Clarizen: Collaborative Online Project Management for Small-Midsize Businesses

January 30, 2008 at 10:05 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Reviews

I think that project management is one of the killer apps for web 2.0 within the enterprise. It was one of the applications that first excited me about the business potential of web 2.0 (e.g., An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). Clarizen is designed to bring online, collaborative project management solutions to small-midsize businesses (SMBs) so they can manage all of their projects and resources in one place with transparency of web 2.0. This transparency also allows the sharing of projects with team members, partners, vendors and customers.

I recently spoke with Eran Aloni, Vice President of Product Marketing at Clarizen Inc. This company started in Israel but moved to Silicon Valley in June 2007. They have a community of Clarizen blogs, that gives more of the product and company context, Clarizen announced its beta product at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June. The commercial version came out in mid-October. Eran mentioned that most project management tools in the past focused on the planning phase. “You would spend long hours putting together a project plan that often was too rigid to be useful over the duration of the project,” said Aloni. I can relate to this as I have suffered through months of planning and re-planning on enterprise IT projects.

With Clarizen, the focus is on the execution part. While the tool is scalable and can handle complex projects, it is also flexible and makes it easy to start an effort. It can handle efforts like research and development with 100s of tasks and visibility to many people. You can share projects across organizations with security and a permission mechanism. At the same time an individual can see across all the projects they are allowed to view. Despite general Web 2.0 security concerns that some have expressed, it seems to me that tools like Clarizen offer more control over security. This cross-project visibility is much better than trying to share project updates through email, for example.

I saw the interface and it has a nice dashboard that remains consistent as you drill down. It is easy enough for even me to use it, a real test for the business user. You first see across projects and then can look within them to easily see stuff at risk in both a road map and list format. Project notes are wiki like for collaboration and allow for lessons learned. The interface makes it simple for team members to be participants. They can also report progress through email that get integrated into Clarizen through a free application. Clarizen also sends out status email that team members can respond to directly or log into Clarizen for more detail. You can use a draft mode for planning purposes and people are not engaged in the update process until you shift to action mode.

They have created a number or templates, including a professional services template that allows for parallel budget management for billing. The industry specific templates have incorporated industry specific terms. One of the features I most appreciated was the ability to delegate the design and management of project subtasks with Clarizen. You can easily distribute responsibility but the overall project management has visibility and oversight.

I have written in several posts how the transparency of web 2.0 can change behavior. Eran said they he has heard from clients that people like going into the office knowing their tasks are all green and that everyone knows this. It makes good behavior visible. Managers have said they do not have to chase people now for updates. Like Al Essa in the MIT example I referenced at the start of this post, managers are given back much of their day through enterprise tools like Clarizen and can become more coaches and mentors than watch dogs. Automation World and Fast Company, among others, have provided comments on Clarizen and the general improvement of web 2.0 tools.

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Upcoming Webinar: the Future of Work - with Steve King, Josh Holbrook, and Jim Ware

January 30, 2008 at 11:25 am · Filed under Webinar

Join us on Friday, February 8 at 1:00-2:00pm ET for a roundtable-style public conference call in which Steve King, Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future, Jim Ware, co-founder of the Future of Work and a contributor to this blog, and Yankee Analyst Josh Holbrook will discuss the Future of Work and the impact it will have on businesses large and small.

Among the questions they’ll be addressing:

• How will the role of IT change as new work tools become more accessible and computer-savvy college graduates come into the workforce?
• Are we really looking at the end of the Hierarchical Organization?
• What developments will drive the biggest changes on how teams work?
• Have the traditional barriers to adoption of work tools – people, culture, and politics - disappeared?

Join these leading thinkers in the first of what promises to be series of spirited discussions on the Future of Work, the Future of the Office, and the impact on the Future of Businesses.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION to sign up for this free webinar. We will be taking your questions during the live online session or you can also write up your questions ahead of time and post them as a comment to this post.

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Review: With Mindjet MindManager Pro, Say Goodbye To Your Whiteboard

January 30, 2008 at 7:04 am · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Product Management, Reviews

Mindjet MindManager Pro 7

From Mindjet, Inc.; free for 21 days, $349.00 to purchase

Summary: A step-by-step project manager for any size business

Requirements: Windows XP/2003 Server/Vista

Whether you are manager of a corporate department or a small and growing private professional practice, your decision-making workflow probably doesn’t flow all that differently.

