I picked up this link to a great article (Create a Culture for Collaboration) from Michael Specht’s HR blog. It was kind of interesting because tonight I had to work with two guys on a joint project.
One of us was in Brisbane, the other in Melbourne and I was in Canberra. Late last night I had e-mailed out a document outlining an agenda for a two day workshop that we are putting together and before the meeting I uploaded that data into a SharePoint task list (with some customisations).
We were able to use Skype to hold a three way audio converstation and all three of us where looking at the SharePoint site making live edits to the agenda as we allocated tasks and dropped and added features.
Internally at Readify we are only likely to use the phone if we need a syncrhonous conversation with someone, by default we go with e-mail or some kind of instant messaging tool. So far tonight I’ve used Office Communicator, MSN Messenger, and Skype for this task.
The future of the knowledge worker is something that Darren ponders quite a bit and more than once he has predicted that at some point in the future going to work will involve grabbing the morning cup of coffee. sitting in a nice comfortable chair and flicking on a huge screen. The tooling for this is here now – all that is actually waiting is for some suitably forward thinking enterprise to shut their main office.
Its going to happen – it won’t long before the people making financial decisions that buying employees an Internet connected device at home and a big screen or even a projector is actually a cheap option – provided people learn how to embrace the technology, and also how to exploit it.
When this happens your internal network becomes the Internet and your critical infrastructure is actually just hosted somewhere safe.