I have enjoyed participating in the FastFoward blog for the four plus years it has been in existence. It have been a great place to meet interesting people and share ideas. At every conference I have met new people who said they were following us on this blog. All good things have their run and now ours is over. I hope you stay in touch with us through our individual blogs. I want to close with a look at an interesting study on the positive impact of Web 2.0. Ironically, the label the most tech savvy people in the study as the tech fast forward group.

Communispace, in partnership with Ogilvy & Mather, recently released findings from a joint research study that examines the impact technology has on the lives of today’s consumer, with a specific focus on the role technology plays on children and  family life in our society. The ‘Tech Fast Forward: Plug in to See the Brighter Side of Life’ study evaluates the optimistic outlook associated with tech-savvy kids and their respective families and draws direct correlations to the resulting implications for marketers and brands.

In two phases of research, they surveyed 1200 US parents with children aged 3–12 in the household and qualitatively explored key topics with 112 tech-savvy community members and their kids. In the first portion they identified 5 segments: tech backward 3%, tech neutral 36%, tech forward 42% , and tech fast forward 19%. Ten they looked more closely the last group. Here is a video of the qualitative portion of the research, including footage from Flip cameras given to participants (children ages 3-12 years old) tasked with recording in-home technology-related behavior.

The vast majority of all segments saw technology as a positive force in their lives (84%) with the tech fast forward slightly ahead (87%) on this measure. In a related question: Will technology make of break us? All segments respond make 72% of the time and 85% of the fast forward said make. When asked if technology better connect or creates more distance, 72% of all segments said better connect and 80% of the tech fast forward sided with this view.   This is an overall quite positive view and one that I share.  The tech fast forward group is also more optimistic about the future.

Some of the key implications identified in the study that enable brands to more effectively connect with and reach the Tech Forward consumer include (mostly in their words with some additional comments):

Mobilize tech optimism: Brands have the opportunity to capitalize on today’s tech optimism by helping consumers create the brighter world they want to see.

Mine the family mindset: As intergenerational attitudes converge, opportunities to market to the family as a unit increase. Purchase decisions are family decisions.

Curate unexpected connections: Brands have the opportunity to bring unimagined access to consumers across the globe and should harness the power of connections in more interesting ways. We like this idea at Darwin.

Put the world to work for you: Technology has unleashed the wisdom of the crowd and brands can build on tech optimism to channel their customers’ creativity.

Respect the mode: Consumers today switch between modes of separation and integration, and seek service and product solutions to help them feel in control.  Brands will benefit by providing a flexible feature set that speaks to the multi-modal life.

Un-connect the dots: Consumers want to interpret your brand—to make your brand’s story their own. So give them the building blocks and let them put the pieces together. I like this one. This is what we do at Darwin, enable people to better connect the dots themselves through content visualizations rather than prescriptive top down search.

Build gated communities: Safety and privacy create major barriers for self-expression online; private communities help consumers feel secure and confident when engaging with your brand online. This is what Communispace does quite well.

Let people mess with your brand: The creative impulse abounds, and today, any and all content is fair game for experimentation, adaptation and reinterpretation. This includes your brand!  Companies need to embrace this trend and enable consumers to reimagine and remix brand assets. I like this one best of all. There is much more in the report that is available for free.

Thanks for reading this blog over the past few years. I hope to stay connected to each of you.

I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.

And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it.  The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever.  Yada, yada.  Promises, promises.  Here are a few revolutions:

• In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
• In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
• In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
• In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
• In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
• And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.

Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”

And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting?  What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution.  The social networking revolution.  An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way.  Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real.  The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.

I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.

Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships.  But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings.  Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.  Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing.  People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives.  Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.

(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town.  One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)

I had not been paying too much attention to Klout until I saw this article in the New York Times, Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored. I skimmed it and tweeted about it to save the link for further reading. I often use my Twitter, @billlives, as a social bookmarking tool so I remember and have access to posts and articles I want to save. I then go through my tweets twice a month and it gives me an overview of what I thought was important during this time. Then I do a blog post that lists the tweets I found really important as a way archive these tweets. I am sure there are more efficient ways to archive Twitter but I find this practice a useful exercise.