I’m anticipating that you identify goals, research and obtain information that will facilitate these goals, organize this information into actionable items, and then communicate these items to your colleagues, staff and business partners.

Mindjet MindManager Pro is a tool that will help you track, and actually map, this data.

With interfaces that don’t look all that different than the multi-function office suite software you probably already are using, Mindjet MindManager Pro is more than just a project manager or scheduler. It comes with map templates, multi-map view options, filtering tools and product alerts that do more than just chart project-related thinking and planning. It helps you along with the actual processes that product management entails.

In that vein, the real utility of this product is its ability to guide you through project management creation slides in a step by step manner. No more whiteboards!

Topics and sub-topic tree structure and navigation is a given, as well as integration with PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel and Word.

MindManager Pro 7 is the newest version of this software. It offers a free, 21-day trial period but costs a one-time $349 fee after that. I predict you will be so hooked, you won’t want to go back to your whiteboard, and will easily find a way to justify the modest expenditure.

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The Collective Intelligence of the (Connected) Organizational Crowd

January 29, 2008 at 10:57 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0

(This is a slightly updated post of a piece I wrote about a year ago.  I think it’s hard enough to realize wisdom at the individual level, let alone groups or crowds, so I have decided to translates Surowiecki’s core concept in The Wisdom of Crowds to address the collective intelligence available in any given "organizational crowd").

The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki.  He delivered the keynote presentation at last November’s KMWorld 2007 (a conference about knowledge management and improving the effectiveness of knowledge work).

Yes, everyone gets the concept stated by the title.  Regardless of whether they agree with Surowiecki or not, there’s a fundamental attraction, and empirical evidence, to the concept.  A crowd, faced with a question or a problem, or an idea, is made up of a wide range of different diverse people with as many perspectives as there are people.  Yet there often seems to be a wisdom, a coalescing of sense, that can be deduced or extracted, or "consensed" from the crowd using a range of known processes.  In a given process, the crowd takes on a consciousness, and adopts a perspective or a position on an issue, which represents its ‘wisdom".

The workforce in any given organization is a crowd of sorts (a crowd that is likely to be more homogenous than a general crowd, to be sure, and the constraint of some homogeneity plays into the rest of my thinking, as I hope will be evident).  Organizations have cultures, and can even be said to have personalities that flow from or are representative of that culture, as individuals in the organization act outwards towards customer, suppliers, vendors and other external stakeholders.

Indeed, many organizations go to significant lengths to ensure that their workforces are aligned, on the same page, hold a shared vision, speak as one .. you get the picture (or the vision, so to speak ;-).

And the inspiration, the catalyst, the creator  enabling the construction of that shared vision, the alignment, the culture in which the vision takes shape and is made manifest, is the job of the leader or (more common today) the leadership team.

But .. and here is where it gets interesting for me .. there is a significant tension in this process between structurally-induced learned behaviours and the sense people have of engaging and channeling the energy of a culture.

For quite a few years now there have been sustained and often clarion-like calls for the development of learning organizations, for changes to fundamental assumptions and models of leadership and effective management .. and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars spent on culture change initiatives, coaching, increased effectiveness at internal communications .. you know it, I know it and employees all over North America and western Europe know it.

There have been scads of organizational development and organization change books trumpeting the need and one way or another that this is accomplished under a great leader or a magnificent leadership team.  There are competency models galore, climate and culture surveys, and a wide range of other assessment, diagnostic and developmental tools and processes aimed at "harnessing the employees’ and the organization’s potential".

The structure of most organizations of any size is still clearly hierarchical, and it is the rare "authentic" or natural leader that possesses, finds or grows in him or herself the wisdom to bring humility, purpose, values, clarity and inclusive decision-making to the challenging role of creating  and leading a responsive, adaptable and effective organization.  Jim Collins codified these rare qualities in a concept and articles about "Level Five Leadership", which was a featured central article in the Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Leadership issue. 

When going back into that literature or that field, the fundamentals I have always returned to  are the key points of humility and listening.

And I think that there’s the rub, and the lesson on offer with the possibilities of acknowledging and working to access the wisdom "collective intelligence" of the organizational crowd.

