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BUSINESS

IMPACT

The Authority on the


Future of Technology

August 2011
www.technologyreview.com

Published by MIT

AUGUST 2011

The Future of the Office


www.technologyreview.com

The Future of the Office

Executive Summary

CONTENTS
The Big Question
2 The Rise of the Virtual Office
Emerged Technologies
3 Tiny, Cloud-Powered Desktops
4 How to Secure the Virtual Office
5 Intelligent E-mail Agents
6 Telepresence Robots
7 Google Translate in the Office
8 Recognizing Customers
9 Finding the Office Buck-Passers
New Business Models
10 New Options for Wi-Fi Squatters
11 Office Lessons from Africa
Case Studies
12 Smashing the Cubicles
13 Uniting a World of Employees
14 The Dangers of Workplace Inactivity
15 Bring Your Own Device
16 Green Mountain State Gets Greener
17 Using Games to Get New Ideas
18 Attending to Digital Etiquette
Leaders
19 Bringing Offshoring to Villages
20 An Office on Every Surface
21 The Future of the Office Internet
Infographics
22 Designing Around Collaboration
24 Offices Go Mobile

BUSINESS IMPACT

is published monthly by Technology Review


Chief Correspondent
David Talbot
Deputy Editor
Brian Bergstein
Assistant Managing Editor
Timothy Maher
Art Director
Lee Caulfield
Design Director
Conrad Warre
Staff Editors
Kristina Grifantini, Erica Naone, Tom Simonite,
Brittany Sauser, Emily Singer, Linda Lowenthal

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Working Anywhere,
Including in the Office

Fast-emerging technologies are radically reshaping where and how


how we work. Heres what that means for you.

By DAV ID TALBOT

hanks to the rapid evolution of


that work smoothly on the small screen (see
mobile, social, and collaboration Tiny, Cloud-Powered Desktops, page 3).
technologies, the office is changAt the same time, the trend toward mobiling in important ways, and covering a
ity intensifies certain challenges. Companies
more expansive geography. In this issue, need to maintain security on employeewe explore the grand opportunitiesand
owned gadgets (see How to Keep the Virtual
potential pitfallsassociated with the
Office Secure, page 4, and Bring Your Own
rapid adoption of office social networking
Device, page 15). Employees must navigate
platforms, the increased use of employee- a tricky etiquette landscape of online social
owned mobile devices, and the trend
networks and the profusion of devices that
toward remote work.
reduce traditional face-to-face communiFraming the issues in his introductory
cation (see Attending to Digital Etiquette,
essay (see The Rise of the Virtual Office, our interview with Daniel Post Senning, a
page 2), Andrew McAfee, of the Center for
descendant of Emily Post, on page 18).
Digital Business at MITs Sloan School of
Abroad, creative applications in lowManagement, argues that adoption of new
bandwidth environments like parts of Africa
mobile and social technologiesas well as
(see Office Lessons from Africa, page 11)
data analytics and intelligent assistants built
show even further potential for efficiency.
into themare making traditional offices
And in India (see New Technology Brings
obsolete and may also significantly increase
Offshoring to Villages, our interview with
white-collar productivity. But those devel- Xerox CTO Sophie Vandebroek, on page
opments are unlikely to change the human
19), outsourced work that has traditionally
need for hierarchy and real-world social
been performed in urban office buildings
engagementand the basic organizational
can now be done efficiently near employees
need to find and retain talented staff.
village homes.
For starters, companies can save money by
With companies rapidly adopting social
using existing office space far more efficiently
networking toolsthey are projected to
when more employees work somewhere
spend almost $2 billion on them worldthat isnt the main office (see Smashing
wide in 2014, up from about $500 million
the Cubicles, page 12, and New Options
in 2010new opportunities for analyzing
for Starbucks Wi-Fi Squatters, page 10).
and optimizing staff performance will arise
Broader opportunities for efficiencies
(see Finding the Office Heroes, Shirkers,
come from fast-evolving technologies that
and Buck-Passers, on page 9), as will a new
range from wheeled telepresence robots and
set of creative motivational tools (see Using
virtual assistants (see Seeing the Future of
Games to Get Employees Thinking, page 17).
the Office Internet, page 21) to automated
This issue also includes interviews with
e-mail organizers (see Searching for Intel- industry thought-leaders Dave Evans, chief
ligent E-mail Agents, page 5) and, perhaps
futurist for Ciscos Internet business solumost important to owners of smart phones
tions group, and Craig Mundie, the chief
and tablets, office productivity applications
research and strategy officer of Microsoft.

The Future of the Office

The Big Question

The Rise of the Virtual Office

As the definition of the workplace changes, dramatic increases in


productivity could be ahead.
By AND R E W M C A F E E

he idea that the office is a specific


place where our professional lives
happen is becoming less universal, and less important. These days many
knowledge workers can be productive anywhere, thanks to smarter, more numerous
mobile devices, faster network access, and
a growing number of online collaboration
tools. Telecommuting is no longer merely
something that the phone company is trying to sell you. And wherever the office may
be, wider and better use of social networks,
data analytics, and smart technologies such
as voice recognition could be poised to
increase productivity dramaticallymeaning that both real and virtual offices may
have fewer people in them.

But while the physical office is changing,


certain connotations of the word office are
not. I can think of at least twohierarchical
organization and place for human interactionand theres no indication that these
are becoming any less important. Even the
most progressive high-tech companies retain
many of the organizational trappings of their
industrial-age predecessors: full-time managers, org charts, job descriptions, and so
on. And since humans remain social animals, conventional gathering places will
remain important in business. These spaces
whether they be conventional offices, temporary ones, or conference facilitiesmust
be made conducive to collaboration. They
must also become physically healthy places

The Future of the Office

business impact August 2011

EVG E N IA E LI S E EVA

RETHINKING WORK White-collar productivity will likely continue to rise because of technologies that
make it easier for people to work from anywhere.

to spend hours of time, since sedentary work


has emerged as a significant health threat.
As the office expands beyond its conventional boundaries, key challenges must be
met, including the privacy and security
issues posed by a distributed global workforce of people who work digitally and use
multiple devices. New tools like cloud-based
office productivity apps must be made not
only user-friendly but resistant to attacks
and data loss. And workers will need better
toolsincluding improved voice-recognition
software, e-mail-organizing technologies,
and intelligent agents that help handle complex tasks once reserved for specialiststo
streamline work processes, make sense of
the overwhelming volumes of data besieging them, and improve productivity.
To date, IT-driven productivity gains
within the office have been somewhat modest, at least compared with those seen in
manufacturing. In 1989 the U.S. manufacturing sector employed 18 million people;
by 2009 that figure had declined to 11.8
million. But though the workforce shrank
34 percent, the value added by U.S. manufacturersthat is, the value of their output
minus the cost of raw materials purchased
surged 75 percent, to $1.78 trillion. Weve
definitely observed white-collar productivity
improvement as well, especially since the
mid-1990s, but it hasnt been as big.
That may soon change. Consider that
people already routinely deal with computers rather than office workers when they
make an airline reservation, buy products
and arrange for delivery, or troubleshoot a
problem with a product they own. More farout advances in artificial intelligence could
push productivity even further. Voice recognition, speech synthesis, and automatic
translation have improved significantly. And
weve seen that computers can now accurately understand and reply to questions:
IBMs Watson supercomputer beat human
competitors at Jeopardy! earlier this year.
Skeptics will point out that futurists have
been promising an AI-driven revolution in
knowledge work for decades. But by now

