This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 20 Jun 2007, by Ole C Brudvik.
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20 Jun 07
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- Web Office technology will make partnering and out-sourcing more efficient by creating a platform that can seamlessly support virtual ad-hoc teams. Thus, it will quickly reduce your costs.
- If you have any competitors using Web Office technology, they are going to have a significant productivity lead over you. Web Office will be as big and important as email, and you wouldn’t imagine running a business today without email.
- Your new hires are already using this technology. The MBA class of 2006 has lived and breathed the web since they were in high school. If you don’t provide company endorsed solutions, they will end up using tools that are available on the open Internet until you do.
- Most importantly, Web Office will help you to increase the pace of innovation within your organization. As I explained in my last paper “Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators”, constant innovation is the only business strategy capable of producing a stream of above average profits. To achieve constant innovation, senior executives need to bring everyone into the effort. Web Office is the ideal tool to help achieve that goal.
- Web Office is cheap. You will get a lot of bang for your buck.
There are five reasons why any senior executive needs to start thinking about Web Office now:
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None currently offer anything like a complete Web Office solution. But, they have all made a very interesting beginning. One of them could easily be the next Google. The company that wins this space will most likely lead with something that is not already available. An enterprise blog or enterprise Wiki provider is my best guess. The winner will quickly follow this with a widget / badging platform that will give non-technical users the power to quickly and easily create robust highly interactive web based applications.
My guess is this will be built on a Ruby on Rails platform, because Ruby on Rails is so powerful and because Ruby on Rails encourages such radically quick turn around. Currently, 37 Signals and Zoho seem to be furthest along with their Ruby on Rails based technology.
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In fact, some Web Office services, such as social networking services (like LinkedIn) are only possible if a significant portion of the service is run outside company firewalls.
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To come up with innovative ways of organizing the world’s information, Google relies upon its engineers. Google engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time doing whatever they want. Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO has said that every new product in Google comes from the engineers and their 20% free time.
The engineers are so successful because they can use the internal Web Office solutions to quickly find out about interesting side projects to work on, or about the key problems that the company is trying to solve.
In most other firms, only the top executives are focused on trying to address the key strategic problems facing the company. At Google, every single engineer has been asked to contribute to the effort.
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The world’s information is already organized, it’s just that it is poorly organized. Google’s real objective it to constantly come up with new, innovate and better ways of organizing the world’s information.
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Dave Thomas, one of the original signatories to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development has some great advice:
Managers should not treat their employees as equals. Instead, treat them as suppliers. Don’t tell them how to do what you want. Instead, challenge them to provide you with better work products and innovative solutions.
Dave calls it management by intentions. This approach presents an amazing opportunity for a company to increase the pace of internal innovation and to get every member of the organization to focus on the company’s key strategic objectives.
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How do you manage people in this type of environment?
Web Office is going to present a significant challenge for many managers. No longer will they gain power from control of information. Instead, power will go to managers who can cultivate an environment that encourages employees to make the most out of these new tools. Internal entrepreneurs should thrive in this kind of work place.
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The right approach will require a change of mindset, from one that provided solutions to one that provides tools. In addition to providing the infrastructure that will support Web Office, IT will have to change the way it builds systems. Rather than massive solutions it builds today, IT will shift to open, modular systems, with service orientated architectures. This means they will be building lots of little solutions that are designed from the get go to talk with other applications.
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mash-ups show that a business professional with only a little knowledge about a powerful scripting language can build a brilliant new application in just days.
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Today, many knowledge workers feel overloaded because they are forced to react to a constant stream of email, phone calls and instant messages. Email, the phone and instant messaging have one thing in common - they are all push work flows. In other words, they interrupt what you are doing. Theoretically, people can ignore all three, but generally, socially, it is difficult to get away with ignoring all three when you are at the office. Web Office will change that. With Web Office, knowledge workers can pull the information they need when they need it. They can use directories to go straight to the right People Page or Project Page. If that doesn’t work, they can use enterprise search tools. Knowledge workers can also post information, and know that their colleagues will find it when they need it. Gone is the need to blast out an email to everyone in a large group, providing them with information they might need in the future. My colleague, Dan Hoover, puts it this way: “Web Office replaces the current manual processes of reacting to emails, and organizing emails with a system that lets the computer do the filtering and organizing for you.”