Well, the tweet on Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored got retweeted six times within a few hours so this action caused me to look more closely at the article. I then tweeted that I was inspired by the RTs to write a blog post on the article and I got two replies for the six who said they were looking forward to the post. I was pleased as this type of exchange is how Twitter is supposed to work. I also met a few new Twitter friends in the process.

The article itself exposed me more to the growing movement behind such tools as Klout and Peerindex. It is about all of us getting a number, similar to Robert Parker’s quantification of wine. While there is more objectivity here that with Parker, the underlying motive is the same, the quantification of the world. This is a topic I have covered several times.  I did a four part series on this blog that began with Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget.

In this post I quoted, Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. So how does this relate to someone’s reputation on the Web? Personally, I follow people for many different reasons so a single score is not going to help too much. I also follow people related to three different twitter accounts I am connected with (@billives, @darwineco, and @outstart). The fact that Klout does offer the top ten topics a person is known for helps but there is still a gap between the complexity of why I follow people and a score, in the same way I might like a wine for many different reasons, occasions, and food parings.

I look at the Klout scores of people I know and there is a rough correlation with my views of what works for me but certainly not a precise one. Like wine, I think this is an area best left to the full range of human cognitive abilities and the multiple associations the human mind can make.  The Klout score of someone I do not known might help except for the fact that I know it is not completely accurate for my needs, only a clue about what to pursue in more depth. For the record, I did check my scores on two of these tools and my Klout score is 55 and my Peerindex score is 59 but I am not really sure what this means.

Mobile collaboration is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already work remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether that mobile devices exceed desktops. The new Forrester Wave™: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011 by Ted Schadler for Content & Collaboration Professionals offers some useful advice on how mobile collaboration requires a new app approach.

We are now living in a work everywhere world. I have noticed that even most small vacation inns have free wifi as a standard offering. Forrester notes that your most productive employees m now use four devices to get work done. This means that “client/server solutions with on-premises servers are inadequate, simply not responsive or agile enough for escalating user requirements and expectations.”

They note that mobile apps need to be designed to run well on any mobile device because of the proliferation of devices. With so many different mobile platforms and form factors to target, app developers will have to organize differently, code differently, and execute differently. In this new environment design skills grow ever-more important (and scarce). There will be new abstraction layers that separate presentation from interaction from back-end services. Teams now must design for mobile first.

Mobile apps must be delivered as a cloud service. Forrester notes that latency is already a problem for distributed organizations and even waiting for email to upload or download to a remote site can be painful. I see this with my iPhone. For me this wait time is mitigated by the fact that I mostly use the iPhone to check for messages when I am killing time. It would be very frustrating in normal use. In addition, access to team sites and even the file system from a hotel room over a virtual private network (VPN) can be excruciatingly slow. Fortunately this is no longer an issue for me but I remember it well. Forrester states that the problem is the lack of capacity, bandwidth, and data close to the device. The solution is cloud suppliers with data centers around the world and points of presence in every major city. The cloud is simply better for delivering good mobile app experiences. I would agree.

Here is another perspective on mobile app creation from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. This session discussed three components that any mobile strategy should have, which includes deciding what goes mobile, understanding how to mobilize applications and services, and designing a framework for managing mobility. On a related note here are some thoughts from the 2011 mLearn Mobile Learning Conference.

In many aspects o technology business innovation, maturity models have served to define stages of development, serving as benchmarks for companies to see how far along they have progressed. The model serves as a guideline for process improvement. For example, the Capability Maturity Model Integration Framework (CMMI), first published at Carnegie-Mellon University, has served as a set of guidelines for software development.

Now. IDC has proposed a similar approach for social enterprise development, called the Social Business Maturity Model, which is intended to help companies that are growing in their adoption of social business and want to optimize their use of social tools.

IDC’s Social Business Maturity Model consists of 5 stages:

1. Experimentation
2. Compartmentalization
3. Integration
4. Operationalization
5. Optimization

Do these identified stages make sense for identifying where organizations stand on the social enterprise spectrum?  The final stage, optimization, suggests that it isn’t until this point that significant benefits are being delivered to the business.