Emerged Technologies

Tiny, Cloud-Powered Desktops

even the skeptics are finding phone numbers


with the help of computer-based operators.
One of the biggest barriers to higher office The profusion of mobile devices is driving advances in cloud-based
productivity was articulated best by the late
productivity apps built for the small screen.
Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard:
By E R I CA NAONE
If only HP knew what HP knows, wed be
three times more productive. Most knowledge-intensive organizations, in other words,
do a lousy job of capturing relevant information and sharing it among all the people
hen smart phones first took off, applications. Zohos Vegesna notes that
who could benefit from it. But digital tools
many software companies fig- users expect custom apps tailored to the
that address Platts frustration have gone
ured people might want to view
iPhone, the Android tablet, or whatever
from inadequate to industrial-strength in
files on the small screens, but few thought
device theyre working on.
the past few years. These tools include blogs
anyone would use them for creating and
Scott Johnston, group product manager
and microblogs, social-networking software, editing spreadsheets and presentations. for Google Docs and Sites, says that while
and wiki-style tools that allow collaboration We were proven wrong, says Raju Vegesna
the interfaces will look different on phones,
without tightly constraining it. They give
of Zoho, which offers online office tools.
tablets, and PCs, I suspect were going fullindividuals a voice, allow groups and comBusinesses are demanding things like
featured on every device. He believes that
munities to form easily and spontaneously, spreadsheet and document editing tools that
workers will eventually use tablets in place
and help knowledge both accumulate and
work anywhere, on any device. In response, of laptops and demand productivity software
spread. They will be a major force shaping
large and small companies are now provid- that works just as well on them. Potential
office work in the coming years.
ing cloud-based office productivity applicaFor that to happen, however, devices and
tions for smart phones and tablets.
data need to be secure. The growing prevaIt takes creativity to make them work.
lence of tablet computers and smart phones
Web-based word processors such as Google
presents a double-edged sword. People can
Docs werent naturally able to process touchget work done anywhere, but the flip side
screen input. Google had to rework Docs to
is that company data goes wherever the
give the ability to edit from certain devices,
worker goes, and the company cant easily
such as those running recent versions of
control it. Even as technologies proliferate
Android. Zoho is building apps for mobile
and their problems are overcome, offices devices to bridge that gap for its products,
no matter how virtualremain collections
enabling those programs to interpret users
of people. In my work, Ive seen a positive
touchscreen clicks. Meanwhile, IBM is
feedback loop between what we do when
testing software that can break up large
we get together face to face and the ways
spreadsheets into portions, making them
in which we reinforce those relationships
less unwieldy to update and edit on tablets. SMALL SCREEN Editing is tough on a smart
phone, but mobile workers want to do it.
digitally with new tools.
Cloud-based office software has been
And its important to remember that even
around for years, making shared editing easin this world of freelance and part-time con- ier since multiple users need only keep track
advances in touch-screen technologysuch
tractors, companies are still desperate to
of one file. But the cloud is even more impor- as ways to give users more tactile feedback
hire good people and retain them. Thats
tant when people are working on mobile
could also accelerate demand for such apps.
not going to change anytime soon, no mat- devices, which are switched or replaced far
While Google, for example, offers priter how many snazzy digital tools we get. more often than are desk-bound PCs.
marily cloud-based apps with light offline
The office of the future might have fewer
The cloud is the natural central stor- capabilities, Microsoft recently launched a
people in it, but the ones who are there will
age site not only for the data but for the
cloud-based version of its Office productivmatter more than ever.
productivity applications themselves, says
ity software called Office 365, betting that
Rick Treitman, entrepreneur in residence
users will see advantages in full-featured
ANDREW MCAFEE IS PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST AT THE
CENTER FOR DIGITAL BUSINESS AT MITS SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANat Adobe and director of product market- offline software that also allows for accesAGEMENT AND AUTHOR OF ENTERPRISE 2.0: NEW COLLABORATIVE
TOOLS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATIONS TOUGHEST CHALLENGES.
ing for its Acrobat.com cloud-based office
sibility in the cloud.

G ETTY I MAG E S

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The Future of the Office

Emerged Technologies

How to Keep the Virtual


Office Secure

The upsurge of mobile devices requires cloud-based solutionsand


means companies must pick and choose what data to protect.
By ROB E RT L E M O S

mployees are increasingly gobbling


up Internet-connected mobile gadgets: theyll buy nearly a half billion
smart phones this year and more than 50
million tablets, nearly triple the number of
tablets sold in 2010.
Employees using such gadgets to connect remotely to company servers and
e-mail accounts can boost efficiency; but
the practice also creates security challenges. Companies have long recognized
that mere perimeter security around the
office network doesnt work anymore. That
security model was killed off by the laptop.
But traditional solutions to managing laptopsincluding running security software
on them and setting up encrypted communications channels known as virtual private networks (VPNs)dont really succeed.

Mobile-device sales
(millions)

Attackers have learned to customize malicious programs that can remain undetected
for days or weeks. And VPNs only protect
against eavesdropping. Theyre useless
against already-infected devices.
The results can be ugly: witness the
Department of Health and Human Services Wall of Shame, a list of medical-recordrelated breaches, including 32 incidents this
year, of which 18 were caused by lost portable
devices or laptops. Such security issues are
widely expected to worsen.
The problems have forced informationtechnology teams to switch tactics: rather
than trying to secure the device, theyre
coming up with ways to protect sensitive
data even if the devices are compromised.
For example, Heartland Payment Systems,
the credit-card processing firmchastened

700
Smart phones

600

Tablets

500
PROJ ECTE D

400
300
200
100

The Future of the Office

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

business impact August 2011

GARTN E R

by the loss of 130 million records during


a conventional 2009 server breachnow
treats all devices, whether mobile phones or
remote point-of-sale terminals, as compromised. So these devices only refer to creditcard data using tokens; that is, special codes
that correspond to the actual data, which sits
in a protected digital vault, says Kris Herrin, the companys chief technology officer.
The security firm Symantec focuses on
protecting its source code, financial data,
and intellectual property, ensuring that
such information cannot leave the company without significant protections, says
David Thompson, Symantecs chief information officer.
Cloud security solutions, from companies such as Websense and Zenprise, are
another option. Websenses cloud service
brings e-mail and Web security to any device
that connects to the Internet. Rather than
forcing users to connect back to the home
office for security protections, a Websense
proxy filters out malicious code and spam.
Zenprise, meanwhile, helps companies manage their devices through the Internet. For
instance, it can remotely erase the memory
on lost or stolen devices.
A different way of dealing with device
proliferation is to place a small secure programa virtual machineon an employees
device to interact with corporate data. The
model, which is used by an increasing number of banks to enforce security on customers
computers, lets companies claim a piece of
the users device as a fenced-in compound.
When banks use such technology, consumers are allowed to opt-in to the service
and install the plug-in. The technology isnt
foolproof, but it stymies attacks that could
get by antivirus and antifraud monitoring.
I actually think that enterprises can learn
from banks and financial institutions on
how to secure their employees these days,
says CEO Mickey Boodaei of Trusteer, which
offers banks such a solution, and is starting to offer it to companies that want to
secure devices owned by employees, but
used for work.

Emerged Technologies

GET ORGANIZED Gmails Priority Inbox adds


an icon to e-mails it deems important, based on
factors like the sender, the time sent, and terms
like ASAP or urgent within the message itself.

Searching for Intelligent


E-mail Agents

Beyond spam filtering, tools emerge to cope with e-mail overload.

By LE E G O M E S

G O O G LE

-mail may have been the Internets


first killer app, but keeping up
with it has become sheer murder.
The volume of e-mail defies comprehension: by one count, 32 billion messages a
day were sent in 2010, a figure that does not
include the roughly 90 percent of e-mails
that are spam.
A growing number of products and
research efforts aim to ensure that e-mail
overload doesnt cancel out the productivityenhancing benefits of IT. Googles Gmail
Priority Inbox is an early effort in this direction. The feature adds a special icon to messages it judges to be important.
It looks at the sender and the time it was
transmitted, which can offer clues to the
e-mails importance: a message your mom
sent you at 2 a.m. is likely to be more important than one she sends at noon.
Gmail also reads the message itself, and
when it spots a term like ASAP or urgent,

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it is more likely to move that message to the


front of the line. It uses numerous other
cluesfor example, an individual message to
you from your boss is presumed to be more
important than group messages.
Just as it is with the details of its main
Web-search algorithm, Google is mum about
the specifics of the code that determines
whether or not a message is important.
But Alex Gawley, senior product manager
for Gmail, says the program, by watching
the users behavior, increases in accuracy
over time.
For all its advantages, Googles Priority
Inbox demonstrates how hard the e-mail
overload problem really is. Many Gmail
users say that while the software does an
acceptable job of separating e-mail wheat
from chaff, even their Priority Inbox quickly
fills up with items demanding attention.
One of the reasons for that, say software researchers, is that e-mail programs

remain dumb. There are a number of common actions that users may need to take
after reading an e-mail, such as updating
a piece of software or entering an item into
a calendar. But current e-mail programs
offer limited help in performing those tasks.
Some companies are developing smarter
mail programs to help out. Farzin Arsanjani, president of HyperOffice, in Rockville,
Maryland, says his companys collaborative
software is designed to break down barriers
between current office-productivity programs,
enabling information to flow more easily
between, for example, Outlook and Excel.
What about an e-mail program that is
smart enough to actually answer mail for
you? Such things exist, but only in very limited domains that are irrelevant to the average problems of an everyday office.
One example is Project Radar, a fouryear, multi-million-dollar DARPA effort
to develop automated e-mail reading that
would be useful to the armed forces. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon and SRI International collaborated on the work and
eventually produced a system that could
handle a small group of logistical and scheduling messages.
SRI eventually spun off from Project
Radar personal assistant software known
as Siri, which it later sold to Apple. Siri supplies mobile-phone users with answers
to relatively simple questions from wellstructured databases, such as Where is the
nearest post office? and What restaurants
around here are still open?
Michael Freed, program director at
SRIs Artificial Intelligence Center, envisions future personal assistants that are
even more robust than Siri. But they are
not going to be perfect. If they catch things
only 90 percent of the time, is that going
to be good enough for you? A lot is going
to depend on how much people will tolerate them when they dont work right.

