OfficeTeam recently issued a report on the "Office of the Future, circa 2020," predicting that it will be increasingly mobile and flexible as companies swiftly assemble the resources necessary to meet changing business needs. In my work with the Administrative Management Society in the mid to late 1980s, we published a series of books and research studies on "The Office of the Future," which at that point meant the year 2000. We had a lot of hits and misses with that series. more...

Where's the Inspiration?

There are voices out there that claim IT doesn't deliver the strategic punch it used to be able to deliver. In May of 2003, Nicholas Carr made the case in a provocative Harvard Business Review article entitled "IT Doesn't Matter." Carr states that IT has been a victim of it's own success; it's affordability and availability to all has leveled the playing field, and therefore no one gains any competitive advantage. However, IT is a living, breathing entity that is constantly evolving and undergoing innovation. And IT innovation is not built on what you have, but what you do with it. Just about everyone now has video equipment, but last time I checked, there hasn't been an unusually large surge of new Steven Spielbergs or Spike Lees coming on the scene. more...

The Techno-Entrepreneurial Spirit: Hope Springs Eternal

The news we get everyday from the Middle East may seem disheartening, but I want to offer a more optimistic assessment - with an IT slant. That is, ten years from now or so, we may be fretting about the loss of IT jobs to low-cost development shops in Iraq. Even in India, they may be bemoaning the loss of opportunities to this new entrepreneurial-tech hotbed in the Middle East. more...

How do You 'Can' a Jedi Master?

A couple of years back, I had the opportunity to talk with Allan Frank, chief technology officer for AnswerThink Consulting Group Atlanta and formerly national partner-in-charge of enabling technologies for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. "How do you can a Jedi master?" he asks. "How do you store the collective learnings of the organization? Why did we win that sale? What have we built somewhere else before? What did that design look like? We can take a relational database, slice it, dice it, and cut it, rotate those cubes, and do data mining. But in the end, the difference is what really animates an organization is a human being." Can we automate and institutionalize serendipity? Should we? more...