The study by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a trade group representing both print and digital publishers, found that 75 percent of college students prefer print textbooks over electronic versions. Reasons for preferring print included “fondness for print’s look and feel, as well as its permanence and ability to be resold.”

This suggests that the preference for printed books will decrease once e-books become comparatively cheaper than paper books, and when they become as easy (or easier) to resell. But for researchers and web workers alike, printed books provide significant advantages that go far beyond “new book smell” or intelligent margin notes made by a previous owner.

Sensory Advantages

Readers can have multiple hard-copy texts open simultaneously for at-a-glance cross-referencing: something that’s far more difficult when you have just one screen on which to view e-books. This, together with the larger page size of many printed books, means they can be shared among groups of researchers more easily.

More information is often available in a single view in print books than in an e-book, even if you’re using an iPad or large-format Kindle DX. Also, researchers can take in the key features of an adjoining print page.

I tend to remember where to find particular pieces of information, based on my memory of looking at the content on the page: was it on the left-hand side of the spread, or the right? My books also tend to have saw-tooth rows of color-coded sticky notes down their page edges. Electronic bookmarks and apps like iAnnotate can’t replace the ability to augment existing pages to more easily tell where a needed piece of information lies; e.g., it’s at the second pink sticky note, or half-way down the page that has the fifth yellow sticky note. I can see this information from across the room, and without opening the book.

Of course, there are other sensory considerations that help me remember where to find information in printed books, such as:

• How much of the book was I holding in each hand (that is, how far through the book did the content appear)?
• Was it before or after that wrinkled page that got wet in the rain that day I was reading at the park?

This plethora of “extraneous” sensory information makes it easier to recall not just where pieces of information can be found, but, often, the information itself.

Learning Advantages

Printed books don’t have a handy search function, it’s true, though many have indexes. But as I’ve suggested,  search is among the least of the tools that we need in order to absorb new knowledge. Taking in new concepts, language, and philosophies often requires us to construct entirely new mental schematics. In our minds, we may relate the physical layouts of printed books to our new mental maps, and to the information contained in these maps.

Printed books currently make for a richer, more memorable, and more easily understood learning experience than today’s electronic offerings can provide.  The real questions are: How long will these advantages last? And how will developer of e-readers and e-books make their products more useful for the sorts of research that web workers do?

Do you prefer print or e-books for learning?

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General Employment Picture Still Shaky

The fourth-quarter Employment Confidence Survey from Glassdoor shows that both employers and workers in all fields in the U.S. are still concerned about their futures.

Employers’ expectations are highest in the South, where 49 percent expect performance to improve in the next six months, compared to 36 percent in the West, 40 percent in the Northeast and 42 percent in the Midwest. Twice as many employees in the West (15 percent) expect their company’s outlook to get worse in the next six months than those in the Northeast (7 percent) and South (7 percent).

The survey indicates that the general workforce (not just technology workers) continue to worry about:

• Reduced compensation. More than half (52 percent) of those surveyed reported that their company reduced compensation within the past six months, and 27 percent reported that their own compensation had been cut.
• Reduced health benefits. 28 percent of those reporting saw cuts in their health and dental benefits, up 6 percentage points from last quarter and 11 points from fourth quarter 2009.
• Unlikelihood of pay raises. 45 percent do not expect a pay raise in the next 12 months, while 36 percent do expect a pay raise and 19% are uncertain.
• Uncertainty about bonuses. Of those who expect a bonus, 21 percent expect it to be more than their last bonus, 47 percent expect it to be the same, and 16 percent expect it to be less. Of those who expect a bonus, twice as many men (16 percent) than women (7 percent) expect an increase in this year’s bonus over their last.
• Uncertain job prospects. Employed adults are afraid that if they should they lose their job, 33 percent are uncertain they would be able to find a new job matched to their skills within six months, which is up from 28 percent last quarter, while 34 percent believe it’s likely, and 32 percent are uncertain. Surprisingly, those currently unemployed are slightly more positive about getting a job commensurate with their skills within six months.

Technology Job Postings Surge

Two other reports seem to indicate the technology job market is more positive than the above findings would indicate.

Technology jobs fared well in the Industry Employment Trends report for December 2010 from Indeed. According to this study, postings for information technology positions grew by 82 percent over December 2009.

The most popular positions included graphic designer, program manager, technical writer, software engineer, systems administrator, and network engineer. The U.S. cities with the most postings included New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Washington, Dallas, Austin and San Diego.