The Future of the Office

Emerged Technologies

Telepresence Robots
Seek Office Work

New models have reached the marketplace, but high initial prices
keep applications limited.

By TOM S I M O N I T E

Piloting a robot, and


contending with its
sometimes poor hearing
and limited vision, can
make interacting with
people a challenge.

The Future of the Office

OFFICE BOT This telepresence robot, from


Anybots, costs $15,000. Known as the QB, it
has built-in obstacle avoidance that automatically prevents it from striking objects such as
doorways.

tag. Yet both robots compare favorably with


dedicated videoconferencing rooms, which
are sold using similar arguments and cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Tom Serani, cofounder of RatePoint,
which helps businesses monitor their online
reputation, says that his Vgo paid for itself
in about a month by allowing managers
to maintain a presence among call-center
staffers.
Other companies are preparing to launch
telepresence robots aimed at addressing
what Colin Angle, cofounder and CEO of
iRobot, says is a need for significantly more
intelligence. Instead of having to steer a
robot like a remote-controlled car, he says,
a user should be able to ask it to navigate
to a particular meeting room, or click on
screen to indicate which person to follow.
The products that have launched so far
are really videoconferencing on a remote,
driveable platform, says Angle. It has some
appeal, but they dont build a version of you
in a remote location able to be as effective as
you would in person. His company, which
makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner and the
military PackBot, is working on a version,
dubbed Ava, that he says will solve some of
these problems.
business impact August 2011

ANYB OTS

uilding on the trend toward remote


include companies such as Hewlett-Packwork, two companies started ship- ard and Cisco.
ping wheeled telepresence robots to
The technology provides advantages over
customers this year, and other versions are
videoconferencing, Semonite adds, because
launching soon. While prices are steep and the person who is remote can choose what
sales tepid, some early adopters find that
they want to see and go places beyond the
the robots offer advantages over technolo- meeting room.
gies such as videoconferencing.
Telepresence robots are a better bet now
Telepresence robots are wheeled
that reliable Wi-Fi access has become stanmachines steered by a person sitting at a
remote computer; the bots take the persons
place around the conference table or, say,
on a facility inspection. They are equipped
with cameras, microphones, screens, and
speakers so the human controller can interact with real people.
But using one of these robots is far harder
than picking up a phone or using a video
calling system. I tried one this year, to stand
in for me at Technology Reviews main office
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as I worked
dard in the workplace. And the 4G cellular
in San Francisco, and encountered a fairly
data networks being rolled out by carriers
steep learning curve. Piloting a robot, and
will make them even more capable, says
contending with its sometimes poor hear- Semonite, whose company has been working and limited vision, can make interact- ing with Verizon on a version with a builting with people a challenge.
in 4G connection. It will make it possible
Still, customers find them valuable, says
for the robot to work reliably right out of
Ned Semonite, VP for product management
the box, and to go into places like factoat VGo Communications, the New Hamp- ries or warehouses that dont always have
shire-based company that sells the four- Wi-Fi, he says.
foot-tall robot I tried. Some engineers and
Its not yet clear whether telepresence
designers enjoy being able to visit a distant
robots are cost-effective, however. Semonite
lab or inspect a prototype without leaving
claims that the $6,000 Vgo can pay for itself
the office, he says: It means they can be
just by saving the need for a few business
there more often. You get the immediacy
trips. The only competing robot on the marof walking in the door, and that valuable ad
ket, the much taller QB from the California
hoc contact. More than 200 of the robots
startup Anybots, might need to replace a
are in use so far, he says, and customers
few more trips to justify its $15,000 price

Emerged Technologies

Google Translate in the Office

A growing body of translation tools makes communication among


global workers smoother.
By LE E G O M E S

TE C H N O LO GY R EVI EW

he potential usefulness of automatic


computerized translation was recognized by the very first AI researchers
in the 1950s. But it wasnt until new algorithms emerged in the 1980s and 1990s
that the field made significant progress.
Now, translation tools of great sophistication are playing a growing role in both
everyday office use and for specialized fields,
as the economy becomes increasingly globalized and companies sell products and
services in multiple markets.
The poster child for computer translation
is Google Translate, the easy-to-use, general
purpose Web-based translation engine that
can handle nearly 60 languages. Googles
Translate has the same 800-pound gorilla
status in its world that the companys namesake product does in search.
Not only is Google Translate the worlds
most widely used translation system, its
also the most technically advanced. Whats

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more, says Kevin Hendzel, spokesman for


the American Translators Association, is
that it has the advantage of being able to
tap into the vast contents of Googles search
engine in its quest for raw text.
In part because of Google Translates
growing popularity, the office of the future
is getting a verb of the future: gist. To gist
means to use Google Translate or some other
program to get a quick sensea gistof
something thats been written in another
language, says Don DePalma, an analyst at
Common Sense Advisory, a firm in Lowell,
Massachusetts, that follows the industry.
This might mean an Arabic web page
being gisted to see if its about politics or
soccer, or someone sitting down to gist a
Beijing site in Chinese for the latest official
views on yuan-dollar currency levels.
Gisting is expected to take on a larger
role in the office, especially as the amount of
information on the Web continues to expand.

And as home computer users appreciate


the accuracy of Google Translate for casual
Web surfinglike reading foreign newspapers when big breaking stories occurthey
will bring those habits with them to the
office and start doing the same thing at work.
Among office computer users, I would
bet they would be much more likely to click
the Google Translate button now than they
would have five years ago, says DePalma.
Since even the best computerized translation programs still make obvious mistakes,
all translation software, including Googles,
requires human beings to double-check
their work. That sort of human backstopping, says DePalma, will be necessary for
the foreseeable future, at least with important documents.
As a result, many companies sell a combination of computerized and human translation services that work in parallel; these
companies make up the global localization industry, estimated by Common Sense
Advisory to be worth $40 billion a year and
growingin spite of the anemic global economyby 7 percent annually. (Google Translate is usually counted as a general-purpose
Web service, rather than a specialized localization software provider.)
Typical localization customers are companies that need to translate instruction
manuals from one language to another, or
to bring out a product in another culture
without unwittingly violating local customs
and taboos. Many localization firms target
technical fields, like medicine or law, with
highly specialized dictionaries that work in
conjunction with in-house translation software. IBM, which has been working on computerized translations for decades, licenses
its software to localization companies such
as Lionbridge of Waltham, Massachusetts.
Experts use the term gisting with good
reason, since computers are still only reliable
for conveying the general sense of a passage of text. So for the foreseeable future, it
will still require a certain amount of human
intelligence to figure out what the translating computer meant to say.

The Future of the Office

Emerged Technologies

Recognizing Customers
Wherever They Are

Small businesses have so much to keep


track of with just doing their work, says
Lars Helgeson, the companys CEO. They
know that personal responses to comments
on
Facebook pages can give them a leg up
Businesses today have to communicate through a dizzying
By tailoring a response to someone, it makes
variety of channels.
them feel special, he says.
By ERI C A NAO N E
Such systems arent perfect, he acknowledges. For example, Greenropes technology
can search for Twitter handles that obviously
companys customers can use doz- its possible to detect this identity automati- match the real names used on LinkedIn and
ens of methods to get information
callyfor example, the system can identify
Facebook or in e-mail addresses, but some
about a product, buy it, and talk
when a person returns to a company website
Twitter handles dont reveal the users name.
about whether theyre satisfied. A person
and call up other information thats been
In that case, its up to the company to make
interested in a car, for example, might get
collected about him or her.
the initial connection. Then the system can
curious after receiving an ad on a mobile
The platform also keeps track of how
track all the persons interactions from that
device. She might follow up by researching
customers prefer to get information. For
point forward.
the car on a desktop computer, watching it
example, it can track what a given customer
Companies are still trying to figure out
in action on YouTube, or visiting a dealer- focuses on when visiting the websitevideo, how best to communicate with consumship for a test drive. If she bought the car, images, or interactive forms.
ers. Theres still a lot of experimentation
she could take it to any number of places for
service, buy accessories at stores or online,
and maybe discuss it on social-media sites
such as Twitter and Facebook.
This multiplicity of avenues can make it
hard for a company to assess how well its
doing at enticing and pleasing customers.
How can it connect the dots and track a
customer through the whole course of learning about a product, deciding whether to
buy it, using it, and telling people about it?
That is a very disaggregated process today,
and were trying to build a process around
it thats very consolidated and uniform,
says John Carione, group manager of enterprise product marketing at Adobe Systems.
Technology companies such as Adobe are
stepping in with tools that help businesses
identify customers and remain aware of their
ONE MESSAGE, MANY PLATFORMS Web Experience Management (above), part of Adobes Digital
preferences and history, whether theyre
Enterprise Platform, helps companies manage and send out their messages over a variety of channels, including e-mail, websites, social-media sites, and mobile devices.
physically standing in a store or posting
comments on Twitter.
Last week Adobe launched its new Digital
Other companies are looking to address
going on, Helgeson says. Systems such
Enterprise Platform, a system that tries to
the needs of more modest marketing efforts. as Greenropes and Adobes, however, can
provide all the technology companies need
For example, Greenrope, a company based
help them unify their efforts, collect data
for that process. One of its main features is
in San Diego, aims its product at small and
about what works and what doesnt, and
that it helps keep track of who a customer is
midsize companies that simply want to be
ultimately get better at using new media
no matter how that person chooses to com- able to identify their customers in different
and mobile devices to stay connected to
municate with a company. In some cases, communication settings.
their customers.