Most leaders, executives and senior managers are still of an age where they have been steeped in industrial-era management science assumptions, and they have reached the levels of senior decision-making and leadership with the help of the models of leadership and management effectiveness that preceded this digital and hyperlinked environment that includes the Internet and wide, deep and rapid access to information and other people.

They are to inspire culture, shape and direct the organization’s personality (expressed through its service and execution) and use power, access knowledge and acumen wisely.  But most still (and it may only be semi-consciously) know best how to operate top-down, even if their personal leadership or management style is not coercive or directive (note:  leadership & management styles and the related competency models come today mainly from David McLelland’s seminal work at Harvard in the ’60’s on Power (P), Achievement (Ach) and Affiliation (Aff), said to be the three motivational drivers common to all people in a workplace setting).

By and large, the people in today’s organizational structures charged with the accountability for leading to results, still like and know how to use the power of hierarchy … and let’s please remember that regardless of the relatively rapid changes in the fields of leadership development (viz. Level Five Leadership and Breakthrough Leadership, noted above .. or even Buckingham’s "First, Break All The Rules"), not so very much has changed. 

Notwithstanding Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence work and more recently, more from him on Social Intelligence ( derived from the basic constructs developed by David Mclelland, noted above), there remains in my opinion fundamental dissonance between these critical human attributes, the actual dynamics that demonstrate their use, and the social architecture in which they are used (the organization’s structure).   The concepts and the words in the latest and greatest competency models may have changed, the coaches and professional leadership developers will have trotted them out, and you can’t get onto an airplane and look at the magazines without some article about the "new leadership", but the banal reality is that most compensation philosophies and methods and performance management scheme objectives have not.  Yes, these leaders and managers will have performance objective related to the new competency models, and yes, there will be invoices from consultants to show that the leaders and senior managers have been trained during the last twelve months, but … the basic dominant organizational structure of today still mitigates against the use of these relatively new concepts.

Enter social software .. blogs, wikis and various widgets (like IM interfaces that help people connect, converse, swap ways of doing things and feedback from colleagues and customers … giant, wide always-coursing feedback loops that will not be stopped.

What of the wisdom collective intelligence of the interconnected of the organizational crowd ?

Well, in spite of more than a decade of much work by many organizations that have involved themselves in much more inclusive, organizational democracy-oriented initiatives, it only takes a little bit of perceived ambiguity, loss of perceived control, shifts in markets or constituents … and control-oriented hierarchy usually reasserts itself very quickly.

Don’t believe me ?  Read The Economist’s The New Organization, published 24 months ago (damn, it’s now behind a pay wall.  I must have linked to it one too many times

We’ve probably all worked in jobs in sizeable hierarchical organizations.  We know that many, if not most, people who work want to do a good job and also know a lot about what’s really going on - in the company, in its industry, in its markets, in the world out there and in the world they inhabit daily.

We also know that there is indeed something … something tangible, observable, useful and able to be developed and put to use … to the notion of the wisdom collective intelligence contained in and offered up by crowds when faced with an issue.

I and many others have maintained for a long time now that the adroit, open and sincere use of social software in an organization, and the listening and the tapping into wisdom … the wisdom of a given organization’s crowd … will help leaders and managers develop and grow as quickly, or more so, into leaders who do not rely on charisma or positional power or coercion or dishonest political manipulation, but rather face and embrace the crowd they are part of with humility. 

The job of a leader in today’s hyperlinked and transparent organizational world is to instantiate the crowd’s wisdom with a clearly-stated and purposeful mission and objective, and then listen .. and this is where social software can shine, can replace or augment even the most sophisticated culture or internal communications surveys and diagnostics.  It can help leaders and managers learn to really listen, and to respond in intelligent and mature ways to the conversations that will carry the wisdom collective intelligence of the organizational crowd. It can help them engage with that wisdom intelligence through leading and managing by blogging around (blogging around being the virtual electronic equivalent of "walking around" from the famous MBWA meme).

These days (and certainly "tomorrow") it’s less and less about charisma, command and control, and more and more about conversations and championing, catalyzing and coordinating the wisdom collective intelligence of any given organizational crowd (and increasingly that crowd includes the customers, the suppliers, the vendors .. the whole shebang).