Web-Related Positions Rated Highly

The position of software engineer has been named as “the nation’s best job,” according to a study from CareerCast. The position topped the list thanks to its low stress, strong outlook for employment and income growth potential, minimal physical demands and high environmental ranking.

Other technology-related jobs in the top fifty include computer systems analyst (rated in fifth place), technical writer (26th), computer programmer (27th), and web developer (44th), And while blogger is not listed, philosopher is rated in 16th place.

How do you see your job prospects in 2011?

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This got me thinking about how much my beliefs about business have changed in the ten years since I started my own company. I used to agree with the common recommendation that lines should be clearly drawn between one’s business and personal space. The advice was that you shouldn’t work from your kitchen table, and that you should have a separate space for your business.

From a balance perspective, it seemed only natural to compartmentalize, and to have clearly-defined boundaries between work and home. After all, wasn’t that how it worked with “regular jobs”? So when I created a business, I attempted to maintain clear boundaries between it and my home life.

But I began to see that my life as an entrepreneur was very different from those with “regular jobs.” For me, it was a struggle to determine where my work life stopped and my home life began. I thought that something was wrong with me for a while, but then I realized that I actually liked the blurred lines. I liked ‘living’ as much within my business as outside. Since that was true, why was it so necessary to separate the different parts of my life?

I’ve come to accept that I like having a “kitchen table business.” Like Chris Brogan, I have way more time with family and friends now than I ever did before starting a business. I have flexibility to work when I’m able: around sickness, around unpredictable bouts of insomnia, and around the even more unpredictable ebbs and flows of life. So while I used to believe that having a “kitchen table business” would set me up to become a workaholic, I now see it as a way to live my life exactly as I want.

Does my business have boundaries? Yes, but they’re more like gray areas. I’m a web worker, but I also have Internet-free days. There are days when I work eighteen hours, and other days when I work three. Sometimes I work in my pajamas from the sofa, but I can crave the structure of my office. In the end, it all evens out, and for the most part, I feel I’m able to maintain a semblance of balance.

How do you balance your life and business? Do you set clearly defined boundaries, or are you able to work successfully at the kitchen table?

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The report’s authors expect the number of co-working spaces to increase by another 50 percent by the end of 2011. They trace this popularity to the increase in freelance workers brought about by the economic downturn of 2008, and the increased number of small start-up entrepreneurs, particularly in technology and online industries.

We’ve written previously about the growing network of independent café-like collaboration spaces for freelance professionals. The trend began in 2005, and co-working spaces are now available throughout the U.S., the UK and Europe. Facilities have also been opened in South America, Australia and Asia.

As Simon discussed recently, costs for a dedicated desk at a co-working space can be pricey. But one can opt for a “hotdesking” arrangement where desks are shared. And while some of the commenters to his piece recommended hotels, libraries and other public spaces as alternatives, there’s obviously a market for professional workspaces that cater to independent professionals.

Do you use a coworking space? Would you, if there was one in your area?

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In my latest post for GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d), I outline the top trends in remote work discussed at Net:Work that you should be watching out for in 2011:

• Solving the trust issue
• An increasingly mobile workforce, operating entirely in the cloud
• “Office hours” becoming less relevant
• Increased integration between collaboration and communication tools
• Coworking “crossing the chasm”
• High quality video everywhere
• Consumerization of IT

For full details of each of these trends, and the impacts that they’re likely to have on the remote working landscape, read the full post over on GigaOM Pro (sub. req.).

Photo courtesy Flickr user cogdogblog,

There’s no one best time for every organization, of course. Everyone has a busy time, and you’ll have other needs that make the choice subjective. But there are steps you can take to minimize problems.

Stagger the Adoption — Or Maybe Not

It’s always tempting to add a new tool gradually, perhaps switching all new projects  to it, then adding existing projects. The biggest benefit is that you never have to stop working; your projects will always be in some system somewhere.

But there are potential issues with such an approach. It usually takes significantly longer to make the switch, and it’s easy for tasks to get lost as your team tries to figure out where the information should be. Unless the size of the organization means that you can’t make the switch fast and painless (for example, if you have to keep some sort of access available at all times), it’s usually better to make the switch all at once.

Find a Slow Time

In an ideal world, you could move all of your data and projects from one system to the next in one night, while your team is asleep and not needing to work. In the real world, you may be dealing with team members working in different time zones, or with tools that don’t provide for easy exporting and importing. That can mean that the switch will take more time.