The Future of the Office

business impact August 2011

AD O B E

Emerged Technologies

WHO, ME? A blow-off scoreboard charts how


long people take to reply to e-mails, counts how
many times queries are ignored, and tracks the
use of dismissive language.

the monitoring technology.


The idea is to expand the concept of digital monitoring beyond traditional efforts,
such as checking whether employees are
visiting porn sites or making personal phone
calls, to produce a deeper understanding of
employee traits, says Daryl Nord, professor
of management information systems at Oklahoma State University. These smart systems
will be able to detect and alert management
to potential illegal activities, security threats,
and productivity issues as they occur.
SpectorSoft of Vero Beach, Florida, offers
software that can take screen shots of an
employees computer, and determine when
files have been transferred to a USB drive.
The software shows employers what percentage of time employees spend e-mailing or
using certain applications, and who sends
the most file attachments. A lot of companies use it that way to baseline what people
are doing, says Jeani Park, SpectorSofts
Emerging data-mining software tells whether employees are helpful,
senior director of product strategy.
toxic, or management materialand how well the company functions.
And in one effort to improve office comBy KAT E G R E E N E
munications, Lymbix, a startup based in
Moncton, New Brunswick, monitors tone
in e-mails and issues the writer an alert
before he or she hits the send button on an
onsider your workplace e-mail style. of exclamation points, font color, capitaliza- unintentionally cranky-sounding message.
When asked a question, do you con- tion, punctuation cursing, the way people
More and more companies have policies
fer with others and attribute your
sign off in an e-mail, and the overuse of
about how employees should use technolresponse to the group? Do you avoid mak- certain words, such as please.
ogy, and they are increasingly using softing a decision in case you might need to
Whats wrong with please? It can be a
ware to enforce these policies, says Nancy
reverse course? If so, you may be a buck- sign of powerlessness and frustration, often
Flynn, founder and executive director of the
passer. In the latest in digital monitoring, expressed after previous communications
ePolicy Institute, in Columbus, Ohio. We
new software can identify such people and
were ignored, explains Elizabeth Charnock, have definitely seen a trend upward in terms
discern a range of other traits, potentially
Cataphoras CEO. Companies might reach
of the number of employers that monitor
allowing management to intervene or
out to a frustrated person or at least keep an
Internet use and e-mail, says Flynn.
assign people to tasks better suited to them. eye on them to make sure they dont act out.
Charnock believes that the right kind of
Software from Cataphora of Menlo Park,
The tooland associated visualizations
monitoring can help good workers shine.
California, sorts through e-mail, instant mes- of the databuilds on the companys exper- The world will come around to the idea
sages, calendar events, documents, and even
tise in providing e-discovery and analysis
that monitoring in an appropriate way is
phone logs to pull together a digital character
services for law firms poring over company
appropriate for employees and employer,
profile. For example, Cataphora tracks use
data; Cataphora is now commercializing
she predicts.

Finding the Office Heroes,


Shirkers, and Buck-Passers

CATAP H O RA

www.technologyreview.com

The Future of the Office

New Business Models

New Options for Starbucks


Wi-Fi Squatters

DiFonzo says, the caf era is over. For one


thing, coffee shops nationwide have taken
steps to discourage people from squatting for
hours over tables and outlets. Workers might
be better off finding new workspaces anyA new crop of apps helps a mobile workforce find office space
way, says Anthony Marinos of Loosecubes.
anywhere, anytime.
I dont know if anyone ever liked working
By ERIC A NAO N E
at coffee shops, he says. What do you do
when you have to go to the bathroom? Do
you pack up all your things every time? How
often do you have to buy drinks?
consultant who works from home
More than 10 million people in the United
Marinos argues that shared office space
wants to host a meeting somewhere
States are entirely mobile workers, with no
not only is more practical but also can prowith a professional atmosphere. A
permanent office space outside the home, vide valuable social opportunities. Instead
marketing VP traveling abroad wants a
estimates Chris DiFonzo, founder and CEO
of requesting informational interviews, perplace to work other than the hotel lobby
haps recent college grads could spend a few
or a Starbucks. A software engineer wants
days working in the offices of companies
a quiet spot to resolve office problems while
that interest them, where they would have
on vacation.
a chance to make natural social connecWorkspace-finding applications, such as
tions. Loosecubes itself opens its office to
Desktime, LiquidSpace, Loosecubes, and
mobile workers, and recently partnered with
OpenDesks, are cropping up to help people
a graphic designer it found that way.
in situations like these find good places to
LiquidSpace is designed to build up a set
get things done. Some apps also help office
of credentials (a passport) for each user.
owners fill extra space with people who have
Users must apply to a space for a visa to
established a reputation for reliability.
get access, or even to see if a spot is availTypically, a service can be accessed via
able. The system also waits until users have
either a website or a mobile reservation and
been approved and have arrived to release
payment app. These contain a catalog of
sensitive information such as door-access
temporary office spacessome in dedicated
codes and Internet passwords.
shared work buildings, work-friendly cofOf course, the apps have to serve users
fee shops, and business centers, and others
needs as well. DiFonzo says OpenDesks users
within the offices of startups or corporations.
fall into two groups: those who like to plan
Loosecubes, for example, offers about 1,800
ahead and reserve spaces, and those who
spaces in 52 countries.
want something on the spot. He and other
The apps aim to take advantage of the
companies are building in mobile and social
trend toward increasingly mobile workers.
features to help users in both situations.
These days its not just freelancers, consulMost app developers believe that shartants, and the self-employed who go hunting
ing office space can help businesses become
for wireless signals. Forty percent of IBMs
more responsible and sustainable. Its about
RENTAL DESKS Mobile workspace-finding apps
workforce works outside IBM real estate. such as LiquidSpace make it possible for people
more than empty space, says Rosen. Its
The U.S. General Services Administration
about taking the space that we have and
to rent temporary office space when traveling or
when they want a break from the home office.
announced at the end of July that it will
using it better.
renovate its Washington, D.C., office building
Gilbreath, of LiquidSpace, says that
to accommodate about three times as many
of OpenDesks. Adding in those who are
workplace-finding apps need to give users
employees, mostly by eliminating private
mobile at least three times a month puts
a real-time solution when they need one:
spaces and instituting a system whereby
the number above 40 million.
Im at the corner of Market and Third Street
employees schedule desk space when they
For a time, many of these mobile work- right now. I need to work for the next hour.
plan to come in to the office.
ers parked themselves in coffee shops, but, Where can I work right now?

The Future of the Office

business impact August 2011

LI Q U I D S PAC E

10

New Business Models

Office Lessons from Africa

Highly efficient use of technology from Lagos to Nairobi reveals


a less-is-more aesthetic.
By LE E G O M E S

K IWANJA.N ET

frica contains some of the poorest


together mobile entrepreneurs and invesparts of the world. But that only
tors in Nairobi.
makes some of the continents
Whereas cellular service is well estabe-commerce accomplishments all the more
lished in populous regions of Africa, Wi-Fi
impressiveand worth studying by busi- in homes, offices, or coffee shops is rarely
ness owners everywhere.
found, even in big cities.
African office workers and other entreI find it interesting how quickly people
preneurs have managed to take relatively
in the West write off SMS, Hersman adds.
simple mobile-phone technologies and use Sure, its much more expensive per byte than
them to build remarkably robust commer- its data counterpart, but its what people
cial systems. The typical skilled tradesman
have, and use, on a daily basis in Africa. We
in a big city like Lagos or Nairobi is likely to
very well might see SMS services decline
have an Internet presence as useful as any
over the next two to three years, but if youre
in a major metropolitan area in Europe or
building a service in Africa, ignore SMS at
the United States.
your peril.
The difference is that business owners in
Mobile apps that use simple technologies
Africa dont have complex Web pages, but
to solve everyday problemslike making
rely instead on a highly evolved system of
paymentsusually do very well, Hersman
text messages. The graphics might not be
said. This is particularly true in Kenya, where
as fancy, but the job gets done just the same. more than 14 million people use a service
Its all very straightforward. Its just Click
called M-Pesa to make transactions using
here if you want to make an appointment, mobile phones.
says Craig Holmes, a client director for IBMs
Holmes, who is based in Johannesburg,
Middle East and African operations. The
South Africa, is helping provide back-end
systems they have developed have simpli- services for Bharti Airtel, the Indian mobile
fied commerce in a very basic way.
operator that, along with several other big
Others working with African mobile
carriers, is jostling for a position in the boombusiness owners say those entrepreneurs ing African mobile-phone market.
innovations should be closely heeded by
The job gives Holmes a perspective on
companies trying to do business there.
how mobile commerce is evolving in Africa,
In the United States or many Euro- where a less-is-more aesthetic can be found
pean nations, simple channels are often
everywhere. For example, farmers and fishtoo quickly thrown away for the next big
erman use SMS to check on market prices
thing. In Africa, its in the unsexy technol- in different villages. And in Tanzania, IBM
ogy spaces that you find most of the suc- engineers designed a pharmaceutical supplycessful entrepreneurs, says Erik Hersman, chain management system entirely using
cofounder of Ushahidi, the mobile crisis
text messaging. The system keeps track of
and event-mapping platform and a devel- drug inventories in clinics, and lets healthoper of iHub, an organization that brings
care planners get medicine into the field.

www.technologyreview.com

HANDS-ON Text-message-based mobile payments, common in Kenya and other parts of


Africa, are one foundation of mobile office and
commercial work.

