to personal portals such as Yahoo and Google so that they can tailor the information they provide to us. Maybe we are getting progressively inured to these little concessions to privacy so that we only get upset about really serious stuff, such as the loss of credit card numbers or massive dumps of personal data. Is our tolerance for invasions of privacy getting higher? How high is too high?

Maybe it really is not that big a deal and I should not be surprised that few people care. Maybe meeting organizers should be able to know if I click away to read e-mail, even if I don't know that they know that. What do you think?

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I've been chatting about this with several of my peers at Gartner. (Recently, we published a major body of research on this subject - don't miss it and don't assume this personal blog post is a substitute for or summary of that work. It's not.) This post is a less-conclusive look at emerging concerns (and advice on) training and total cost of ownership (TCO) implications of migrating to Office 2007. I'm looking for input from you.

If you don't put a solid training and governance strategy in place, then you're going to be in trouble.

We think Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a natural upgrade from LAN file-shares. So much so that, by 2010, WSS will replace a majority of Windows-based, LAN file shares. (We expect explosive growth in WSS deployment and usage.) Enterprises have to get a solid plan in place, however, otherwise anarchy will rule. For typical "office"-type files, migrating up to the WSS feature set is a "no-brainer" because costs and risks appear minimal compared with potential user benefits. Training and governance are key requirements. Rollout, training and the evolution of governance mechanisms can be executed at a leisurely pace.

It's a different story on the desktop. Are you considering mandatory Office 2007 training before upgrading a user's machine? Many users will opt out of the training and can't be forced into it. (Ironically, this may be a bigger problem for more-experienced users, because inexperienced users will be more open to training and have fewer problems adapting to the new user interface.)

Left to their own devices, a few users (particularly the highly skilled power users) will experience self-inflicted traumas as they skip training and dive into short-term deliverables that they just have to get done but have no idea how to do in Office 2007. Trust me, I've already seen it happen, and while that observation is anecdotal, saying, "We warned you, you should have taken the training" is a pretty weak defense. Imagine a seasoned Office 2003 user on a cross-country flight getting ready to create a new presentation for an entirely new account, only he can't instantly figure out how to do with Office 2007 what he used to do with Office 2003. Not a pretty image. Conjure up the worst-case user crisis story you can imagine and use it to motivate power users to come to training.

Consider maintaining the current and new versions of Office on the user's machine until he or she has gone through training. Once users either go to training or self train, few will ever need to go back to the older releases - and you can delete them.

All this training talk raises the bigger issue: what's the real TCO for Office 2007? Microsoft's usability lab results suggest that users will be more productive with the improved user interface (and higher-powered features, such as better graphics and easier formatting). Don't forget the upfront investments you should be making. Upgrading procedures, documentation and user skills will cost real time and money. We think some firms will really balk at much of these upfront expenses. Future savings - whatever they may be - will have to be discounted (based on the time value of money), while current costs will not be. The size of the future savings for enterprises whose users have already mastered the current (less than perfect) interface is less than clear. Although the new "ribbon" user interface is better organized, the loss of time and the potentially real user frustration during the transition period may discourage enterprises from upgrading Office on the desktop.

Do you have a full transition plan thought through? Funded? Have you estimated the costs of training, documentation and process changes, new governance models and all the other soft factors associated with upgrading to Office 2007? Share that with me.

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Many of my discussions with customers about knowledge management (KM) initially focus on how to capture knowledge as it is created or flows through an organization. Users want to know how to convince employees to share their experiences or take the time to document best practices or other insights. They ask about the best systems to store, classify, search and distribute this information. All of that is important, but often misplaced, I find. It's generally far more useful to concentrate on how the organization will use knowledge rather than just how to collect it. Ironically, emphasizing how knowledge will be used usually ends up increasing the quality and amount of information collected as well.

One of the reasons many people are hesitant to spend the time to document what they know is because they don't know how, or even if, it will be used. Too many KM initiatives gather great material, which then sits unaccessed on a virtual shelf in some repository somewhere. Focusing exclusively on how to capture knowledge means not building knowledge access into daily business processes, training users how to find information that can help them make better decisions faster, publicizing how the use of someone's insights has led to success or other steps that would encourage knowledge use.

Visibility into how captured knowledge will be used can be a tremendous incentive to participate in knowledge capture efforts. Subject matter experts are more likely to participate if they know that their efforts will actually be used. Individual recognition can often be the best incentive, in fact; far better than the clumsy efforts to financially reward contributors that I have seen. It is a cliché (but nonetheless true) to say that nothing succeeds like success. Ringing the bell to highlight wins and successes, with recognition for the user and contributor, can multiply this value.