In such a situation, you’ll want to look for a slow time: a long weekend, or a few weeks when, historically, you don’t get much new work. If you’ve got a good estimate of how long the changeover will take, you can likely block out the time needed to get it done. You may ask your team not to synchronize their work during that time, or you might find a few days when everyone will be off work. The key is to get things done in a fashion that doesn’t drive you crazy.

Start Planning Early

Even if you think the time for moving to a new collaboration tool is a long way off, it’s worth planning as early as possible. Perhaps you don’t see the need to shift within the next year — but wouldn’t next year’s holidays present a perfect opportunity to do the conversion, while everyone’s off celebrating?

How do you plan for changing collaboration tools?

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Here are some technology and management considerations to take into account when managing a multi-generational virtual team.

Technology

If some team members are young enough to have been around computers most of their lives, it’s reasonable to expect they will be comfortable with the idea of virtual working.

Younger employees are more likely to be comfortable with the technologies that go along with working online, but that may not always hold true. For instance, while a younger team member may be very comfortable with social collaboration tools, she will likely need training when it comes to industry-specific applications.

Management Styles

Younger members of the workforce, especially those in Generation Y, may need more management feedback, and may expect a more collaborative work environment, than their predecessors. While Generation X-ers may have a preference for handling projects on their own, Generation Y members may struggle in a virtual work environment because of the reduced feedback that often happens in such situations.

While the situation is not simply a matter of age — Generation Y-ers are showing similarities to previous generations as they age — you do need to take the age of your team members into account when managing a virtual workforce. You need to make sure that you’re providing a work environment that supports them, whether they need an in-depth support network, as a Millennial might, or whether they want you to cut the interference and get out of their way, as a member of Generation X might.

Beyond Age Differences

The names of different generations, from Millennials to Baby Boomers, are simply shorthand for general trends. Employees of the same generation will never be identical. While you can certainly expect management techniques to change, the most important thing is to keep an eye on individual team members. The best way to minimize the issues that go along with online team collaboration is to pay attention to what’s really going on. You can prepare for certain eventualities by looking at generational trends, but you can’t implement every management technique your team needs until you see the team in action.

That said, it is certainly worth your while to read up on proven techniques for managing the age groups you’re working with. Having specialized tools will let you find the best answers. After all, by working with a virtual team, you have less face-to-face interaction on which to judge situations. Having a few extra techniques is the least you can do to make up for that lack.

How do you bridge the “generation gap” among team members?

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Given the boom in mobile apps, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see that freelancers with mobile development skills are in demand. But mobile app developers should still be pleased to see the “Mobile Phone” category showing the greatest growth overall in this report. Looking further down the list of in-demand skills, there’s even more good news: The Android category is also very strong, showing growth of 24 percent over the previous quarter. It’s a less rosy picture for iPhone developers, though, whose category shrunk by 4 percent.

Web developers should probably start brushing up on their HTML5 skills if they haven’t already; growth in HTML5 was up 72 percent in the third quarter. HTML5 and other related technologies, like CSS3 and geo-location, might still not be fully supported in all of the browsers just yet, but forward-thinking businesses are already looking at ways of making use of them to build innovative products.

Here’s the top 10 job categories from the report:

Of course, just as with similar reports released by other freelance marketplaces such as Elance, you should take these figures with a pinch of salt. It’s only data from one marketplace, albeit a fairly large one with nearly two million users and some 180,000 jobs posted during the third quarter, and it’s also subject to vagaries of job classification (sometimes it’s not clear-cut as to which categories a particular job should fall into), so it can’t be taken as representative of the wider freelance jobs market. However, it does provide an interesting snapshot of the Freelancer.com marketplace.

Mobile app developers: Are you seeing a surge in demand for your skills?

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Thursday Bram: How have Alpine Access’ methods of managing staff and working with telecommuters changed since the company started? What important lessons have you learned?

Jim Ball: When we started Alpine Access, we knew we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We also knew that the only way to make the model scalable was to implement as much technology-driven “management” as possible. Putting those together meant we needed to test our unique operational processes manually until we were comfortable we had them right. Only then did we build systems to support and automate them. So, with time, we’ve implemented a great deal of technology that allows us to manage many of the day-to-day functions in a highly automated fashion, leaving our human resource to manage by exception. We’ve been very careful, however, to make sure we maintain an appropriate level of human touch so as to ensure our agents have the sense of community and culture that is so important to Alpine Access.