Tags: The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, David Mclellan, Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Marcus Buckingham, Euan Semple, hierarchy, wirearchy

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Restoring the Meaning of Virtual Collaboration

January 29, 2008 at 9:20 am · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Virtual Environments

Bill Ives posted about Virtual Environments for Business: Unisfair a few days ago, commenting on the emergence of a new style of trade show. I have myself recently been delighted about MPK20, Sun’s Virtual Workspace, which I read about first in a CIO.COM article.

“MPK” is Sun Microsystems designation for the buildings on its Menlo Park campus. There are 19 buildings of brick and mortar. MPK20 is the building where the virtual teams meet to collaborate, to bump into colleagues serendipitously, and to have meetings. Project Wonderland, as it is called, offers a really special glimpse into what is possible in the development of applications that support human interaction in a virtual space.

Demos guided by Nicole Yankelovich include a walkthrough of the the “Virtual Workspace” that illustrates a virtual team room, offices, a meeting room, and a relaxation space. What impressed me the most was the way in which the workspace is designed to enable people to collaborate on content. I captured a screen from the video file that shows Nicole and a colleague editing a Powerpoint presentation in virtual space.

We have long been used to the terms “virtual team” and “virtual collaboration” to mean the work of people who do not happen to be sitting together even though (to my mind) they are really collaborating. Seeing Nicole and Joe collaborate in a truly virtual environment indicates that perhaps the term virtual, as we have been using it, was merely an intimation of the office of the future.

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Tomoye: Bringing Web 2.0 to Communities of Practice

January 28, 2008 at 5:48 pm · Filed under Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Reviews

Communities of practice have been around a while, and so has the software platforms to support them. They were one of the first inroads of social software within the enterprise. I recently talked with Eric Sauve, CEO and Co-Founder, at Tomoye, a Communities of Practice Platform. Tomoye has been in this space for 8 years. Ecco is their flagship product and they are planning a new release later this quarter. As Eric said, they started long before it was cool to discuss the social dimension of the enterprise. Their market remains within the enterprise but they have now incorporated many of the innovations of web 2.0 into their platform. They have also worked to bring these new features in a way that reflects their relatively long experience with the business side of social software.

Many of the new enterprise 2.0 tools are focused on team collaboration and project management and execution. Tomoye is different as it maintains its focus on the extended group/ community collaboration that is more theme based that project based. The wikipedia defines the concept of communities of practice as “the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations.” Sounds like a great task for enterprise 2.0.

As Tomoye has made the transition into enterprise 2.0, that have brought their process approach. While the platform supports broader themes, it is also designed to help participants reach answers and network. Eric contrasted social forums with no focus on one extreme and content management systems with no engagement on the other. Tomoye provides more structure and support for facilitation to better enable communities to reach decisions that align with business goals and policies.

The buzz around web 2.0 has created a better educated consumer within the enterprise for what they offer. It has also set higher expectations for what community of practice platforms should provide. Web 2.0 puts more control into the hands of users and increases transparency. In some cases, Tomoye has renamed existing functions to fit the web 2.0 terms and in other cases they have realigned functions and added new functionality. In the first instance, Tomoye has had wiki like functionality for some time as part of its collaborative discussion features. Now they have explicitly called this out.

In second instance, they have added features such as the ability to rate documents, questions, and answers to allow for more user involvement. They support blogs and added the ability to automatically embed discussion items within blogs to generate more discussion. There is also social networking, expertise location, tagging, page rank, open APIs, and syndication.

Eric showed me show it works. The interface includes a community home page and three additional tabs. First, there are documents and videos. The documents include wikis and allow for discussion around the documents. The videos work similar to YouTube. The next tab brings in questions and answers. You can see them by themes, people, and most recent. For each Q&A pair, you can tag them, subscribe to updates, email them, edit, and blog them, as well as mark as a favorite. You can see the rankings of answers, as well as who are the most highly rated suppliers of answers.

The next tabs brings experts and members by themes, areas, titles, location and offers a link to the Facebook style personal profiles of individuals. There you find many social networking features including their latest activities, who is in their network, the files they are sharing, the first page of their blog, and their community affiliations. The system is .net based so it hooks with Sharepoint. The open APIs allow for mashup integration.

Tomoye has 250,000 deployed users. They also offer consulting services to help you get started since this is about much more than software. It is nice to see a long time enterprise social platform make the transition to enterprise 2.0.