Since low-end mobile phones are quite


inexpensive, many Africans have two or three
of them, each powered by a different carrier.
Theyll reach for the one with the cheapest
service for whatever call they happen to be
making, be it local, mobile, or long-distance.
While low-end handsets make up most
of the African market today, smart phones,
especially those using the Android operating
system, are growing in popularity, especially
with the recent introduction of lower-cost
models like the Ideos, from the Chinese
maker Huawei, which was recently selling
in Kenya for $80.
Nigeria already has smart-phone adoption rates closing in on 20 percent, and the
figure is expected to reach 50 percent in a
few years, Holmes says. Other parts of the
African telecommunications scene are also
impressive, such as the widespread use of
mobile phones for simple person-to-person
money transfers, something that has yet to
take off in the United States.
Some people seem to think that Africa
doesnt want to innovate, but all I have seen
is a great spirit and a tremendous desire to
experiment and build an ecosystem that will
benefit everyone, Holmes says. Africa has
very specific characteristics, and one of the
most important is a passion to get things
done with what they have in hand.

The Future of the Office

11

Case Studies

DESIGNED FOR MOBILITY This conference


table, from the design firm Steelcase, allows
employees to dock their mobile devices and
take turns sharing the displays at the ends of
the table.

Smashing the Cubicles

By sketching future spaces around tablets, smart phones, and social


technologies, companies can operate with far fewer desks.
By TOM S I M O N I T E

12

The Future of the Office

which Cisco recently began selling to businesses. Rick Hutley, a Cisco vice president,
chooses his desk according to which colleagues are present and whats on the days
agenda. Then he docks his Cius to a port on
the desk that includes a phone handset. The
tablet handles voice and video calls whether
its docked or mobile, and it can be used to
share documents at meetings.
It can also be plugged into a monitor and
keyboard to be used like a full PC. You can
walk around with your entire world with
you in this device, Hutley says. My laptop
would often stay on my desk, but the tablet
never does. If he needs to make a private
voice or video call, he can step into one of
the rooms at the edges of the cluster.
Employees can also participate in the
companys corporate social network, Quad,
which is accessible on the Web or through
the iPhone, iPad, or Cius. People can post

business impact August 2011

STE E LCAS E

he quick expansion of social and


mobile technologies is creating a
widely distributed workforce. To better suit employees who come into offices
more sporadically, some companies and
design firms are testing radically newand
more efficientconfigurations for physical
offices, and betting that improved technology will make the experiment more successful than similar ones in the 1990s.
A project at the headquarters of Cisco
Systems in San Jose, California, for example,
overthrows decades-old conventions about
office space. Called Connected Workplace, it
replaces individual cubicles with open clusters of wheeled desks that belong to groups,
not individuals; personal belongings are
largely confined to lockers.
There are no PCs at the desks, because
the employees who use the space use mobile
technologies, including the Cius tablet,

meeting requests, give status updates on


projects, and quickly get in touch via instant
messages, voice calls, or e-mail.
Ciscos vision is an example of a broader
effort to reshape office technologies and
environments. We used to have boring
stuff at work and more interesting technology at home, says Prith Banerjee, leader
of Hewlett-Packards research arm. Now
office technology will make use of the same
cool experiences and interfaces.
Among other things, Banerjee predicts
that flexible, paperlike color displays will
blur the boundary between phones and tablets in the next few years, creating mobile
devices even better suited to serving as an
entire office in your pocket.
Such changes could save a lot of money.
Ciscos project, for example, was launched
after an internal study found that cubicles
were vacant two-thirds of the time while people roamed the campus or worked remotely.
Company calculations hold that the building
used for the project can accommodate 140
employees, up from 88 in designs used in
a traditional Cisco building, and that real
estate costs would drop by 37 percent.
Over the long term, Cisco hopes to save
on health costs, too, because people who
move around more frequently are less likely
to suffer ergonomic problems. The company is planning to study whether the more
mature technology of today can conquer
resistance that hobbled previous attempts
by companies to create offices where no one
has private space.
Meanwhile, office design firms are stepping in with complementary ideas. Steelcase,
for example, is building office installations
that allow for spontaneous meetings in open
areas. Mobile-device ports are integrated
into conference tables or semiprivate pods,
and some allow people to take turns projecting data on a common screen.

Case Studies

A MORE SOCIAL FUTURE As the fourth largest company in India, with more than 130,000
employees, Infosys provides a way to unite scattered workers.

Uniting a World of Employees


By encouraging use of its social business platform, Infosys fosters
collaboration in far-flung offices.

By KRI S T I NA B J O R A N

ZONDOR

ith more than 130,000 employees worldwidein cities including Hong Kong, Zurich, Beijing,
Atlanta, and Bangalore, where its world
headquarters is locatedthe Indian IT and
outsourcing giant Infosys has a particular
need to keep everyone connected.
So Infosys decided, earlier this year,
not only to sell but also to internally use
a corporate social-networking platform,
iEngage. With this, it joins a fast-growing
trend toward putting social media to work.
Giving widely scattered employees a new
way to collaborate encourages innovation,
says Sunil Senan, an associate vice president at Infosys. We stand to get a lot more
out of our employees through these social

www.technologyreview.com

platforms, he says. And its important for


companies to demonstrate early that theyre
listening to their employees.
Infosys is trying to tap the wisdom of
former employees, too. With more than
20,000 former employees under the iEngage umbrella, it hopes to gain more perspective on organizational problems from
seasoned hands.
Infosys is just the latest in a string of
companies seeking to make better use of
employees experience and knowledge. With
hundreds of millions of people using social
media to transact with each other and to
learn of news, products, and ideas, it is no
surprise that this new medium is due to
penetrate the enterprise, says Bernardo

Huberman, director of Hewlett-Packards


Social Computing Lab and lead researcher
on Virtual Watercooler, HPs corporate social
technology. And penetrate it hasdozens
of companies, including IBM, Jive, and
Salesforce, now offer suites of social collaboration tools.
Use is expected to increase sharply. The
IT research firm International Data Corporation, or IDC, projects that social-platform
revenues will jump from $390 million in
2009 to nearly $2 billion in 2014and,
IDC also reports, 15 percent of Americans
who use social media use it for work.
Social business platforms tend to contain many of the same features as public
social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and
Google+. Employees can share content, chat
with messaging tools, and see what coworkers are up to. The platforms can overcome
barriers to communication, such as location
and position within the organization. When
HP did an internal test run of its Virtual
Watercooler, employees took to it quickly
and felt it gave them a broader understanding of the company as a whole, in the words
of one user.
The platforms can also mine collective
intelligence to solve problems efficiently.
Sean Poulley, vice president of collaboration
solutions at IBM, cites the experience of a
translation-services companythe Londonbased aatranslationsas an example. After
integrating IBMs document-sharing social
platform into its daily operations, the company, which employs more than 700 freelance translators around the globe, sped up
its document review process from an average
of 24 hours to about five minutes, he says.
While some organizations are understandably concerned about the abuses that
the new medium could bring, I believe that
the benefits will eventually trump the potential drawbacks, says HPs Huberman.