The lessons? Automating a bad process just amplifies the mistake. Make sure process drives technology — not the other way around.

Thursday: How has Alpine Access scaled working with telecommuters, when many companies seem to struggle with working with just a few telecommuters?

Ball: The most common problem I’ve seen most companies make is that when they decide to implement a telecommuting program, they assume they really don’t have to change the way they do business. That is, they often focus on nothing more than providing their telecommuters with the technical tools they need to operate from home. Not much else changes. Have you ever been on a conference call where most of the others were together in a conference room? If so, you’ve undoubtedly experienced the inevitable head-scratching as a result of muffled side-conversations or speakers who rely on hand-waving or other activities that don’t translate well over the phone. It’s often simple things that make the difference.

Alpine Access started as a pure home-agent company. By design, we’ve never had a physical call center. This has forced us to ensure that every aspect of an agent’s relationship with us is centered around the fact that they are not in a common office. Recruiting, training, operational support, coaching — even extracurricular activities all are designed specifically for remote workers.

Thursday: What sort of infrastructure do you use to manage 3,000 telecommuters? Is it custom built, or have you found tools that scale well?

Ball: In keeping with the “don’t let technology drive process” theme, we were forced to custom build much of our infrastructure for the first few years. As appropriate commercial solutions have come to market in recent years, we’ve been able to replace many of our custom solutions. Even in those cases, we generally find ourselves making fairly extensive modifications to those commercial systems in order to keep them true to our needs.

Thursday: What approaches can smooth the process of working with a virtual staff? Are there any tips or tricks you can recommend?

Ball: Probably the strongest suggestion I can make is to have the people who are designing the program actually live all aspects of the experience. There really is no way to effectively simulate that experience in a safe (from a fall-back standpoint), sterile office environment. Make sure your virtual staff feels fully-engaged and that the technology they are using is essentially invisible.

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Yesterday, we held our inaugural Net:Work conference at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. We had a wide-ranging conversation that covered the future of work in a highly mobile, post-broadband world, but while we talked about the technology at length, the key takeaway from the discussions (both on stage and off) was that it comes down to people, and how we can connect, communicate and collaborate with each other better. Whether it was Cisco’s Debra Chrapaty discussing how using technology helps her to be a radical collaborator and live the lifestyle that she wants to lead, Collaborative Strategies’ David Coleman talking about how companies need to  focus on how people use technology, or Amazon’s Sharon Chiarella noting how technology should allow people to work on their own terms, it seems that we are all looking for ways to be better connected with our colleagues in a very human way.

While we have an incredible set of tools at our disposal now, management styles and even company structures will need to change to allow people to be their most productive and for our companies to flourish. Many of the people-management issues that are present in on-premise teams are exacerbated when team members work remotely — and one of the key issues that needs to be addressed is trust. Managers find it hard to trust workers that they can’t see sitting at their desks day-in and day-out, while remote workers find it hard to trust that employers are making the best decisions when they don’t have in-person contact with them on a regular basis.

One effective way to help build trust is to use some of cloud-based communication tools that we have at our disposal to improve transparency within an organization, as noted by Salesforce’s Marc Benioff when he was discussing the use of Chatter within his company:

“If there is no trust between employees and managers, nothing is going to work. Transparency builds trust. To get trust alignments, you have to have massive communication, you have to open up everything and focus on innovation and focus on collaboration and self awareness of an organization to get leadership.”

But tools can only go so far; it may also take a more radical shift in the way that our companies are structured and managed in order to allow remote workers to operate to their fullest potential. I asked LiveOps CEO and chairman Maynard Webb how we can address the trust issue, and Webb said that the employer-employee relationship is fundamentally broken, because companies are too paternalistic. Employees find it hard to trust an employer who judges them and acts as the gatekeeper on their career. Webb thinks that that our organizations need to be more meritocratic; individuals will then feel more in control of their own destiny.

We’ll be investigating the people management issues that companies face when establishing a remote working team in more depth here on WebWorkerDaily.

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The Human Cloud

As Mathew recently said, the human cloud is the capability of a company to get the best talent available regardless of location. With the advent of mobile technology, “flashmobs” and bee “swarms” to accomplish a problem will be more commonplace. An example of this would be responding to a PR crisis: Instead of taking the time to convert a conference room to a “physical war room,” a marketing executive can connect with the resources inside and outside the company (executive team, bloggers, call center, media consultants) to create a “swarm” to extinguish a PR spark before it becomes a media firestorm.