Of course, exclusively focusing on how knowledge is used would lead to a chicken-and-egg paradox: How can we use knowledge if we haven't captured any? Often, this presents an excuse to dive into technology. Many KM planners, especially those from IT departments, are more comfortable dealing with the technology-driven issues of how to capture, catalogue and store information in repositories than the people-driven issues of how it gets used throughout the organization. As with so many high-performance workplace concepts, finding the correct balance is important. A good rule of thumb is to focus at least as much attention on using knowledge as capturing it. This would go a long way toward swinging the balance the right way.

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In recent discussions with clients at four different Gartner events, I've discussed the business value of creating an internal "MySpace" in which employees can share personal interests, hobbies, pictures of pets and children, and almost anything else they'd like to share (providing, of course, that they retain a sense of decorum). This really is nothing new. It's the notion of a personal "home page" on the intranet, but the emergence of MySpace.com has made IT organizations far more open to providing such a facility for their users.

Two pieces of advice: Make this an "opt in" activity (so that people who don't want to share personal details don't have to), and make sure it is searchable, so people can find others with similar interests.

Have you experimented with creating an internal sharing site? How are people using it? What business benefits are you seeing?

Let me know.

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Reality is messy. I have been traveling around the U.S. and Europe talking with clients about the impact of consumer-grade technologies and Internet-based capabilities on their work. Many IT managers are embarrassed at how out of control some of their users are. They're afraid their peers in other companies will find out that they don't really control everything going on inside their enterprise. They think they're being unprofessional by not applying all the controls and enforcing all the policies that "the rest of the world" applies. At the same time, they are unwilling to stop users from having their way — at least within reason.

Others worry that they are failing to meet the needs of users, because they — the IT professionals — cannot stay on top of all that's emerging (and often quickly submerging) on the Internet and with consumer-grade technologies. Users look wistfully at what could be, while IT professionals continue to do their "day job," ensuring that what was supposed to be, eventually gets done.

IT professionals are creating policies they never enforce, and then engaging in a practice of "don't ask, don't tell." Some lock down everything for fear of stagnation and lack of support from the most senior business executives who, for example, refuse to carry two laptops on the road — one for business and one for personal use. Lockdown isn't the only thing going on. Most IT organizations that are doing outstanding work implementing and evolving critical enterprise-class systems know full well that the ability of users to be creative, to innovate, to team and to lead suffers under the slow rate of progress that can generally be driven from central IT citadels.

The first step in tackling these problems is to openly admit them. They are all problems. They stem, I believe, from our own instinct to take on more responsibility while shedding none. They also stem from denial. We seek to do it all and do it best, when we would be better off focusing on what we can do really well and let the marketplace take over in provisioning many classes of users, applications and devices.

Is it time to rethink the role of IT professionals? Tell me about it.

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There is an interesting debate about "peer review" going on among readers, contributors and editors of "Nature", the scientific journal. There is also some activity on the part of interested bloggers (see, for example, here and here). The debate and the lengths to which "Nature" is changing its processes is another leading indicator of how much IT is changing how people work.

Background

Nature is a "refereed scientific journal," meaning articles are reviewed by others in the same field and they must approve the article before the editors will (consider) publishing the piece. This time-honored tradition, involving mailing physical copies of the research to reviewers and exchanging comments and recommendations (often anonymously) through the editor, replaced the earlier tradition of live debate in scientific societies. IT and the social collaborations that flourish on the Internet enable scientists to try "open debate" instead of closed (and confidential) peer review.

"Nature" is an interesting player in this arena. In November and December 2005, there was a large (some say manufactured) controversy surrounding the quality of content on Wikipedia. The controversy flared over the "Sigenthaler incident." "Nature" ran a special report that commented on the quality of science coverage on Wikipedia compared with the quality of articles found in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It concluded that "Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries." Britannica disagreed and "Nature" carried that - and its response to Britannica's position - as links found at the beginning of the special report. ("The Wall Street Journal" recently ran a debate between the founder of Wikipedia and the editor of Britannica. See this link for the full article.) And Gartner wrote a research note on lessons to be learned by corporate IT managers from the Wikipedia controversy.

Today

Fast forward to this summer. "Nature" has opened a debate on how to change peer review. Here's its description of the debate (see this link for the full article):

"Nature's" Peer Review Debate

"Peer review is commonly accepted as an essential part of scientific publication. But the ways peer review is put into practice vary across journals and disciplines. What is the best method of peer review? Is it truly a value-adding process? What are the ethical concerns? And how can new technology be used to improve traditional models?
This "Nature" Web debate consists of 22 articles of analyses and perspectives from leading scientists, publishers and other stakeholders to address these questions."
Nature also set up a separate space for comments on the debate and is making unapproved research available for comment (by researchers in the subject field). This peer review blog is its new experiment.

Finally, there's an interesting paper on the benefits of using the "wisdom of crowds" to improve the quality of peer review. "Nature's" debate on the nature of peer review can be found at here.