The Future of the Office

13

Case Studies

Tackling the Dangers of


Workplace Inactivity

Some companies are trying out existing products to encourage activity in their
workers. Pegasystems, a software company
headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gave its employees Fitbits, thumb-sized
Researchers are using activity-monitoring technology to figure out
devices that detect wearers movements, as
how to keep employees healthier.
part of a broader wellness program. We
By EMI LY S I N G E R
have a population of technical people who
are often just sitting at their computers,
and we had seen in medical-claims data
evidence that our employees in general were
growing body of evidence suggests
Owen and collaborators are about to
not physically active enough, says Janice
that sedentary office workers and
begin a clinical study in Melbourne in which
Barker, senior director of compensation and
other inactive people are at a rela- office workers are given adjustable desks
benefits for Pegasystems. That was sometively high risk of dying early.
that let them choose between sitting and
thing we felt we could make efforts to solve.
While many employers have introduced
standing throughout the day. Participants
As part of the program, teams of employees
wellness programs to encourage workers to
will wear accelerometers to measure activ- compete on how many steps they take over
exercise and lose weight, few have tried to
ity and inclinometers that measure sitting
a given period.
figure out ways to make office work itself
time to determine whether the desks reduce
Barker says the Fitbit has been very popless sedentary. For most people with indoor
the time spent sitting or at least break up
ular, with requests for it pouring in from
office jobs or doing lot of driving, work is
sitting time. Researchers will also look at
employees in Russia, India, and China.
really the biggest chunk of sedentary time
participants levels of glucose, insulin, and Weve seen an incredible increase in activity
during the day, says Neville Owen, profes- triglycerides to determine whether changes
levels, she says. I personally was someone
sor of health behavior at the University of
in their habits reduce these markers of car- who never got out of my chair. But when
Queensland, Australia. The average Ameri- diovascular disease. We will also look at
you have this Fitbit and see how little you
can, for example, spends about 10 hours a
participants perception of their own energy
move, its incredibly motivating.
day sitting, and the problem is getting worse. levels, says Owens.
Another approach may be simply to make
it more acceptable to walk around. Last
November, when about 20 scientists, exerSIT OR STAND The height
cise physiologists, and ergonomics experts
of this desk from Steelcase
converged at Stanford to discuss the dangers
adjusts so that the user can
of sitting, they were encouraged to perch
sit or stand.
on exercise balls, stand at caf tables, and
wander around during talks.
We got a lot of interesting feedback, like
This was the first conference where I was
still awake at 4 p.m., says Ken Smith, a
researcher at the Stanford Center on Longevity, which hosted the conference.
Smith and collaborators are working on a
pilot project at a call center in California to
implement suggestions that resulted from
the conference. We want to explore cultural
changes in the workplace that make it okay
to stand in a highly sedentary environment
like a call center, where it might be frowned
on to walk around, or not even possible, he
says. Part of the study will be to look at the
impact on productivity.

The Future of the Office

business impact August 2011

STE E LCAS E

14

Case Studies

Bring Your Own Device

Remember when only the boss got a BlackBerry? At ColgatePalmolive, employees bring their own smart phones to work.

By ROB E RT D. H O F

AB E R D E E N G R O U P

hen executives of Colgate-Palmolive met last year to consider


how the 205-year-old household
products company could move more deeply
into the digital age, they heard an earful
from employees with smart phones.
People were asking, Why cant I get my
[work] e-mail on my own phone? recalls
Linda Van de Wiele, director of collaboration for Colgates Global Information Technology organization.
Until recently, many companies viewed
employees mobile phones less as productivity boosters than as security disasters waiting to happen. Workers might visit unsafe
websites, lose phones packed with corporate secrets, or forward corporate e-mail to
personal accounts.
But with 468 million smart phones
and 70 million tablets expected to sell this
year alone, according to market researcher
Gartner, companies can no longer afford to
ignore the tide of consumer devices that
employees are already using to get work
done. Indeed, according to one survey of
office workers, some 37 percent already use
consumer technologies for work without
company permission.
You had popular rebellion in the corporate world, says Kevin Cavanaugh, vice
president of business and technology at IBM
Collaboration Solutions, a division in IBMs
software group.
The explosive spread of smart phones
now has some large companies scrambling
to keep up. Until early this year, for instance,
Colgate was allowing only some 1,000 senior
managers with company-issued BlackBerrys to access corporate e-mail servers from
their phones. That figure represented just

www.technologyreview.com

4 percent of Colgates global workforce of


26,000. By comparison, about one in three
American adults now owns a smart phone,
according to a May survey by comScore.
Colgate recognized that mobility is
the wave of the future, says Van de Wiele,
and that tethering people to a desktop had
become untenable. So this March, Colgate
launched whats known as a Bring Your Own
Device (BYOD) program. A self-service website enables employees to register their personal phone or tablet and download an IBM
app called Traveler, which provides access
to company e-mail and calendar software.
(IBM offers the program for free to clients,
that already license its Lotus Notes software.)
Colgate says that 400 people registered the

first day and that 2,500 now access work


e-mail using the IBM program.
Colgate expects that BYOD will save it
money. Not only will more employees do
office work on the go, theyll be doing it on
devices that Colgate wont have to pay for.
Van de Wiele says that for the 524 employees whove signed up to use personal BlackBerrys, Colgate is saving $1 million a year
on license fees it would have had to pay
BlackBerry maker Research in Motion if
the devices were under corporate ownership.
After the successful launch of its BYOD
website, Colgate now plans to take the program beyond e-mail. The company has been
piloting a personal-phone version of IBMs
Connections software, a sort of corporate
Facebook-meets-Twitter for sending status
updates and sharing files.
Analysts predict that, within three years,
nearly all companies will support BYOD
programs of some kind. Already, around
72 percent of firms surveyed by Aberdeen
Group say they allow employees to use their
own smart phones or tablets for work, four
times as many as at the end of 2008.

Do you allow employees to use


personal devices for work?

28% No

45% Any Device

27% Approved Device

The Future of the Office

15

Case Studies

WHO NEEDS PAPER? One Vermont state


agency lets its employees sign documents digitally. The system can verify the signer with no
need for unique handwriting.

Green Mountain State


Goes Greener

State of Vermont starts moving from page to screen


to save money, time, and trees.
By KEN R I C K V E Z I NA

16

The Future of the Office

Ken Bisconti, head


of IBMs Enterprise
Content Management
division, says that when
companies stop printing
e-mails and other documents that are born
digital, they can reduce
paper consumption by
80 to 90 percent.
began trying to make the process more
efficient and less costly by relying more on
online tools.
The Department of Information and
Innovation became a beta tester for software from IBM and Silanis that lets agency
employees sign a document digitally by

business impact August 2011

TE C H N O LO GY R EVI EW

ffices will probably never be completely paperless, despite the


longstanding technology prophecy to the contrary. But sharp reductions in
paper use are still possible, as one Vermont
state agency is trying to prove.
Vermonts Department of Information
and Innovation handles IT procurement for
the state, and much of that work is paperintensive. The agency sets up contracts with
outside vendors, such as antivirus-software
providers or hardware sellers, to maintain
the state governments technological infrastructure.
A given contract handled by the Department of Information and Innovation may
need to be seen and approved by several
people before it can be accepted, and each
step still requires printing and signing by
hand. The agency might handle 80 such
contracts in a month.
About a year ago, officials in the agency

appending a bit of data that verifies and


records the identity of the signer electronically, without the need for unique handwriting.
The system then automatically alerts the
next person in line that its his or her turn
to review it. Theres no need for a physical
document to be passed around, no need
for collecting signatures. The flow of contracts through the organization is no longer
limited by how fast its employees can walk
from office to office.
Similar measures in any organization
could yield savings that add up quickly. Ken
Bisconti, head of IBMs Enterprise Content
Management division, says that when companies stop printing e-mails and other documents that are born digital, they can reduce
paper consumption by 80 to 90 percent.
Franois Ragnet, a program manager
with Xerox Research Center who focuses
on document technology, envisions a future
in which many more documents are stored
online and automatically update themselves,
so that paper is needed only in limited circumstances.
For now, though, paper can be minimized
only up to a point, says Kris Rowley, the
agencys chief information security officer.
Final versions of contracts must still be
printed and physically filed.
And not every department within the
state government is willing or able to use
electronic signatures.
Paper in the office is never going to go
away, says Rowley. Shes also not sure how
much money the effort will save.
Still, she hopes the agency can do its part
to shrink the anticipated $153 million gap
in the states budget. Vermont has always
been about green, she says, and theres
an awful lot of paper wastedtheres no
need for it, especially with technology the
way its going.

Case Studies

OFFICE GAMES The U.K.s Department for Work


and Pensions uses a game called Idea Street to
generate new ideas from employees.

