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Toward The Information Workplace

Within the last few years, innovative software companies have recognized that document management, portals and collaboration were highly synergistic tools that should be implemented together. Now, something bigger than convergence is happening, which will totally redefine the world of work. This "Information Workplace" is born of massive technology convergence and embodies new notions of trust, openness, mobility, roles, business process and context-also making privacy and security key concerns (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The IT Workplace is Born of Massive Technology Convergence

Users Don't Know What They're Missing

It's ironic that knowledge workers express high levels of satisfaction with current tools. In December, 2005, Forrester surveyed 540 IT executives at North American small and mid-sized businesses. We found the vast majority of IT executives believe their organization does a good job improving workforce productivity. And the majority of knowledge workers participating in Forrester surveys over the past two years say they are more satisfied than not with their desktop technologies and enterprise or employee portal.

IT believes it is doing a good job of improving workforce productivity (see The Information Workplace, Figure 2). Why? Most workers compare today's tools against yesterday's rather than envisioning new possibilities. In fact, while today's knowledge worker tools are vast improvements over the tools used 20 years ago, they are still profoundly deficient. Today's tools don't manage the barrage of inputs from communication and information channels and don't help people organize or communicate their thoughts in a natural way. The tools don't model the way people think-leading to distraction, frustration, and loss of productivity. Instead, today's tools:

  • Are disjointed, fragmented, and stovepiped. Most workers use separate tools for emailing, instant messaging, finding contacts, scheduling and participating in meetings, creating and editing documents, participating in business processes, learning new software, and communicating via voice.
  • Require users to step outside business processes. Users must frequently exit their business processes to look for information or help, and to access collaboration and document management tools.
  • Are single mode only. Even in today's mobile world, most communication and collaboration devices are separate. Too often workers pick up a telephone handset or mobile phone to make a call and then launch software on another device to email or instant message (IM) someone.

Plus, today's tools are targeted mostly at office workers. Information work is rapidly expanding to include people who work most of the time with other people (like salespeople and physicians) or in the physical world (such as pilots and factory workers). People in all jobs will be served by the Information Workplace, which Forrester defines as:

A digital workplace that provides seamless, multi-modal, contextual, mobile, and right-time access to people, content, data, voice, business processes and e-learning through portals, collaboration, workflow, content repositories, analytics, taxonomies, search, enterprise rights management, and other emerging technologies.

Economic And Business Shifts Drive Major Changes In Work

As the globe continues to shrink, workers need to communicate effectively with more people - inside and outside the organization - who are in different buildings, transportation modes, time zones, and countries. The Information Workplace is becoming critical as business boundaries blur, the traditional office disappears, more baby boomers work part time, and next generation workers enter the workforce with sky-high expectations of technology.

The Information Workplace will provide a holistic environment that is:

  • Seamless. Users get information they need at the right time with minimal effort, using advanced services like search, linguistic analysis, pattern recognition, expertise location, statistical analysis, and categorization.
  • Contextual. Functionality is based on workers' activities, where they are located, and steps in a business process. User profiles, interests, and competencies will combine with context, taxonomies, and vocabularies to bring the right information in the right format to the user when needed (see The Information Workplace, Figures 1 and 3).
  • Guided. Just in time learning and embedded work simulation will be delivered when workers perform new tasks or run into problems.
  • Visual. Users will get updates on process status and business metrics via visual interfaces that look like the real world. Icons will morph into photographic images and 3D interfaces will become more commonplace.
  • Multi-modal. Users will access the Information Workplace via browsers and rich clients, PDAs, landline and cell phones, tablet PCs, wearable computers, and embedded devices in cars, factory machines, and radio frequency ID (RFID) devices.
  • Role-based. Workers will access content, data, business processes and tools based on their role(s) in the organization or a specific activity. Work will also be assigned based on enterprise rights management, personalization and presence information.

Get Started Now

A few visionary companies impatient with the limitations of today's tools are stitching together nascent technologies to develop Information Workplaces instead of passively waiting for vendors to lead the charge. Some companies - like Verizon and IBM - have already embarked on this journey by developing and rolling out Information Workplaces to large numbers of employees. To get started, organizations should:

  • Incorporate Information Workplace concepts into business and IT strategies. Focus on collaboration, content, and portal technologies, as well as strategies for application development, customer interaction, business process outsourcing, security, privacy, office design and telecommuting or telework.
  • Work on the basics. Most companies do a poor job of managing documents for workgroups. Get this content into a document management system and standardize on an enterprise collaboration platform. Also, adopt business process management software for automating human work flows and look at how next generation e-learning can support workers in the context of their jobs.
  • Do the cultural work. Develop a culture in which workers have skills in time management, IM and email etiquette, and virtual meeting best practices. Designate a "czar of cultural change" and have this individual teach people how to use and benefit from Information Workplaces.
  • Experiment with emerging technologies. Key Information Workplace technologies include expertise location, content and data visualization, idea management, and simulation software, but the list is long, with many choices.
  • Analyze users' roles. Contextual delivery of content and tools requires careful analysis of users' roles, the business processes in which they are involved and the activities in which they engage. This is a radically different way to dynamically provision content, collaboration and e-learning tools. Consider hiring specialist firms to help IT and HR examine the roles of workers.
  • Analyze the worker's context. Focus on: Where are people when they complete a particular step in a process? What resources do they have at hand? What applications do they use when performing this step in the process? What additional knowledge would help them perform better? What happens next? What happened before? Should context flow from earlier steps or down to later steps?

Erica Driver is principal for ThinkBalm. She may be reached at erica@thinkbalm.com

Connie Moore (cmoore@forrester.com) is vice president and research director at Forrester Research.

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