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point is everyone can create and sort the content, not just "webmasters" the internet is an extension of our minds, we can’t leave it to corporations to create and organize the content for obvious reasons… all corporations have their vested interests and see the public as consumers, they’d rather you buy something from them, doesn’t matter if its the best or in your best interest or good for your health, etc. the web 2.0 movement has been mostly a public movement
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An example of enterprise blogging:
Image if everyone in your organization had a blog that described them, included their resume, a list of all their skills, and was automatically kept up to date with a list of all the projects they were working on. You could call these types of blogs “People Pages”. That is the beginning of an enterprise blogging solution.Here’s what my team is building for our firm of 130,000 auditors and consultants.
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It’s interesting to note that Web Office is not an AJAX version of Microsoft Office, but instead, is a whole new way of working. So AJAX powered versions of MS Word or Excel are not really needed. And they do not achieve any significant bump in productivity over existing tools because they are not designed to help knowledge workers efficiently communicate with a large audience. Instead, blogs and Wikis will take over that role.
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Web 2.0 in the Workplace – What tools they are going to need?
When the MBA class of 2006 shows up for work, here’s what they’ll expect to find, because this is the list of tools they are already using:
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The technology isn’t the key thing here. Instead, it is the idea that business professionals would want to be able to build their own web based applications. What an amazing notion! The implication is that IT should stop building end solutions that often only frustrate. Instead, IT should build tools that empower knowledge workers to build their own solutions. Here are some examples of how the web is being turned into so much conceptual Lego
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DIY Micro-solutions - aka Mash-ups, Widgets and Badges
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But why stop with news readers? Today’s office tools could be described as write once, search often and cut & paste even more. Web Office is going to change that. People won’t set out to write searchable text when they post to an enterprise blog or Wiki, but the Web Office technology will produce searchable text that can be easily hyper-linked and searched almost as a kind of side benefit. And what an amazing positive externality it is.
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Write Once / Use Often
With enterprise blogs and enterprise Wikis, when you write an article or a post, that information is captured in a structured format. That means it can be turned into many things. For example, most blogging systems, including MovableType and WordPress, will turn your blog posts into a feed.
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Web Office solutions are going to use this new philosophical approach (that the web should be both readable and writable) to redefine how knowledge workers share information. With enterprise blogs and enterprise Wikis, knowledge workers will now have the ability to efficiently communicate with a large audience.
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blogs and Wikis support the distribution of ideas and innovations.
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A new phase in the web means a new phase on your intranet
The movement that is powering all these new technologies is loosely called Web 2.0. For the business world, Web 2.0 means three things.
Read / Write WebRichard MacManus calls his blog “The Read/Write Web”. The name perfectly sums up the new philosophy about the web. People now believe that instead of just surfing the web, users should contribute as much content as they consume.
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The average MBA graduates in 2006 are not just knowledge workers. They are capable of being highly networked internal entrepreneurs and innovation creators. Their ability to connect is not just about email, BlackBerries, text messages and voice-mails. They are intimately familiar with all those tools, but ultimately, expertise with those one-to-one connectivity tools is just the price of admission.
What makes these new graduates so effective is their ability to work efficiently with large virtual teams and their amazing ability to maximize the power of their personal networks.
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It’s not what you know, or who you know… it’s how many people you can reach
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the best content on the internet will be on public social web 2.0 sites like it is now, it will get organized by the public, then on the other hand you’ll have private companies trying to copyright and charge money for information that should be in the publics’ hands…
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