Using Games to Get


Employees Thinking

Organizations can make productive things happen by letting their


workers compete for virtual points.
By KEN R I C K V E Z I NA

U.K. D E PARTM E NT FO R WO R K AN D P E N S I O N S

ompanies have been using crowdsourcing to get large groups of


outside volunteers to answer a
question or perform a task, but now they
are finding ways to crowdsource internally
by using games and contests that entice
employees to generate, hone, and implement ideas. Nearly two years ago, the U.K.
Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)
began asking its employees to play a game
called Idea Street in their Web browsers.
The game is like a suggestion box for the
agency, but it rewards players for generating new ideas: they get DWPeasa virtual
currency to be used in the game.
By implementing suggestions made
through the game, the department expects
to save roughly $30 million by 2014, says
David Cotterill, the DWPs deputy direc-

www.technologyreview.com

tor of innovation. Some of these ideas are


deceptively simple but improve the efficiency
of the department, such as a new way for
employees to reserve conference rooms and
a simple app that analyzes the DWPs datastorage availability.
Games are turning up in a variety of business-oriented settings these days. Microsoft
created Ribbon Hero 2: Clippys Second
Chance, a downloadable game designed
to teach people how to use the companys
Office software. Walt Scacchi and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine,
have developed FabLab, which turns a firstperson shooter game, Unreal Tournament
3, into something that trains people how
to work in a semiconductor factory. The
ShapeUp platform uses games to encourage employee health. Badgeville, a startup

that helps companies use online games to


attract consumers, recently secured a $12
million round of funding.
People have always played games while
they work; its just that now its being formalized and the games are more fun, says
Richard Bartle, a games researcher and one
of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer
online game industry. The research firm
Gartner predicts that more than 70 percent
of the worlds 2,000 largest companies will
soon have at least one gamified application by 2015.
At the DWP, players of Idea Street earn
rewards in the form of DWPeas not only by
submitting ideas but also by providing feedback on others ideas. The points also help
the organization select and develop good
ideas. Suppose you have an idea that accumulates a certain level of positive comments
from the community. It thereby graduates
to a team-building phase, in which youll
have to enlist a certain number of teammates to support your idea. If you succeed
at this, your idea will move on to the final
phase, in which you build a business case for
it and try to get other players to invest their
DWPeas in the idea. Ultimately, it will go to
an approval board, and if it is green-lighted
there, all the people who invested in your
idea will get a return on their investment.
Other departments of the British government are beginning to use Idea Street.
It debuted in the Ministry of Justice and
the Department for Business Innovation
and Skills last year.
Rajat Paharia, chief product officer and
founder of the game service Bunchball,
expects to see more organizations follow
suit. To him, theres an obvious connection between the nature of business and
the nature of games. Most companies
havent thought that hard about it, says
Paharia, but the corporate world already
is a giant game.

The Future of the Office

17

Case Studies

Attending to Digital Etiquette

Emily Post might have advised us to keep informal IM language out of


e-mail and avoid watching Twitter feeds when colleagues are speaking. So how are we doing?

By KAT H E R I N E B O U R Z AC

n 1922, Baltimore society woman and


magazine correspondent Emily Post
wrote the book on etiquette. An encyclopedic guide to manners, it became a
best-seller and launched a family business.
Her descendants are carrying on the task
through the Emily Post Institute, and her
great-great-grandson, Daniel Post Senning,
is working on a book about etiquette in an
age of digital communications.
Technology Review asked Senning for
insights into the proper use of technology
in the office.

What do you do when the offender is,


indeed, the organizer or your boss?

Incivility studies show that the vast majority of rude behavior in the workplace flows
down the chain of command. It costs twice

One is when people are unaware of whats


deeper in an e-mail chain, and someones
opinion about a boss or an employee gets
sent to that person. Another is when people
use blind carbon copy inappropriately to
secretly send e-mails to someones supervisor
and hedge bets. And a final one is failing to
use appropriate salutations and greetings,
particularly when approaching people for
the first time.

Senning: My family calls it the technological brick wall. You put enough devices
between you and another person, and you
can forget that theres a person there. The
technology itself isnt rude. The existence
of the technology might allow someone to
forget about the impact his words or actions
are having on someone at the other end. The
vast majority of bad behavior is inconsiderate behavior.

18

The Future of the Office

Are these kinds of etiquette dilemmas


entirely new?

MR. MANNERS Office technology is only as


good as the etiquette of those using it, argues
Daniel Post Senning.

an annual salary to replace an employee, just


to get a new warm body into a seat. One common reason people leave jobs is they dont
feel respected by someone above them in
the chain of command. And if you get into
the subtler studies, even if you dont lose
the person, you lose productivity to negative thoughtse.g., Im not respected here.

Not at all. Every generation has had to


survive a change in the conditions of the
world and the manners that go along with
it. Etiquette is a combination of manners
and principles. The manners change, but
the principles dont. The fundamental principles of etiquette are honesty, respect, and
consideration. Those guiding principles stay
the same. We might not know to dog-ear the
calling card on the left side to indicate that
its being left for the woman of the house,
the way they did 150 years ago, but we know
youre not supposed to use the cell phone
at the dinner table. Each generation has to
learn the etiquette of its time.
business impact August 2011

E M I LY P O ST I N STITUTE

Its rude if someone is not giving you their


full attention. Its not that uncommon, and
its most commonly the supervisor or the
organizer texting or doing e-mail. Youve
got to model the behavior you want to see.
Say, Im going to be doing a 15-minute presentation; please turn off your cell phones.
Make the expectation clear.

Youre not obligated to accept a friend


request. There are a lot of good ways to
handle it. Some suggest that you respond
to them via a different mediumrespond
with an e-mail and say, I only use Facebook for close friends and family, but Id
love to connect with you on LinkedIn, my
professional network. Another option is
simply to ignore it. Or you might manage
your Facebook account to accept that request
in an area with business contactslike what
Google+ is now doing.
Can you give an example of the negative impact of words delivered through a
technological medium? What are some
e-mail faux pas?

TR: Is the proliferation of office technologies making people ruder?

Like, say, when someone is scrolling


through Facebook or Twitter posts while
you are giving a presentation?

What should you do when your supervisor, or your employee, sends you a
Facebook friend request and youre not
comfortable with it?

Leaders

New Technology Brings


Offshoring to Villages

The Xerox CTO describes research that allows manufacturing and


office workers to avoid commuting to traffic-choked Indian cities.
By DAV I D TA L B O T

he next decade will bring remarkable changes in the way office work is
done. Perhaps nowhere will change
be more profound than in countries such
as India, where improved network access
and smart technologies could make it possible for certain tasks to be divided among
people working outside major city centers.
Xerox is one of many companies developing the technologies that will pave the way.
CTO Sophie Vandebroek described some of
the efforts of the companys two-year-old
Xerox Research Center in India.

C H R I STO P H E R LAMAR CA/ R E D U X

TR: Offshoring is already a big business


in India. Whats coming?
Vandebroek: India today has large office
buildings where you might find 3,000 people
coming to a crowded urban area to perform
tasks like document management or to staff a
customer-call center. They have low incomes
and sometimes commute for hours. It is better
to spread that work into the villagesbetter
for business efficiency, for sustainability, and
for improving the health and happiness of
the employees and their families.

Such technology doesnt exist already?


If you are somewhere with sufficient bandwidth and a smart phone, you can access
databases and even enterprise resource management systems. Innovation in the developing
world is often about doing more with less; in
this case doing specific things with less bandwidth on more phones. The new tool enabled
access to only the specific real-time data he
needed, which had been entered in Chennai.
Are such innovations applicable outside
of the developing world?
If you can do things in a simpler and more
efficient way, its always good. In the medical
field, for example, there is a lot of innovation
on low-cost devices that nurses can use in
villages. Similar low-cost technologies could

be used by people in the developed world


to report their own medical information
from their homes.
How can you break up the tasks of those
massive offshoring centers and do it in
villages, especially if the work involves
sensitive financial or health information?
You need to do it securely, and in a way
that can withstand breakdowns in village
power and cellular or Internet connections.
We are in the middle of crafting the solutions.
For example, if the job involves managing
your health-care payments900 million
health-insurance payments are processed
by Xerox every yearwe make sure we split
the job, so that no one person knows your
name, your medical condition, and your
Social Security number.
How soon can such office solutions be
widely implementedand whats the
ultimate vision?
My hope and goal is that this works and
is scalable. We are initiating a pilot with
one of the startups in the Indian Institute
of Technology Madrass Rural Technology
and Business Incubator. If it is successful,
the future of work in India and in all developing nations will be radically different.

PAVING THE WAY Sophie Vandebroek thinks the office solutions


that the Xerox Research Center
in India is working on could transform the way that work happens
throughout the developing world.

Xerox employs ethnographers to study


such problems. Whats an example of
what theyve discovered?
One involves distributed manufacturing. In Chennai we studied a mass-producer
of baskets and other woven goods. A rural
cordinator would go around all week to
the villages where the products were made,
and on weekends he would enter production data into an Excel spreadsheet back
in Chennai. He needed a way of entering
and accessing data with his mobile phone
in real time.

www.technologyreview.com

The Future of the Office

19

Leaders

TABLET SKEPTIC Craig Mundie thinks tablets


will be important for at least five years, but says
theyre flawed when it comes to collaboration.

great at, particularly in this area of lifelike


collaboration and interaction.
Where is Microsoft with this technology?
Some of the last things I talked about,
such as Avatar-based telepresence, are here.
Avatar Kinect went worldwide [in July]. For
the very first time, there really is an ability
to have meetings of up to eight people in a
telepresence type of environment.