"Nature" isn't the only journal experimenting with peer review, but its involvement in the Sigenthaler incident, as well as its high overall profile, makes these experiments interesting.

How does all of this apply to your internal and external technical strategies? How would you like us to follow up on this blog posting with more-formal research?

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The "Associated Press" carried a story on Wednesday relating how Radio Shack fired 400 people via e-mail. My first reaction was, "how dehumanizing!" In earlier positions (pre-Gartner), I've had to lay off people and it was never easy, for anyone. A faceless e-mail, to me, would be a cruel way to handle a layoff. A lot of the blogger buzz reinforced that feeling, but as I dug deeper, two other thoughts hit me. First, I might not be getting the whole story. Second, this may not have been as bad a move as it seemed on first glance. It also got me thinking: Is this the start of a trend?

I read a post by someone claiming to have been laid off. He or she had a very different take:

"…this was handled with complete class and respect for all involved. All employees were told three weeks before that layoffs were being planned, and why. They were then told exactly when they were going to take place and how it would be handled. There was a Web site to ask questions. Yes, employees did get e-mails, but how else can you inform? Come up to us in our cubicles? (No offices.) Call on the phone? We did meet with our function heads, and then met in a larger group, where we were told about the benefits, outplacement and an upcoming job fair. I got to say goodbye to friends, walked out on my own and, while I'm sorry to lose the job, I know I was fairly treated. I'd like you to show me a better process than that. Shame on the Fort Worth paper for making it seem like this was some heartless act."

I haven't called Radio Shack to find out the facts of the matter, but there are some hints in the AP story that support the details in the blog post.

Then, I began to wonder if the detailed process — properly executed — might not be totally acceptable in our "new society," particularly among people far younger than me (I'm 57); people who post, for example, intimate details on MySpace.com or personal pictures (on riya.com). Parenthetically, Riya.com is scary. Per Douglas Rushkoff's article in "Discover" magazine: "Tag enough pictures of yourself or a loved one and the site can then identify those faces when they show up in photos anyone else puts online. Just roll your cursor over a face and Riya will tell you who it is." In its first seven weeks of existence, people uploaded more than 7 million pictures to Riya.com.

So, maybe we are going to see more companies follow the same process that Radio Shack followed — including the e-mail layoff notices.

What do you think? Have you seen firms doing this? If this trend takes off, what else might we expect to see happen?

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On 28 August 2006, Google confirmed yet another rumor as it took the wraps off "Google Applications for Your Domain," an advertising-supported set of tools (such as e-mail, calendaring, voice over IP and Web page authoring) aimed at small firms (see "Enterprise Applications Offer a Glimpse of Google's Ambitions" for the facts and our analysis).

Well, you and I need to get more partisan and do it fast. How long will it be before services like this — from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and others — get rich enough for your CEO to start questioning why you're spending $50,000, $100,000 or $10 million a year on something you could get for free if only people would accept some advertising in the right-hand margin.

Is what we provide to our employees that special that when push comes to shove, you would rather see your firm lay off people instead of using free "Office from the Internet" services?

Have you gotten those calls yet, maybe from the CFO if not the CEO? How long do you think it's going to be before there are stories in first-class, in-flight magazines touting the real savings and, in some cases, the improved accessibility (from anywhere via any device)?

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In my all-too-infrequent spare time, I took up furniture making as a hobby. Yes, it's about as far from IT as you can get! One thing you learn quickly, however, is that it matters very little which brand of tools you buy — good furniture comes from the skill of the maker far more than the tools he or she uses. Anyone involved in a discipline with a high skill content will tell you the same. Sure, a great musician sounds better on a great instrument, but a great instrument certainly doesn't make for a great musician (another hobby gone), and a great musician can make a poor instrument sound pretty good.

So, is there a lesson for the IT organization? Our industry has been obsessively focused on building better products with improved capabilities, improved reliability, reduced costs and so on. IT products were like early automobiles — each one worked differently, required a different set of tools to keep it running and only with a combination of luck and good judgment could you be assured of arriving at your destination. But things do change, products do improve and many IT products are now "good enough" to serve the majority of users most of the time. Just as with automobiles, if you want to set the land speed record or get from zero to 60 in six seconds, then you need something unusual — but most of us don't.

And the consequence — in many, perhaps even most, cases — is that it doesn't matter which product you buy. Spend the minimum amount of time ensuring it does the job you want (don't buy a car if, in fact, you want a truck) and then spend most of your time figuring out how best to use it to achieve the maximum benefit for your business. You should then expect your suppliers to spend a lot less time and energy persuading you that they have more and better features than the other guy and a lot more time helping you take advantage of the features they offer.