Here is a recent study that reported digital distractions from Harmon.ie on what has become a major issue at work. It impacts both work and time outside work hours, often blurring the distinction between the two. For example, the majority of people under the age of 40 stay digitally-connected in bed, and 44% of people stay connected during a night out at the movies. Of course many of these connections are for personal reasons, but often work is involved.   In the following result summaries the bullets are in the words of the study. Here are some of the work related findings:

• Two out of three users will interrupt a group meeting to communicate with someone else digitally, either by answering email (48%), answering a mobile phone (35%), chatting via IM (28%), updating their status on a social network (12%) or tweeting (9%).
• Relatively few workers disconnect to focus on a task (32%) or during virtual meetings or teleconferences (30%), webcasts (26%) or lunch (12%).
• A majority of workers turn off their devices only when their boss asks them to (85%) or during one-on-one meetings (63%).

Most of the distractions are digital.

• Users reported getting sidetracked in email processing (23%), switching windows to complete tasks (10%), personal online activities such as: Facebook (9%), instant messaging (6%), text messaging (5%) and Web search (3%).
• Multiple devices on the desktop contribute to the problem, with 65% of respondents reporting that they utilize up to three additional monitors and/or mobile devices simultaneously with their main computer screen as they work.

Companies have responded with strategies to limit these distractions.

• 68% of respondents reported that their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions, while 73% of end users have adopted self-imposed techniques to help maintain focus.
• The #1 corporate strategy used to discourage digital diversion is blocking access to public social networks such as Facebook and/or other non-business websites (48%).

A related, but different, problem is the difficulty in finding content. Respondents reported that they spend an average of 2-1/2 hours per week trying to find the documents needed in multiple local, corporate and cloud repositories.

• The user’s email inbox is the #1 location searched, with 76% of respondents reporting email as the first place they look. Other locations include the desktop (69%), file server (52%), shared workspace (34%), portable storage device (18%) and/or cloud storage (9%).
• The average user emails two or more documents per day to an average of five people for review, increasing email-based document volume by up to 50 documents per week. The fact that these attachments are stored on multiple local computers complicates the challenge of finding the latest document versions as well as merging feedback from multiple reviewers.

All of this points to a very disorganized workplace. The very tools that are supposed to help us are actually overwhelming us in some cases.  The solution starts with a unified strategy for digital communication and requires some smart policies, cultural issues and wise implementation of limited number of technologies. I wrote about this recently (see Taking Control of Our Knowledge Consumption and Our Social Presence). I quoted Nick Carr whose new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains address this issue, “companies need to challenge the assumption that employees should always be available. Some people do their best work when they’re disconnected, and companies should create a work culture that encourages it.”  It sounds like they need to actually force many people to disconnect.

Big Data is a hot topic. I went to a session on Big Data Analytics for Social Media at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Computerworld reported on an IDC study that predicts we will see a 50 times increase in the world’s data in the next ten years. In 2011 alone they report that 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created. This is the equivalent to every U.S. citizen writing 3 tweets per minute for 26,976 years. Then over the next decade, the number of servers managing the world’s data stores will grow by ten times to match the 50 times increase in data. The report adds that IT execs will likely have trouble finding enough people with the skills and experience to manage this increase This is all covered in the fifth annual IDC Digital Universe study.

This data growth is fueled, in part, by the spread of smart devices such as sensors in clothing, medical devices, and structures like buildings and bridges. In addition, unstructured information – such as files, email and video – will account for 90% of all data created over the next decade. Some of this growth is through the rise of high bandwidth data such as videos.

There is some good news as new hardware and software has driven the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information down to one-sixth of what it was in 2005. This is likely why servers will only grow ten times while the data they store will grow fifty times. Relative costs have also dropped as since 2005 the annual investments by enterprises in hardware, software and cloud services technologies, along with the staff to manage information, has only increased 50% to $4 trillion.

The cloud accounts for some of the cost reduction and will account for more going forward. Today, cloud computing accounts for only 2% of all IT spending. However, by 2015, though, close to 20% of all information will be attached to cloud services some way, and as much as 10% will reside in a cloud infrastructure, IDC stated.