The human cloud is also a catalyst for companies to generate maximum value from existing resources. The Deloitte Center for the Edge recently published the 2010 Shift Index, which rigorously documents a long-term performance deterioration of 75 percent in return-on-assets (ROA) across 15 industries in the U.S. since 1970, despite productivity gains. According to the Shift Index, “the solution lies in empowering passionate employees, those who feel truly engaged with their work and constantly push the performance envelope, by accelerating institutional innovation and driving corporate growth.”

Empowered Employees

Collaborative cultures are now embracing the passion of the whole employee, creating work environments for them to use their devices, home office and professional networks to support the context for creating competitive advantage for the company.

Empowering workers in the human cloud, giving them a choice of devices and leveraging social networks for collaboration is necessary, but not sufficient enough to create truly high-impact collaboration. Different levels of “generational trust” between seniors, boomers, Gen Y and the Millennial Generation create a “digital divide” that can pose a significant barrier to collaboration. Research conducted by David Coleman, Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies, finds the biggest barriers to collaboration are not technology problems but are related to people and process. He has created a framework that illustrates different levels of competence, trust, age and web:

Source: Collaborative Strategies

Companies can act on these findings and create initiatives and social metrics designed to accelerate the progression of digital exiles, digital immigrants and digital natives to digital workers.

On-Demand Infrastructure and Applications

Businesses can now leverage on-demand infrastructure and applications to support nearly every aspect of their operations. Service providers can securely host multiple tenants of one application on one server, which boosts their server utilization rates, cuts administrative costs and lowers server cost per tenant. The resulting efficiencies and cost savings can be passed through to customers using a mesh business model.

At the same time, corporate IT departments are freed from the hassles of traditional deployments, software maintenance and upgrades, and concerns about scalability and reliability. IT can help business units source innovative applications when they need them and avoid getting bogged down with day-to-day maintenance and support. This frees IT up to focus on more value-added activities while being more responsive to changing business needs.

In many cases, these on-demand solutions can be integrated with existing enterprise IT investments. For example, social-media oriented, on-demand collaboration tools can be integrated with Microsoft SharePoint (which offers less-than-optimal collaboration functionality) for an improved user experience that makes employees and external partners more productive, effective and inspired to innovate to establish competitive advantage.

One example of a company turning these ideas into applicable business solutions is Intuit, who developed an innovation management tool called Brainstorm. To read a case study of this process, check out the full report.

Image source: flickr user ChrisL_AK

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As a freelance expert, should you jump in, or are you ringing your own industry’s death knell?

Having built an expert crowdsourcing site for the past year, I’m convinced these sites don’t have to commoditize expertise. Quite the opposite, I think they can give it direct value.

Freelance experts’ hourly rate typically includes three basic transaction costs: customer acquisition, customer retention and work performed. Take freelance graphic designers, for example. First they need to find customers, which requires sales and marketing investment and time. Once they have customers, they have to maintain them, whether it’s answering the phone, reporting on progress or dealing with billing and collections. Sometimes very little of a freelancers’ time is devoted to doing real design work. Typically, these people became freelancers because they love design, not because they love managing overhead.

The new expert crowdsourcing sites eliminate most of the overhead costs by bringing customers and experts together and automating service, support and billing. The freelancers perform work and get paid directly for their expertise. While the hourly earnings may appear lower than traditional freelance work, once the transactional costs of being a freelancer are removed, the hourly fees for direct work can be about the same. The upside is that the time freelancers spend finding and managing clients can now be applied to actually doing the work they love.

The critical issue for freelancers is to find sites that allow them to earn more for their work than they could on their own. Some crowdsourcing sites are approaching this point, especially sites that offer a collaborative compensation model. One such example is uTest, where top software testers are earning as much as $5,000 per month — many while working primarily during evenings and weekends. uTest has had a number of testers from the U.S., the UK, Russia and India report that they are currently earning more from uTest than their full-time jobs as testers.

The collaborative model is an evolution of crowdsourcing incentive systems. In the early days of crowdsourcing, companies issued requests for submissions. Potentially, hundreds of participants could respond, but only the one or two “winners” collected any prize money. Considering all the work the “losers” did, this model heavily favored the project sponsor over the people doing the work. More recently, crowdsourcing companies have adjusted to models that pick multiple winners (with payment distributed among them) or have moved to collaborative models in which each contributor to a final result is compensated.