So, does this mean the end of competition and product differentiation? Of course not. I can still choose between 10 models of cabinet saw, and I researched carefully before buying one. But having got one, I know that the particular brand and model I chose has no impact on the quality of my furniture. So … back to the wood shavings.

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AOL recently made 19 million AOL search transactions available on the Internet, ostensibly made anonymous by replacing user IDs with a number. That’s not good enough, AOL. A careful examination of the search contents could reveal the identity of some of the apparently not-so–anonymous users. Well, the blogs went wild, excoriating AOL for its inappropriate behavior. AOL apologized. Many people bemoaned the loss of people’s right to privacy. I bemoan it too, but that’s not the point of this posting.

Your employees do business-related searches on the Internet. They are essentially leaking corporate secrets onto the Internet. Their searches could be found and analyzed by a competitor, resulting in your competitor having an upper hand over you in competitive situations.

So what are you going to do about it? Stop them from using the Internet? Create your own Internet crawler and search engine? Or live with it?

Total secrecy is impossible to achieve in a practical way.

There’s a larger lesson here, too. Total control doesn’t make sense in most situations.

What am I missing? Let me know…

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Photosynth caught my eye - and the eyes of lots of other bloggers as well. Announced at SIGGRAPH as a research project (by Noah Snavely and Steve Seitz from the University of Washington, and Richard Szeliski from Microsoft Research), this project impressed me. As an amateur photographer, I've always wanted the ability to feed dozens of pictures into my computer and let it generate a 3D image I could navigate around. If this team can deliver - and deliver it quickly as a part of Microsoft Live — then it'll deliver a few very compelling points. Innovation lives at Microsoft, and Live provides a way for it to get out. Live can compete with a lot of other Internet-based computing models.

This technology can be extremely valuable, not just for photographers, but also for anyone who looks at pictures or needs to communicate graphically or analyze information visually. We need to go beyond the bullet-slide metaphor of PowerPoint and the expanding list model of various reporting tools into more-effective ways to communicate and visualize. Technologies such as those contained in Photosynth could be the start of some new ways of doing this.

So, why would Microsoft give this away via Live? Because it can make more money in the long term providing cloud-based services than it can by selling perpetual use licenses. Do you believe that?

Do you think Microsoft is serious about making Live its leadership platform?

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There is no substitute for face-to-face meetings, either planned or serendipitous. We can build all the fancy real-time and asynchronous tools we want, but none of them are as effective as staring eyeball to eyeball and shaking one another's hand (the rituals may vary by culture but the message is the same).

Taken to its extreme, everyone would work in a single facility — people from every company would be in this one place, "the office." There would be one and only one office. All companies, all contractors, suppliers, distributors, salespeople ans so on would work in the same location so they could get together with whomever they needed to meet for consultation or collaboration.

The extreme case is, of course, absurd. We live (and work) around the globe. We to try to overcome differences in time and space, language and tools, skills and motivation, and other phenomena that intrude in meetings to make them less productive. Technology helps us have (somewhat) effective meetings when we're awake at different hours, working in different geographies and so forth.

Technology helps. But it's not a replacement for face-to-face meetings at the water cooler. (It can even make some face-to-face meetings work better,but that's not the focus here.)

Where has technology failed you?

When do you insist on face-to-face meetings?

Does everyone really need to be in the same office?

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When I talk with customers about how to achieve a high-performance workplace (HPW), one of the hardest things for them to deal with is the need to loosen up on some control issues, and how to do that without losing control completely. This is natural. For the past several years, CEOs and CFOs have been asking CIOs to reduce costs, reduce risk, ensure compliance and generally take tighter control of users. This has resulted in locked-down desktops, strict TCO and ROI procedures, and tight IT procedures all around. The result is that IT has collectively become "The Abominable No Man"’ in many organizations, better at refusing or blocking any initiative than facilitating it.
We cannot stay on this trajectory. The complexity of the business and IT environments is too overwhelming to pursue the myth of total control. There are too many variables and influences to permit anyone to control all inputs. Even if we could, that would be a bad thing. Real innovation is coming from unexpected and not totally understood areas, such as Web 2.0 and consumer-oriented collaboration facilities. To block access to these is counterproductive and, ultimately, futile. Increasingly, many users see access restrictions as similar to network faults: a minor irritation to route around.

Does this mean we should throw open the doors to every virus-laden, spyware-filled download we can find? Or post sensitive information on any blog site we care to? Of course not. Loosening control does not mean giving up all control. It could mean enabling four or five different products in a particular technology area instead of just one (but not any). Innovative IT managers are experimenting with virtualization to shield experimental trials from sensitive corporate processes. In some cases, it will mean trusting employees to do the right thing, something businesses are accustomed to doing in other areas (like contract negotiations or travel expenses), but not done often enough within IT policies.

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