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A Glimpse at the Workplace of The Future

January 25, 2008 at 1:52 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 2.0, Web Apps

(Editorial note: the original of this blog post was written in 2004, and I have not included in it the growing influence of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics, though it is clearly alluded to in the notions of ubiquitous connectivity and ’smartware’)

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The workplace of the future will be surrounded by smart software, and full of people for whom interconnectedness is a given. How will the nature of work change?

Fundamental assumptions create beliefs, which shape what we do. A dominant set of beliefs creates what we call a ‘paradigm’. Many people have recognized that a paradigm shift is occurring as we move from the Industrial Age to the networked-and-hyperlinked Information Age.

While many of the factors and trends are already apparent in the work world today, using them as fundamental assumptions about the emerging future can help to address their growing impact on peoples? work lives and the ways we adapt to their presence.
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1. Interconnectedness between people and between businesses will continue to grow. Being ‘connected’ in a ubiquitous sense is rapidly becoming more familiar to more people. Access to the Web, and the applications on it, will become easier and easier to use.

It looks like a tsunami coming. Globally, three times as many people are forecasted to be on-line in the year 2003 (that forecast was essentially correct) relative to the number of people on-line at the end of the year 2000. Web applications will more and more often reflect the intersection of human and work activities, and will touch virtually every domain of activity (since the original sentence was written, the arrival of Web 2.0 has come into general awareness).

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2. ‘Smartware’ (smart software) applied to work activities will become ubiquitous for virtually all types and aspects of work. The effects of ’smartware’ applied to work will continue to change the fundamental nature of knowledge work, and increase the polarization currently occurring in the work economy.

At one pole, the ‘dematerialization’ of work (less manufacturing, more information and knowledge) will create ever-higher levels of creative, imaginative and specialized knowledge work. Highly-focused service work will be based on conversations, meetings and negotiations in which people leverage knowledge, money, power (by virtue of controlling something) or time.

At the other pole, legions of low-skilled service work such as customer service, data entry, sales service and semi-skilled trades work will be supported by smart tools. This type of work will become essentially disposable in nature, in the sense that it will matter little who does the work. This statement is not meant to be cruel - rather it is just an observation about what can be seen happening all around us.

Between these two poles, work will tend to migrate towards one or other of the poles, e.g., skilled trades or teaching school. A school teacher will be supported to significant extents through the use of ’smartware’ and smart tools, as will a technician or a machinist. However, the nature of the work will depend upon the context of the organization and the systems, tools and culture of the specific industry business or workplace.

It will become critically important to clarify the context with which to use ’smartware’ and smart tools. The tools will become important participants in this process - using them will demand clarification of the context, or the tools themselves will help to clarify and revise the context(s).
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3. The ‘line-of-sight’ between the customer, employees’ work and the company’s strategic objectives will be essential, and very complex in some types of work. An employee’s work will need to address the dynamic of mass customization (an individual’s specific skills and personality will need to mesh with highly-structured work processes and information systems).

The other type of work will be niche-based - very narrowly defined and serving a specific need, e.g., you’ll go to the dentist for dental work. And the dentist will offer you an extensive range of services, in various bundles to create packages of value (value bundling).

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4. Tomorrow’s knowledge-work employees will be smart, assertive and questioning of inappropriate or uniformed authority. This sharpens the game for senior managers / executives and makes the notion of coaching (or champion-catalyze-and-coordinate instead of command-and-control) very real.

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5. Jobs/roles will change continuously.  The focus for designing work will be blending the skills and strategic capabilities that an organization (in the present) either chooses to pursue strategically or must pursue to stay in the game.

Jobs/roles will become fluid and unbundled (into price-sensitive sets of skills). The tools to do this are currently being built, and work is increasingly being described this way (except in the Public Sector). Personal learning contracts and brief bullet-point lists of skills and competencies are on their way to becoming the job description of 2010. This dynamic will continue to grow in importance because younger workers have been told to prepare for this for at least the last fifteen years.

Restructuring and downsizing have become regular and accepted fluid dynamics of life in organizations. It is already a common feature of the corporate landscape, and it will become an accepted ?fact of life?.

6. Most of the necessary ’smartware’ to create all this already exists. New and better applications will appear continuously. The key limiting factor will be an organization’s willingness and/or courage to use them. This will depend on the awareness and openness of senior managers / executives regarding:

· Real willingness to invest in letting smart people use the tools and an interconnected social web of knowledge-building to their full potential.

