10 years ago the physical space had lost its relevance to the digital network. Today work-’places’ are again moving out into the physical and virtual ’smart spaces’. Today’s global workforces have a very different conception about workspaces, ‘own or shared’ resources; ‘physical or remote’ presence; ‘just-in-time’ or ‘anywhere-anytime’ accesses or own office vs. client or partners’ premises. Many workers are continuously on the run, taking critical business decisions on the field. While many attend office as an external or virtual entity. Work collaborations and information exchanges across space and time are extremely commonplace in the era global sourcing and distributed productions. The ‘tooling specification’ needs to be vetted by the Industrial design firm at Turin. So the directors sitting in Colorado hold a video conference with them and try to bring in the company executive currently visiting the ’shop floor’ in the Shenzhen manufacturing unit in Western China. And it all needs to happen in real time. Sounds like some challenge!

"The real question is, how do you get people tools so they can use the technology well without bring tethered to it? You want people to feel like they always have access to technology, but that they’re not tied to it when it’s not in use," There’s a real opportunity to innovate. Workers will want it, and CIOs will want to give it to them." - Steve Balmer, CEO Microsoft. Read full article here.

Many enterprise products are trying to find a niche as the ‘Office’ is being redefined into a fluid form - a hybrid between physical, virtual and functional spaces. Microsoft ‘Share Points’ and other collaboration extra-nets have practically replaced the face of an organization. This is usually referred to as ‘Activity Centric’ collaboration. At the same time Skype and other IMs are becoming de facto modes of access in a ‘people-centric’ view of knowledge sharing and collaborative work processes. Many are attempting to bring in rich data & media in the experience of the collaboration to make up for the geographical distance. Others think it is the ‘distributed knowledge artifacts’ that is truly defining the new trends in work collaboration. Danny Kolke, CEO of Etelos, spoke in a GigaOm event on Office 2.0:

A focus on replicating what Microsoft or others are doing and putting it in a browser isn’t Office 2.0. That’s the wrong vision. The key is innovation and doing it differently, redefining the work experience. The reason I use spreadsheets from Google is not because of advanced features but because I can create easily and share it.” Read full article here.

Google has done a remarkable job with ‘Docs & Spreadsheets’ in this regard, though it’s office collaboration suite called the ’site’, offered as a part of the Google apps, leaves many expectations unmet. It is nowhere near the ease of Google Docs in the way it seamlessly merges with the workflow. Zoho office does a clever trick by making the conversion of the office work artifacts from offline to online a breeze. There are many players in the traditional enterprise or ‘Process Centric’ collaboration space with many products meeting diverse needs. From SAP to Salesforce.com, the diligent innovators are knitting targeted products and high quality user experiences relentlessly. Developments are taking place in mobile offices as well, making most of the collaboration and exchanges possible at the press of a button in your mobile phones. With so many options it is already looking crowded and yet there is no clear consensus about what the Office 2.0 or popularly known ‘Nomadic Office’ is going to be like. Moreover global business processes are undergoing sweeping changes that have significant impact on the way people work. We have seen ‘virtual employees’ with the onslaught of ‘Off-shoring’; ‘just in time hands’ with ‘Job Aggregation’. We experienced ‘Remote work groups’ enabled by secure VPINs. Ever wonder how the next technology wave or Process change will shape tomorrow’s jobs and the experiences of work collaborations?