walk

the end of the office... and the future of work

Excerpt from an article in the Boston Globe:

"This shift has begun to trigger a more fundamental examination of what a job is and what we expect to get from it. Despite the vast diversity of the work people do, the traditional notion of a job has tended to be a standard bundle of responsibilities, roles, and benefits: We do our work for an employer to whom we owe our primary professional allegiance, and that employer pays us and provides us health insurance and a sense of professional identity. In the United States, many of the laws that shape health insurance, retirement, and tax policy are structured around this model.

But in a few realms, people have begun to unpack that bundle and reassemble it in new, surprising, and potentially very important ways. As it becomes easier for companies to plug in on the fly to the constantly shifting network of freelance labor, freelance workers have begun to think not in terms of having a job, but of having a collection of different jobs at any one time."

sharepoint 2010 beta 2 released today

Download the PDF poster.

does google wave matter?

Google Wave confuses a lot of folks. What is it? What problem is it trying to solve? I remember hearing similar questions about Twitter and wikis prior to that.

If you don't know what Google Wave is, you can start here: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

I think the technology is really important. Here's 5 reasons why:

1. We want to use collaboration tools without having to launch into the tool. The aggregation of e-mail, IM, discussion threads and apps is useful and inevitable. Why? Time, convenience, usability and power of the exchange.

2. The e-mail pattern is tired and unnecessary. We don't need a send/receive. We want the flexibility to opt-out of conversations that don't need us. Sometimes we need a history of change rather than being forced to make sense of a flat thread.

3. This is more than a messaging revolution. It's application mashup. And the applications can actually be assembled or removed as needed.

Some early samples if Wave and app integration:
Collaborative BPM with SAP Gravity:
Customer Service with Salesforce.com:
Project Collab with Thoughtworks Mingle: http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-agile-project-management/mingle-and-google-wave
Credits: http://mashable.com/2009/09/05/google-wave-ideas/

4. I'm betting that we'll see integration with 3rd party collaboration and document management tools like SharePoint. This would allow people to work where they live and bridge the gap between grass roots technology adoption and corporate objectives (supporting governance and exploiting corporate knowledge).

5. Twitter is used for collaboration or communication around a topic. So are wikis. Blogs are as well. But Twitter is not a rich experience, wikis are impersonal and can be difficult to moderate and blogs don't have enough realtime collaborative power. The potential of participating in solving tough problems around topical areas is exciting.

extra stuff:

Other current bots and utilities:
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