According to David Reinsel, IDC’s vice president of storage and semiconductor research, the next step is to enable companies to better extract value out of their mountains of data, via big data analytics. “This is where real opportunities lie, and where some folks may miss the boat. As soon as big data success stories are advertised and people see that there is gold in their data … then you will find more companies desiring to put more data online.”

Gartner also weighs in on this issue in a recent report. While the volume within big data is a significant issue, Gartner analysts “said the real issue is making sense of big data and finding patterns in it that help organizations make better business decisions.” I could not agree more.

Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner: “The ability to manage extreme data will be a core competency of enterprises that are increasingly using new forms of information—such as text, social and context—to look for patterns that support business decisions in what we call Pattern-Based Strategy. Pattern-Based Strategy, as an engine of change, utilizes all the dimensions in its pattern-seeking process. It then provides the basis of the modeling for new business solutions, which allows the business to adapt…”

The ability to handle this explosion of data and make sense of it should be a priority of enterprises or they will be swamped in the next few years by both the data and their competitors.

The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) is “an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: while “modern” management is one of humankind’s most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age.” I am impressed with their efforts and recently joined the MIX site. It is free to sign up.

MIX leaders include: Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, Polly LaBarre, and David Sims, and others. I had lunch with Michele after the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and he filled me in on some of what they are doing.

Here is the MIX Manifesto: “What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring and socially responsible, as the people who work within them? Why not, indeed. This is the mission of the MIX.”  I can certainly support this effort.

They refer to this effort as Management 2.0. Consistent with Enterprise 2.0, MIX is using an open innovation model to collect and share ideas to support their mission. Operating under the principle that innovation is a social process they are building a community to support their goals. To encourage sharing at MIX,  “every effort will be made on the MIX to ensure that every valuable contribution is recognized, and every contribution fairly credited.” This is a smart practice. They ask that all participants follow these guidelines, be: contrarian, concise, concrete, constructive, collaborative, and colorful. Part of the color side is to encourage more interesting profiles by participants.

One of the MIX initiatives is the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey
M-Prize for Management Innovation. In the first leg of contest (which runs from May 25 through July 18), they are seeking the “most progressive practices and disruptive ideas that illustrate how the governing principles and tools of the Web can make our organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring, and accountable.” There are two types of entries: an instructive case study (a Story) or an experimental design (a Hack).  The goals is to show how Web 2.0 values (including transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, openness, community and self-determination) can help overcome the design limits of Management 1.0—and help to create Management 2.0.

Here is an excellent blog post by Polly LaBarre, How to Hack Management: A Practical Guide to High-Impact Disruption and Storytelling, that illustrates what they are looking for in the M-Prize but the advice goes beyond this initiative to provide guidance for any new management effort. Polly asks if the idea is: deep, bold, human, clear, and social.

Here is a sample hack, The Deliberatorium, by Martin Klein, Principal Research Scientist at MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. It is s “a software tool designed to help organizations better harvest the knowledge and incorporate the perspectives of their members to identify solutions for complex problems, avoiding the dysfunctional behaviors (such as noise, disorganized content, and polarization) that other social media often produce when applied to challenging topics.” It provides better treading of conversations that offers useful maps of conversation to enable to harvesting of broader input into management decisions.

Just a few years ago, engagement with social communities was an experiment that some bold individuals in bold organizations were conducting to boldly go where no one has gone before. Now, social or virtual communities are the fabric of day-to-day business. It is transforming the way information is disseminated outside and inside organizations as they connect with customers, partners, and industry players. But for some industries, it is disrupting or  destroying — or if you look at it another way — enriching information gathering.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the news business.

The question is then: Is the news business a victim or a beneficiary of the social media explosion?

That’s the question I and co-author Dr. Bill Gibbs of Duquesne University recently took up in a chapter in a new book on the implications of social networking, titled Handbook of Research on Methods and Techniques for Studying Virtual Communities: Paradigms and Phenomena.

The book, compiled and edited by Ben Kei Daniel of University of Saskatchewan, explores how over the last decade, virtual communities have evolved from massive experimental, educational, technological, business, and social environments to normal, day-to-day operations for a variety of organizations.

Chapters cover studies on various types of virtual communities, and in our chapter, we explore how global online communities now include hundreds of millions of members, able to communicate almost instantaneously.

