Office 2.0 Panels

So far, I find myself waiting for the post-document, post-email, post-information-age, post-knowledge-management vision to emerge at Office 2.0. So, here's what I think Office 2.0 is not:

• It's not about productivity -- personally, I'm willing to swap productivity for connectedness everytime. As a result, I keep my IM clients open even in meetings, while I am on the phone, and while working on client work.
• It's not about being "dead easy" -- some things are necessarily complex, and if you try to simplify them you wind up with something that is unusable: for example, textile is easy but leads to badly formatted text.
• It's not about better knowledge management -- social apps allow us to learn what others think, but not manage what they think.

It's the post-everything economy, and none of the old information-age metaphors are adequate. In a transitional era like this we will still think about artifacts like documents, and not about relationships. We are still talking about business processes instead of conversations.

What comes after documents and email, and the browser/client duality? What is the next metaphor, or suite of interlinked metaphors, that will replace these transitional forms?

tags: office+2.0, post+document, post+everything+economy

Comments

[Jevon]

Stowe, you aren't the only one in this rowboat. You basically summed up my feelings from so far today

Everyone is obsessed with all these new features, all this glitter.

Going further, it's pretty obvious that Office 2.0 as we are seeing it so far is nothing new at all. It's just a little prettier, and a hell of a lot slower.

What is new comes from a totally different diction.

Instead of word processing, we have half baked ideas in a post

Instead of "collaboration" we have ad hoc groups of relevant individuals in an organization.

Instead of individuals (and all the extra special integratedfederatedcrosssitelogin features) we have collective intelligence.

Office 2.0 as it stands won't change the world -- and I'm not sure that we should be happy if we don't change the world -- because we are on to something.

[leisa.reichelt]

how about a link to http://www.office20podcasts.com/
;)

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

I've commented on that before - but I'll try to add some more arguments this time. The connectivity versus productivity is a false dichotomy - connectivity does not decrease your personal productivity - it increases it. That's true that being interrupted in some deep thinking loop is bad for productivity - but on the other side having the right information at the right time more than covers this cost. Just yesterday I've read somewhere that the fact that team members know each other for a long time is a very important factor in the team productivity. With IM you create your own private team that can work together for years - because it's pretty independent from physical location of it's participants.

[Lars Plougmann]

The next metaphor is the Snippet

[Tara Hunt]

LOL. Panels are like death.

Yes. I agree 100%. On my boring panel about Evangelizing 2.0, I just kept repeating: "Why do we keep talking enterprise this and that when I believe the whole nature of work is changing."

I mean, really, the tools that are flourishing all around us are those that are downplayed and run second fiddle to the communities that are interacting and making them flourish. YouTube isn't about the technology. Flickr? Nope.

Yet, there was all of this talk about selling blogs and wikis into the enterprise, but having to be concerned about some security compliance garbage. IMHO, this whole boom is about embracing the chaos and getting away from the top-down control issues of the past.

I think everyone there is in store for a rude awakening.

[Chris Heuer]

Tara - this was a largely enterprise foused conference, with the stated intention of reviving the idea behind the "Network Computer" - seemingly in the world of work aka Office (though I can see where some of the materials were a bit vague or seemingly more generally Web 2.0 focused than enterprise - but from the first impression at the party, it was obvious this was the enterprise show 2.0)

That "security compliance garbage" is probably Sarbanes Oxley or its kin (I missed your session so can't say firsthand) - the sort of thing that really sucks time, money and energy, but is nonetheless the sort of thing you probably would be demanding to ensure corporate accountability and fair disclosure. So that is a real world requirement that must be faced and can not be dismissed offhand with such disdain in a big corporation. (which is quite different than the free agent nation you know)

Yes, the world is flat and chaordic models are proving to be more valuable, but change takes time and the top down control hierarchies are not going to disappear overnight (I hope they dont at least, the world would not be far behind if it did). The people in that world and that control model will evolve when smart, passionate people engage them with respect as the humans they are rather than the enemy certain evangelists paint them to be. Remember, you need to be a PART of the community to make real change, you can't just impose your own values on it like a "SeaGull Consultant".

Stowe, this is the best point I have read about the conference so far - had those 2 days been more focused on the forward thinking questions you pose above, everyone would be the better for it. Perhaps we can do a simple event at CNet on this discussion one night - get Rafe to host or something?

I think documents and files stay (conversations get added) but I think the real shift will happen when we embrace Insights as the common currency of the Knowledge Economy with the relationships between them described in the meta layer containing the ultimate value. That meta layer is different depending on who is viewing 'it'. This is a small part of the fundamental principles behind one of the software ideas I would like to develop. I guess the Insyte could be considered a snippet, but that language does not feel powerful enough - the Insyte is that pearl of wisdom that makes all the difference to the success of a project or product.

[David Mantripp]

"IMHO, this whole boom is about embracing the chaos and getting away from the top-down control issues of the past."

Sorry, but this is just ridiculous. People do not, on the whole, like chaos. Neither do they like totalitarian control. The trick is to find the balance. The stakeholders in Enterprise IT are diverse and complex. Certainly it is a breeding ground for idiots, but to be honest, what area of IT isn't ? (including Whatever 2.0). If you seriously want to change things for the better (and what are your motives for that ?) then you have to understand and empathise with the envronment you want to change. There is certainly a great deal of scope in providing enterprises with a new IT infrastructure within which social tools play a big part, but these, and any software, only suceeds if it is aligned with people's real world needs and requirements. And Sarbanes Oxley, ISO 9001, etc etc are real world requirements, from which the end results actually have a real-world benefit on all of us. You want Boeing to embrace chaos ? I don't.

Comments like that are a gift to those in Enterprise IT who seek to resist change.