· The ability of this group to share power, in a real and meaningful sense. The legacy of structural hierarchy, and the manifestations of power and control embedded in our understanding of how to lead and how to manage, have created a real rigidity with respect to the unlocking of potential implicit in the concept of Human Capital.

· The ability of the ‘top’ group to change deeply-ingrained behaviour patterns (see above) and ‘champion, catalyze and  and coordinate’ people to focus on the line-of-sight link between customers’ needs and an organization’s strategic objectives.

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All of the factors outlined above, and doubtless others which we don’t yet recognize or understand, will continue to re-shape the world of work and organizations in ways that we haven’t yet foreseen.
What is certain is that the near-DNA levels of attitudes that we have collectively held will not serve us well in the future. Flexibility, creativity, authenticity - and their opposites such as continual stress, the need to have clear structure, and protective territoriality - will all be key forces in shaping the future of work.

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Tags: workplace of future, Web 2.0, learning, interconnectivity, hierarchy, organizational design, work design, digital natives, digital immigrants

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Virtual Environments for Business: Unisfair

January 25, 2008 at 10:16 am · Filed under Reviews

I am pleased to join this blog and work with such an experienced group of colleagues, many I have known for some time and the others I look forward to meeting. I will be mainly focusing on applications of the new web for business. This first post is on an exciting application that brings a successful web consumer technology into the business world.

We have had virtual meetings for a long time. Then Second Life changed the playing field with virtual worlds. A number of large corporations began investing in their Second Life sites. First it was stuff like hotels. Then the marketing guys got involved and virtual worlds replicated conferences. Exhibits and show rooms sprung up on Second Life islands. This business impact was most likely not an original goal of Second Life, just another example of a web 2.0 tool being pushed beyond its original intentions because of the transformational nature of the new web.

But then there are always problems with pushing a product beyond its goals. In Second Life you have to build a lot of stuff and likely hire some expensive graphics people to do it. Even then your audience is likely to be the 10 million or so who are already on Second Life. That may be fine for some products like the Toyota Scion to be in Second Life as it is kind of weird anyway. What about the average business conference attendee? They will not want to have to download a large application, create an avatar, learn commands, and all the other requirements to entering Second Life.

I recently talked with Don Best, of Unisfair, a company that is creating virtual environments designed explicitly for business clients. They have created the ability to create virtual environments with ease of use for the business participant. I asked how this is different from webinars. Don explained that a webinar is more like a single one-to-many presentation with a speaker and participants who can ask questions, etc. What Second Life offered was actual virtual worlds. Now Unisfair has adopted the concept for business events. They state that if you can create it in the physical world, they can replicate it in the virtual world.

So Don took me on into a virtual environment set up for trade event for National Instruments. The company used to do a 18-city road show that drew about 100 people per stop. In May they did a one day virtual event for their US audience that drew 2,000 “live” participants and then was available on demand for another 90 days. It worked well so they did another for their European audience in November.

The virtual environment I saw had three main components, a conference hall (where sessions were held), an exhibit hall, and a resource center to collect and download stuff from the conference. You can also network with other attendees who have similar interests. In the exhibit hall, booths are staffed by actual (virtual) people standing by during the live event to answer questions. Even when the event goes to on-demand status you can ask questions and get responses. The booth staff also know that you have entered their booth so they can ask you questions based on your profile. They actually have a head start on the staffer in the physical world who cannot read a visitor’s mind. All the stuff normally found in the exhibit booth is there, including the gifts.

Now this does not get you to exciting places like Orlando or Vegas as a business expense but then firms can eliminate that cost and the environment stays greener. The green benefit extends to both reduced travel and all the physical stuff that gets thrown away at these events. In some other ways it is better than the “real” thing since you and the sponsors have much more accessible records of what happen. You can build a profile and search and meet people with your interests. Simultaneous sessions are not a problem. The sponsors can see all the things you did, at least the online part. What happens here does not stay here. But, if used properly this is a good thing. A recent article in the New York Times, Cyberspace Trade Shows Bring Action to the Desktop, provides examples of increased sales leads for sponsors of virtual events at reduced costs.