When uTest’s testing experts work on a new software release, they each get paid for every bug they find. Some find many bugs, some only a few. Chances are high that most earn something but those who do excellent work earn more. uTest is built upon a meritocratic reputation system: Testers who get rated highly by customers get paid more, get invited to more projects, and get paid more for their work. Conversely, testers who don’t satisfy customers earn a poor reputation, and don’t get invited to future projects. True expertise is rewarded.

The per-bug payout rates uTest experts earn can rival the effective earning rate they would make freelancing on their own. In this model, project sponsors win as well because they get exactly what they want: a comprehensive and collaborative testing result from many participants, and a payment system that is based solely on performance. With software, “more is better” applies, and uTest’s ability is to provide multiple test engineers provides better coverage than any one individual.

While it’s moving fast, the crowdsourcing industry is still young and the underlying models are evolving quickly. The industry is stratifying into two distinct types of crowds: curated crowds of experts and general crowds that enjoy participating. In the participation model, the crowd may accept limited or no monetary compensation as reward, participating is reward enough. For expert crowdsourcing sites, the long-term sustainability test is simple: “can a freelance expert make a better living being part of my crowd than on their own?”

I believe that expert crowdsourcing does not by definition commoditize expertise. In fact, if done right, it focuses everyone on what matters most: the results of expertise.

Niel Robertson is a three-time entrepreneur and CEO of Trada Paid Search, a crowdsourced paid search marketplace. You can find Niel on Twitter at @nielr1. He will be talking about “The Human Cloud: The Elastic Workforce in the Enterprise,” at our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9.

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Deskwanted, a online marketplace for coworking desk space,  has carried out a study to determine average coworking costs in the U.S., the UK and Europe. A membership that includes a permanent desk with 24-hour access costs an average of $365 a month in the U.S; a similar space in the UK will set you back $342 a month, while in mainland Europe the average cost is $362 a month.

The study also looked at the cost of renting a desk on more flexible terms, which revealed a much greater variation in costs between regions. In the U.S, a flexible desk arrangement (such as working on shared tables during office hours) costs an average of $150 per month, while elsewhere it’s much more expensive: at an average of $263 per month in the UK and $259 per month in Europe. The cost of renting a desk for a day also varies quite markedly between the regions: $23 per day in the U.S., $25 per day in Europe and a whopping $51 in the UK. Deskwanted’s analyst Carsten Foertsch believes that the variation in prices is due to the fact that American coworking spaces offer a great variety of plans compared to those in the UK and Europe, which tend to be more standardized and include facilities not generally included in the U.S.

How much do you pay for your coworking space?

Photo courtesy Flickr user hyku.

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While communication tools like Skype have succeeded in mobilizing an entire generation of workers, collaboration tools are now driving change within the walls of traditional enterprises worldwide. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools, such as Huddle, Yammer and Jive Software, are breaking down the communication silos that have developed within organizations.

Traditional, inward-looking enterprise software, such as SharePoint, often reflects the structure of a traditional business. Staff using these complex tools can work with people in their department, but collaborating with people outside of this silo is a challenge. Cloud collaboration tools remove these barriers and enable everyone to connect and work with everyone else. Information can be easily shared, knowledge “gate keepers” are removed, people can see who is contributing to projects (and who isn’t) and traditional business hierarchies start to crumble.

Everyone from the managers in an organization to interns can benefit from the flat structure that web-based collaboration tools are starting to nurture. Rather than being restricted to using people on their team for a project, managers can now draw on expertise from across the organization. Regardless of where they are located, what their job title is or what department they’re in, the best people can be selected for a job. Knowledge and expertise become the defining factors for choosing project teams rather than where people sit within the business hierarchy. Boundaries blur and you simply have a group of people working together.

An example of an organization that treats its workers as a global talent pool is independent digital marketing agency AKQA. With more than 900 employees across seven offices worldwide, AKQA’s staff often need to work with colleagues across multiple territories. Teams are assigned to projects regardless of which office they are based in. For example, a campaign may involve a creative team based in Washington D.C. and a technology team in London. To reduce email traffic between staff and the time spent traveling to and from face-to-face meetings, AKQA deployed Huddle as its standard global collaboration platform. As well as enabling staff to brainstorm ideas and work together on pitch materials, secure branded workspaces enable clients to access campaign content, approve and comment on documents, and keep track of projects in real-time.