Increasingly, traditional news organizations are finding they are being outpaced in coverage of world events by cadres of “citizen journalists” reporting in real time via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. While there are valid concerns about the credibility of information being posted on social networking sites, there’s no question that contextual reports are being delivered much faster to global audiences than traditional outlets. In addition, recipients have a wide array of choices from which they can acquire this information.

The news providers that are on top of the game now offer interactive sources that engage people, enable them to build community, and to participate in the news. At the same time, the digital interfaces through which people access the news are continuously evolving, diverse, and oftentimes visually complex.

In the chapter, Bill and I explore trends and developments in news-oriented virtual communities. We review several data collection and analysis techniques such as content analysis, usability testing and eye-tracking and propose that these techniques and associated tools can aid the study of news communities. We examine the implications these techniques have for better understanding human behavior in virtual communities as well as for improving the design of these environments.

The book has an additional 43 chapters as well, intended as a guidebook for executives and corporate leaders concerned with the management of expertise, social capital, competence knowledge, and information and organizational development in different types of virtual communities and environments.

Recently, I read two blog post commentaries on Nick Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.  One by Andy McAfee, Tune Out, Turn Off: A Mantra Needed for Our Times?, and another by Doris Nhan, Live from #gc2011: Nicholas Carr on how the Internet is hurting innovation. Carr’s book provides his research on how technology and the Internet have affected people’s ability to process information in a negative way. He argues that we are losing our ability to concentrate because of the Web.  And I thought it was my advancing years.  But I digress. Before I add my comments let me summarize what Andy and Doris wrote.

Andy said that he was first a skeptic but as he read Carr’s book and “reflected about my own habits, though, I started to get the uneasy feeling that he was on to something fundamental.” He adds that the 2.0 Era has put us put us immediately in touch with friends, family, colleagues, and strangers through easy to use software on the Web and increasingly available and portable hardware devices for access. Andy notes that this can be addictive and I would agree. Andy supports Nick’s claims that this also takes us away from deep thinking. His remedy is tune out and turn off but not before you provide your comments to his blog post. I did both in the order he suggested.

I have long been convinced of the need to gain a sense of isolation to concentrate, at least for me. I have always liked to work at home, starting as an academic in the 70s. I went to the office to meet with colleagues and students but my thought work was done at home away from those distractions.  Now I have come full circle as I mostly work at home but maintain a very active business social life outside the home. For me it is having control over when I want to concentrate and when I want to be social. For this reason I schedule phone calls rather than have people call me whenever. The Web also allows for this option because it is available for virtual socializing when I want it but I can also turn away.

Doris Nhan goes a step further in her discussions about Nick Carr’s book by offering some specific suggestions from Nick for work that align with my own thoughts above. She writes that “to regain a much-needed balance, Carr suggests dedicating time specifically for the Internet and time specifically for focused attention on one task.” I would certainly agree. This is what I do. I often turn to the social aspects of the Web as a break from focused work just as people might go to the water cooler or the coffee room in an office environment.

Nick also suggests that, “companies need to challenge the assumption that employees should always be available. Some people do their best work when they’re disconnected, and companies should create a work culture that encourages it.” Ahem. I have long believed in this. For example, I never liked IM. When required to use it by one employer, I just had my status always set at busy. When I finally got a cell phone in the late 90s, it took me a year to discover that the incoming call function was broken as I only used it for outbound calls. I still give out my office number rather than my cell number, except for specific situations like meeting someone. I know I may be extreme but it is my way for maintaining control over my social presence and my knowledge consumption so that I can accomplish the thought work I need to do like write this blog post.

There does need to be a balance. I do expect someone to always be available when I need help with my computer but then I would not assign these call center people with the additional task of developing the company’s strategic plan while on call center duty. The bottom line is creating a pull rather than push situation and the Web does allow us to use it this away if we choose to operate in this mode. Now it is easier for me as I am working part time on many assignments and mostly working from home.  I think that companies need to give their employees that same freedom if they want innovation and real productivity in thought work.  Granted someone needs to mind the store but someone also needs to be determining where to take the store next. This is why you have a team.