I can also see internal uses for global enterprises. They have already been used for job fairs. The Unisfair website provides an example of the format including a resource center where I got the NYT piece. I think there is a lot of promise here. One of the tricks to making it work will be the proper management of all the data collected and the appropriate facilitation of social networking. These virtual events will never completely replace physical events for certain situations but they offer a very useful alternative and add to the richness to the new web, as well as offering another way to help the environment. It is one more consumer web idea that has crossed over to the business side.

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Understanding the Hidden Economy

January 22, 2008 at 8:38 pm · Filed under Communities, Distributed Work, Economic Development, Talent Management, Web Commuting

This note is adapted from an article I co-authored a while back with my business partner Charlie Grantham.

By way of introduction, the two of us co-founded the Work Design Collaborative in 2001. WDC in turn formed and still manages the Future of Work network - a consortium of firms dedicated to understanding and creating workplaces and work environments that are productive and personally satisfying - all in the context of the changing nature of work, the workforce, and all those technologies that are both driving and enabling change.

Lately we’ve become very focused on the communities in which people live and work (partly because we’ve discovered that in order to attract and retain talent organizations have to “go” where the talent is - at least virtually). And because so much work can be conducted just about anywhere, anytime, our clients are having to learn how to manage distributed teams, remote workers, and mobility. That’s got huge implications for corporations, but it also creates new challenges and new opportunities for local communities as well.

Enough with the preface. Here’s our analysis of why the “hidden economy” has become so important to the future of both organizations and communities.

Lately we’ve been paying a lot of attention to how local communities are coping with the new information-based global economy. The “new rules” for success are creating significant opportunities (and threats) not only for business organizations but for local communities and the governing bodies that run them.

We’ve written about many of these shifts fairly frequently over the past couple of years (see “Business Community Centers as Third Places,” “The Future of Work and Economic Development,” and “We Need a Department of Social Capital,” for example), but recently we’ve become much more aware of the impact of the so-called “new economy” on these local communities.

Think about the following hypothetical scenario: Anytown USA has suffered significantly over the past decade as several mid-sized manufacturing operations closed their doors (either for good, or to relocate south of the border). The population is shrinking, and the folks who are left are having a tough time making ends meet. To make matters worse, the reduced tax base means the schools have had to make severe budget cuts, and even the “big box” retailers on the outskirts of town are hurting. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for optimism.

Anytown is located in a wonderful valley, with nearby summer hiking, swimming, and fishing as well as winter skiing, and it has always been a popular place to live, but now its future feels pretty bleak.

Then something strange and unexpected happens. Without any planning on the town fathers’ part, the population begins to grow again. There are more young families in the neighborhoods and more kids in the schools. The grocery stores and the local shopping centers are experiencing sales growth again. Yet there are virtually no new businesses in town. While retail tax revenues are rising, property taxes haven’t grown much at all.

What’s going on? In a word (or two), Anytown is benefiting from what our friend and colleague Amy Zuckerman calls the “hidden economy” (see her Hidden-Tech website for details).

Those young families moving into Anytown are predominantly Internet-savvy professionals who have set up home offices and are fully employed as software engineers, call-center specialists, marketing consultants, technical writers, lawyers, accountants, and virtual assistants. But their employers aren’t located in Anytown; they are based all over the country (and even outside the United States).

Anytown is a perfect example of what an information-based economy is like. You can’t really see the work that’s being done every day; and it doesn’t take a freight train or a UPS truck to export the finished “product.” The “hidden economy” is generating work and wealth without any visible impact on the community – no traffic congestion, no air pollution, no ugly industrial buildings along the railroad tracks. Unfortunately, however, this “new economy” usually doesn’t bring much in the way of additional property taxes for the local government, since the “invisible” work being done in all those home offices is also pretty well-hidden from the tax rolls. Sure, these good citizens and breadwinners are paying all their federal and state taxes, but the local folks hardly know they’re there.

What makes all this interesting – and important – is that these “free agents,” entrepreneurs, and remote employees of large organizations based elsewhere are essentially “exporting” their services outside the local economy – thereby importing income that they then spend locally on food, clothing, toys for their kids, home improvements, recreation, restaurants, and all the other necessities of life.