Collaboration tools are also shaping enterprises by removing the communication barriers between organizations. Rather than being a self-contained unit, today’s enterprise is an increasingly fluid network of customers, partners and suppliers. As SaaS tools work across firewalls, staff can connect and work as effectively with people outside of their company as they can with the people sitting next to them. Faced with the challenge of successfully communicating and working with its dealer and subsidiary network in an economic downturn, Toshiba America Business Solutions (TABS) turned to Jive Software. An online community called Toshiba eXCHANGE was set up as the key information portal for TABS’ network of dealers. Rather than using email, phone calls and an intranet to gather information, dealers can go to Toshiba eXCHANGE to ask questions, share best practice, and view recent campaigns and product collateral. Three months after the community launched, 1,892 users were participating in discussions and sharing their knowledge.

Since WebWorkerDaily launched in 2006, technology has not just extended the enterprise beyond the office walls, it has started to change its structure. Thanks to online collaboration tools, the fragmented flow of information across organizations is now becoming a thing of the past. The enterprise is no longer dictated to by inflexible legacy technology, but shaped by collaboration tools that let groups form naturally and enable everyone to participate.

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew. See Andy speak about how collaboration tools are reshaping the enterprise at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on December 9th.

Photo courtesy Flickr user toffehoff.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• Are You Empowering Your Mobile Workforce?

The end result of this “consumerization of IT” is that enterprise IT managers must find new ways to evaluate, monitor and implement these new technologies. Though accepting and integrating these “rogue” devices was first seen as a significant challenge, software and services are fast becoming a potential opportunity to simplify many formerly complex workflows, while making workers more productive.

On Dec. 7, 2010 at 10 a.m. PST, GigaOM Pro and Box.net will explore the issues and opportunities resulting from this large-scale shift in a free roundtable webinar entitled “The Simple Enterprise: How Consumer Technologies are Changing the Face of IT.”

The webinar will include following experts:

• JP Finnell – GigaOM Pro analyst and founder of Mobility Partners
• Haydn Shaughnessy – GigaOM Pro analyst and principal of Five Ideas
• Aaron Levie – CEO of Box.net
• Michael Wolf – Moderator, VP of Research – GigaOM

What will be discussed?

• Which applications and functions influenced by the consumerization of IT
• How IT managers can evaluate “rogue” applications while also allowing employees freedom to use new, consumer-driven technologies
• How small, medium and large enterprises differ in the adoption and usage of consumer-oriented web technologies

The webinar will take place on Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2010 at 10 a.m. PST. If you’re interested in attending this free webinar compliments of GigaOM Pro and sponsor Box.net, please register today.

Main image courtesy of flickr user Yutaka Tsutano.

Fried talks about the how absurd it that many people are most productive in trains, cafes, dens, but not in the office. One of the more salient remarks in Fried’s talk is that “people go to work and they’re basically trading in their work day for work moments“. In essence, Fried is suggesting that creative work that requires long uninterrupted stretches of focus is inherently disrupted by the distractions of modern office life.

Curiously, Fried draws parallels between sleep and work as activities that are “phase-based,” requiring prior phases to complete before being truly rested or productive; you may sleep for many hours, but interruptions will lead to more tiredness.

Fried goes on to suggest that the perceived distractions of Facebook and web surfing at work are false, with “M&Ms” (managers & meetings) making up greater, involuntary, more disruptive and expensive distractions.

The talk concludes with three recommendations from Fried:

1. “No-talk Thursdays.” A period of “quiet time” prohibiting coworkers from talking to each other and limiting distraction.
2. Replacing active communication, like conversation, with passive forms such as email, IM and collaboration tools.
3. Cancel your meetings. Things will still get done!

Though I agree with Fried’s thesis that disruption is at the heart of low productivity, I’m not so sure about the general value of the closing recommendations. Email and IM can be just as disruptive as office conversations and meetings, for example, but Fried didn’t offer any insights into best practices in using those communication methods.

Nevertheless, I’m finding the essays in Fried’s book to carry some very useful insights. You can watch Fried’s TEDxMidwest talk at TED.com and learn more about Fried’s book, REWORK, at 37signals. (And if you want to find out more about enabling a remote workforce to to be more productive, you should also come to our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 9 — Ed.).

How do you manage distractions in your workplace?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

• Enabling the Web Work Revolution
• Report: The Real-Time Enterprise
• By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space