An Office on Every Surface


How Microsofts chief strategy officer views the future
of our work spaces.

By ROB E RT L E M O S

n a futuristic video that he showed in a


sales meeting in 2009, Craig Mundie,
Microsofts chief research and strategy
officer, imagined what work might look like
a decade hence. His video showed massive
touch screens connecting offices around
the world, computer interfaces in tabletops, and mobile devices that receive data
seamlessly. Mundie recently described to
Technology Review his vision of data-driven
spaces with interfaces on every surface.

20

The Future of the Office

Why dont you see tablets as a key trend?


It isnt clear to me whether the tablet,
in that exact form factor, will be a persistent thing or not. There may be other display technologies that people may look at
over that longer horizon. Tablets will still
be important over the next five to 10 years,
but there are still things that they are not

What future-office technologies are your


overseas research labs working on?
If you look at Kinect and all the machinevision stuff, that came from seven groups
in three labsBeijing; Cambridge, U.K.;
and Redmond. For more and more projects, the research is blended together on a
more global basis to create these next steps.
How does cloud computing fit in?
The cloud is important in that it democratizes access to super-scale computing and
storage facilities. Now any guy in the garage
with a credit card can economically, for some
period of time, get access to facilities that
are larger than most companies historically
had access to.
And what about Office 365?
When you talk about Office 365, I think
the cloud will be a point of integration for
the individual. All these different devices
in their life, whether they are at home or at
work or in their cars, will gradually become
a more organized set of things that work
together as opposed to a disjointed set of
little computers that the user has to manage.
And I think the cloud is an integral part of
making that happen.
business impact August 2011

M I C R O S O FT

TR: What is Microsofts vision of the


future office?
Mundie: We will continue to see desktop
computing. In fact, one of the things that I
have predicted is that there will be a successor to the desktop, and I think its the
room. There will be what I call a fixed computing environment, and it should evolve
in quite dramatic ways to become a much

richer and immersive experience. We will


see a lot more displays in the office, and
they will be built into surfaces horizontally
and also be on the walls or in the walls. I
think that a kind of completely continuous
model, where you are using speech, gesture,
and touch in a more integrated way, will
become more commonplace. There will
be a subset of that fixed environment that
you will want to take with you, called the
portable office, and the evolution of the
laptop will be that.

How soon will this technology emerge?


In a decade, I dont see a reason why the
kind of technology that we have in Kinect
cannot ultimately be miniaturized to a large
degree, much like other cameras are, where
you have one on the back of your phone or
in the lid of your laptop

Leaders

NETWORK EFFECT David Evans, Ciscos chief


futurist, stands with a concept dashboard for a
fully Internet-connected car.

them. For some people, just having a smart


phone might be enough. I think it will be
job-specific.
Will completely new types of devices
start to appear in offices?

Seeing the Future of


the Office Internet

Ciscos chief futurist predicts digital avatar assistantsand more.

By TO M S I M O N I T E

CISCO

nside the headquarters of networking


giant Cisco in San Jose, California, lies
a technology showcase where executives can test out advanced technologies
like high-definition videoconferencing, a
digital avatar named Halie who researches
spoken questions, and a concept dashboard
for a car whose mechanical and entertainment systems are fully Internet-connected.
Its called the executive technology experience room, and the man behind it is David
Evans, the companys chief futurist and chief
technology officer of its Internet business
solutions group. Evans, who built many of
the demonstration systems on display and
now advises clients on how new technologies could help their businesses, spoke with
Technology Review about how these advances
could boost worker productivity.

www.technologyreview.com

TR: The technology we use at work is


changing very quickly. What is the biggest
force you see today?

Evans: I think it comes down to us not


really needing to go to the office anymore
all our work and connections can come to
us, wherever we are ... It means you can
take your full desktop and videoconferencing anywhere, and you are never away from
your desk phone number. It can give you a
full keyboard-and-screen experience, too.
We will see a lot more devices like that in
the workplace.
Can these new mobile devices really
displace a traditional computer?

Laptops arent going to go away, but I


think were going to see more classification
of workers, and some people just wont need

Cisco telepresence today gives a rich,


immersive experience, but the drawback
is that you have to go to the telepresence
suite. Ive been experimenting with robotic
telepresence, where you [control] the body
of a robot and it becomes an extension of
you, a physical avatar. We are already seeing robotic avatars used by some doctors to
do their rounds, and patients find it really
offers them much the same relationship to
having a doctor walk by in person to check
up on them.
What about technology that allows us to
do less, so we can dedicate more time to
what matters?

A good example of this is the interactive


avatar I developed, Halie. She can understand what you say to her, uses facial recognition, and can do things like manage your
calendar or book business trips. Ultimately
that technology will allow everyone to have
their own virtual personal assistant, so they
spend less time on administration.
How will these new technologies change
the workforce and how it operates?

Already it is clear that people and collaboration matter so much more at work
than they did before. You can no longer do
your job without collaborating with others,
and we will soon rely on being able to access
any person, regardless of place, and [use]
tools like social networking at work. That
might change how employment works. It
could become the norm for people to have
multiple employers, because they can more
easily share their expertise with multiple
employers very easily with this technology.

The Future of the Office

21

Infographics

Designing Around
Collaboration and Mobility

Technology shift sparks a rethinking of conventional office space.


By LAU R E N C OX

ith mobile devices invading


the workplace and more workers telecommuting, many companiesand the design firms that serve
themare rapidly changing their thinking about conventional office space.
Cubicles are pass; flexible spaces that
allow employees to log in, collaborate, and
hit the road are all the rage. The goal is to
support the mobile workforce, increase the
opportunities to interact, and save money
by using space more efficiently.
This design trend is partly a response to
events: cubicles are already emptying. An
internal study by Cisco, for example, found
that cubicles at the companys office were
vacant 35 percent of the time because workers were telecommuting or working elsewhere on the companys campus.

SMALL COLLABORATION SPACES Earlier this year Microsoft completed renovations on its new
Garage, a site in Redmond, Washington, that encourages innovation among small groups of employees. Throughout the building are pods like those shown here. In these temporary work spaces,
teams of two to five employees can collaborate on projects for weeks at a timesomething that can
otherwise be tough in a company with almost 90,000 employees.

SEMI-PRIVATE MEETING SPACE This


pod-like installation with adjustable
privacy screens allows for semi-private
meetings in communal areas. Other,
larger versions incorporate adjustable
video conference screensreplacing
conventional conference roomsand
can be used for communal seating when
not needed for meetings.

TO P: JAS P E R SAN I DAD, M I C R O S O FT; B OTTO M: STE E LCAS E

22

The Future of the Office

business impact August 2011

Infographics

COMMON AREAS Microsofts Garage has huge, open gathering


spaces, such as the area shown here, and plenty of windows to
let in daylight. Many companies and design firms are increasingly
demphasizing closed private offices or cubicles in favor of common areas that allow opportunities for interaction among employees who can easily bring their work anywhere on mobile phones,
tablets, and laptops.

C LO C KW I S E F R O M TO P LE FT: JAS P E R SAN I DAD, M I C R O S O FT; STE E LCAS E; M O R GAN LOVE LL

CLUSTERED COMMUNAL DESKS Companies whose employees telecommute can often consolidate
office space, saving significant amounts of money. This workspace by Steelcase, an office design
company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is designed to use minimal space but create an open
feeling through strategic placement of drawers and privacy panels. The desks can function as communal property, with different employees using the same workspace as needed.

GARDEN-VARIETY COLLABORATION

Morgan Lovell, a U.K.-based design firm,


is developing relaxed, informal interior
spaces that invite employees to stop,
talk, and collaborate. Shown here is the
third floor of Rackspace, an IT hosting
company. Morgan Lovell designed it to
mimic a garden, complete with decking,
swings, and fake grass.

www.technologyreview.com

The Future of the Office

23

Infographics

Offices Go Mobile

Mobile devices are changing employees expectations about when,


how, and where theyll work.
By DAV I D TA L B O T A N D K R I S T I NA B J O R A N

The number of white-collar employees working from outside


the office has been increasing.
Employees who say they telecommute ...

Partly to capitalize on this trend, employers are adopting


social technologies that allow employees to share and
collaborate.
Worldwide business spending on social platforms (millions
of U.S. dollars)

100

2,000

...at least one day a week


...almost every day

80
1,500

39%
60

PROJ ECTE D

32%
1,000

40

20

40%

2008

Employees in office jobs have high


expectations for using mobile
devicesincluding their ownat
work.

45%
500

2010

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Measuring employee attitudes

66% 66%
Expect to be able
to use any device
personal or companyownedto access
corporate networks

Would take a job with


less pay if they got
more flexibility in their
access to and use of
mobile devices

60%
Believe its not
necessary to be in
the office to be
productive

24

The Future of the Office

business impact August 2011

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