It’s powerful operating model that is beginning to turn our economy upside down. As we’ve written elsewhere, much of the population growth in the United States these days is occurring in what the census bureau now calls “micropolises”: smaller cities and regional areas with populations between 50,000 and 100,000. High-speed broadband Internet access puts those smaller communities right on a par with the New Yorks, Chicagos, LAs, Dublins, and Bangalores of the world.

And for many professionals (not all, but a growing number of them), these micropolises are much more attractive places to live and work and raise their families than the big, older cities that have dominated our economy for the last century (there are rebirths going on in many urban neighborhoods as well, but our focus here is on the smaller towns and cities).

Our little story of Anytown describes a community that simply “lucked out” because of some attractive living conditions (recreation, decent schools, low housing costs). But the real message here is that local officials and economic development specialists can actually drive this kind of rebirth with some thoughtful planning and appropriate decisions that make their community more attractive to knowledge workers.

When we work with folks in communities like Anytown we encourage them to look at a number of critical factors that increase their attractiveness to the creative class:

• high-quality local schools, including a local community college or a branch of a state university;
• the existence of a true “downtown” area that’s easy to walk to and includes a good mix of restaurants, business services (accountants, office supplies, computer stores, print shops, mailing services, and so on), and retail stores;
• support for the arts and cultural activities;
• good recreational opportunities; and
• the willingness of local public officials and business leaders to collaborate in creating and maintaining a desirable place to live and work.

Our work often involves conducting market research studies to estimate the size of the “hidden economy” along feasibility studies to explore the possibility of forming a Business Community Center^tm to support the small businesses and remote workers whose success is so critical to the local economy .

Insanity has often been defined as doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. We think it’s time for local officials to stop chasing the old industrial model of offering incentives to bring blue collar jobs to town. That’s crazy in today’s economy; it’s time to recognize that there’s a new path to economic viability.

That path is called the Information Economy, and it’s a marvelous opportunity for local economic development. But it clearly requires you to rethink just about all of your assumptions about what drives economic growth. It’s not jobs per se, it’s creating a community that is so attractive to well-educated knowledge workers that they’ll come, settle down, and bring their work with them. They’ll then begin exporting their services while they import their income to your town. This is truly a case of “If you build it, they will come.”

When you really think about it, it’s a pretty simple equation. But it’s a new kind of math.

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The Changing Enterprise

January 21, 2008 at 8:30 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

I thought I’d begin my posting to the AppGap by listing some themes that I thinking about. As our conversation on the future of work evolves, I will revisit these themes. Do you agree with these? Have these always mattered? Are these important? You tell me.

1. Organizations are becoming more porous than we could have ever imagined. We’re learning much more from our customers than ever before. As a result, collaboration tools within organizations are often about connecting employees with customers and not just to other employees. In a sense, an enterprise solution doesn’t just include the enterprise anymore as the definition of an enterprise is broadening.

2. We’ve finally realized human insights are more valuable than anything that an encyclopedia or a library can offer. Within enterprises, we’re now focusing more attention on connecting with one another versus simply trying to get connected to information. This is because we use each other as filters through which we understand information. Information is free and accessible but knowing what is important is harder. This is why social networks within and outside the enterprise matter more than ever.

3. The consumer and enterprise worlds continue to collide. Design philosophies that drive consumer experiences matter increasingly in the enterprise too. Just look at the number of organizations that have successfully launched mini-wikis within their organizations borrowing the Wikipedia model. Our next challenge? To make our enterprise solutions so compelling that the consumer world can learn from them.

4. Enterprises want to focus on their core competencies again. Delivering solutions as a service over the web is gaining more momentum everyday (software as a service). Companies want to simplify their IT infrastructures and want consulting firms to help them figure out how they should be working in the future. These companies like light, hosted web applications that don’t require huge server investments. More enterprise solutions whether they be intranets, extranets or digital dashboards will be delivered as services. That’s why Microsoft is investing so heavily in its hosting business. Clients don’t want the infrastructure in house.

5. And finally the desktop and the web are finally blurring. We’re reaching a point where every computer interaction you have will be an Internet component to it. This doesn’t mean you’ll be using a browser all the time. It means that you maybe working in Microsoft Office or in Excel or with a blackberry but pulling data from the web or pushing data to the web in real time. As an office worker, you will choose the interface that you’re most comfortable with and through that you’ll interact with the Internet and other people on it - whether they be co-workers, business partners or your customers.

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