Google Enteprise on the self-directed innovator
Here is Stowe Boyd summarizing Matthew Glotzback of Google Enterprise on the topic of the self-directed innovator.
Matthew Glotzbach of Google Enterprise gave a mercifully light-on-the-powerpoint presentation that provides a dramatically different insight into the future of collaboration. In a nutshell, he suggests that today's workforce is dominated by a new sort of person, the self-directed innovator. This person is very different than the knowledge worker of the 80s and 90s. They are:
* not process driven — their work flows, rather than being a bunch of boxes and arrows in a process diagram
* collaborates with a broad network of collegues — and wants to remain connected to them at all times
* intermingled personal and work lives — the new blendo reality, where there is no firewall between work and “private” life
* needs information even when not at a desk — they flow like their work, and need information even if working at Starbucks
* does not spend majority of time in a single application — they flow from one sort of work to another
* impatient — don't want to spend a lot of time in meetings, or working with idiots [my words, not his]
Boyd then links this profile to his contention that the individual is the new group:
Explore posts in the same categories: Main PageSo the groupware model of collaboration, where neatly partitioned worlds are created, and individuals are made to shift context in order to shift from one social thread to another, seems unnatural to me. The primacy of groups and group membership in old-school groupware is outmoded.
The shift to the individual changes everything, and in revolutionary ways. Moving from groupware premises to “soloware” shifts the dialog about standards and interoperability. In the old groupware model, a company would buy a groupware platform and applications, and roll it out across all the users. It was standardized because everyone was using the same rev of the same product. When the issue of interoperability and standards were brought up, it was approached from the perspective of inter-company communication, or different sites within the same company. But in the soloware model, individuals may be using completely different tools, and share nothing in common but certain standards. But the glue that connects the dots in the soloware world are standards like RSS, IM interoperability, and blog trackback conventions: standards that allow individuals to do their thing, but to allow bottom-up aggregation of their artifacts along social connections. The groups are there, but latent, implicit in the gestural relationships of crosslinking, tags, comments, and blogrolls.
I envision a time where even in the largest organization, our lives as individuals will define the norm for computer-assisted work. The model of soloware will displace the 90s ideals of groupware in exactly the same way that the pre-groupware assembly line models were dethroned in the 90s. In our work lives, even in the largest, most conservative companies, we are instantaneously involved in dozens of projects, with teams of people that are constantly changing, with outside consultants and partner companies, and there is no end in sight. When everything fractures away from stable, long-lasting, closed teams toward the exact opposite, what is left are individuals in contact with each other, through soloware: individual needs first, group needs second, by extension.
We are, first and foremost, individuals. The concept that whenever we do something it should be intentionally in the context of a specific well-defined group is outmoded, and was always an approximation of what is really going on, socially. We are involved in social relationships, and what we do with others is always social, but not necessarily part of a group, or only of one group. So, let's put aside groups, and focus on the individual. The groups will follow.
Matthew takes us down the Google path following this idea of “soloware”, based on three principles:
1. redefine the inbox — he showed a bunch of the features that Google has built into Gmail as an indication of how smart add-ons (like presence, instant messaging, PDF, and calendar integration) can make the plain old inbox a source of collaboration
2. search as the navigation paradigm — there is too much for any fixed map to work, so just surrender to the void, and throw away ther notion of taxonomic organization of the web, your email, or your harddrive
3. power of the cloud — web 2.0 mashups, and global collective intelligence is the only way that we can innovate fast enough to build the collaborative solutions we need.
