Something as simple as a publicly-sharable spreadsheet can greatly improve communication in the workplace, allowing everyone to see how different steps in a project relate to manpower, timing, and other resources. The Oshkosh, Wisconsin School District provides a useful example of Smartsheet’s capabilities.

When David Gundlach, deputy superintendent of the school district, was brought in, the district’s network was often down. It was “an unreliable, dysfunctional setup,” he said.

To transform an organization’s technology infrastructure successfully you need to consider the people involved and their skills, the organizational process, and the technology tools. This is true whether you are in a high-tech start-up, a stable engineering firm, hospital, or school district.

Gundlach used Smartsheet to layout all his project plans — everything from managing education projects, community meetings, website redesigns, school board meetings, and tech implementation and transition projects. He used the Gantt capabilities to show how different tasks are dependent on each other. Showing subtasks provided greater granularity to the plan, and it helped him open discussions with the school board about whether or not a project was doable and what resources would be required.

Because of the complexity of the projects Gundlach had developed, and the number of people he had to keep connected across different community meetings and topics such as budget cuts, he needed to visually communicate the projects’ magnitude to keep everyone moving in the same direction.

“It’s more important to have the community on board than to get the technology. [I knew that if the community was] on board, they would see the value of [a sustainable technology budget] and then deliver on that…. The people are the tough part. The technology is the easy part. [You need to look ] through a systems lens and know that the implications may impact four or five others. And you need to know the interrelationships between those four or five.”

Our general familiarity with spreadsheets is part of their strength and what makes them such great tools for communicating with a diverse audience. “Don’t run away from the things you’ve already mastered,” says Smartsheet’s CEO Mark Mader. “Embrace the things you already know. But you also want to capitalize on the things that are now available to use, such as cross office and cross country sharing. If you can merge those two, you have a very powerful solution.” 

“When I first got here, I said, ‘we’re going build a network that I can plug anything into,’” said Gundlach. Smartsheet had an easy, clean, powerful interface. And since it works with Google Apps, everyone could have the same view of projects.”

Smartsheet, Google Apps, Dropbox, and Box are now all part of the district’s infrastructure. The district said no to many non-web-based tools. “Parents and teachers need the same resources at home as they do at school,” said Gundlach.

The new set of cloud tools helped him educate the school board and the community about the amount of work necessary to finish the transformation. Once the board could see the options, the dependencies between the projects, the resources required, and visualize the process (and obstacles), communication changed and things started improving quickly.

“Five years ago I couldn’t have done what I did without a lot of cash,” said Gundlach. But thanks to the power of the cloud, today Oshkosh has one of the finest state-of-the-art school district infrastructures.

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Enterprises spend $270 billion on software every year, yet some can’t even calculate the number of employees in their organizations. Shocking? Well, such was the problem for Chiquita before they moved to Workday.  But rudimentary challenges like this plague every enterprise in the world, and every individual within those enterprises. When we need to derive anything beyond the basics from our enterprise software, most corporations are out of luck.

This problem is only getting worse. With 1.8 trillion gigabytes of information projected to be generated and stored this year alone, our enterprise technology is on a collision course to become utterly useless if something doesn’t fundamentally change.  The data being created is obnoxiously large, with IDC citing that “by 2020, IT departments worldwide will need to administer 10 times the number of servers–both virtual and physical–50 times the amount of data, and 75 times more files.”  Our software, infrastructure, and organizations are ill-prepared to manage this scale of data creation, let alone generate anything meaningful or useful with this amount of content being created and shared.

But this is about to change. It has to. The cloud, social capabilities, and a web of integrated applications are on the verge of creating a far more personalized technology experience for tomorrow’s workers, and a world where an increase in data generates an increase in value and knowledge for organizations.

The client-server paradigm and a reverse network effect

The emergence of the personal computer may have transformed the way we work, but the software revolution that followed was anything but personalized. And amazingly, very little has changed for today’s average knowledge worker over the past two decades. The legacy software within today’s enterprises is stale, static and non-contextual. Applications don’t adapt to our behavior, or tell us anything new about our content and projects that we didn’t explicitly tell them. And they certainly have no understanding of our relationships with co-workers, partners, or customers.

It’s not just end users who are suffering. Technology still rooted in the client-server paradigm invariably prevents organizations from deriving real value from their systems.  Generally, any influx of employees or the addition of a geographically disparate team requires new instances of applications and infrastructure. An organization might have SharePoint running in many different data centers throughout the world, making it nearly impossible to efficiently upgrade applications, deploy new servers and perform maintenance at scale. And with application sprawl comes data sprawl, creating a veritable digital landfill of unconsolidated, silo-ed information.  In looking at the fragmentation of SharePoint in large organizations, a leading enterprise content management analyst, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, discovered that “…enterprises can in fact reach a point of negative returns where an inability to manage proliferating SharePoint silos becomes a hidden but serious enterprise management risk.”

Enterprises everywhere are experiencing the opposite of a standard network effect with their information and people. In these sprawled and firewalled environments, an increase in users and data make it more difficult to locate content, make decisions, and gain insights from past actions.  This means more information is creating more complexity – far from the ideal outcome if organizations are about to generate orders of magnitude more information.

The cloud and centralization

Of course, decentralization and fragmentation of data and applications isn’t a new problem by any means. Early last decade, Oracle decided that application and data sprawl were hindering customers’ agility, decision making and cost savings.  Larry Ellison said of the client/server era, “Your information was chopped into tiny pieces, stored in lots of tiny databases, running on lots of tiny PC server computers.  This data fragmentation was accompanied by distributed complexity.”

Not surprisingly, Oracle’s solution to this problem was to have all core applications run on a single Oracle database instance with consistency across its apps. This would have worked marvelously if the world wanted to adopt only Oracle’s software — but that comes at the cost of tying your entire fate to a single vendor’s vision, roadmap and services.  With the emergence and maturity of cloud platforms, there’s now another way.

On-premise applications are inherently limited in that they rarely leverage data beyond what’s immediately available on a local machine, server or narrow data store. The opposite is true with most cloud products that take a centralized approach to storage and computing, and we’re only now starting to tap into their potential.

At Box, our model is store once, extend everywhere — and “everywhere” spans desktops, smartphones, tablets and even other apps. With the cloud, users can get to content and tools from any device, and IT departments are no longer burdened with maintaining and upgrading cumbersome hardware and software. This is making today’s employees more mobile, nimble and productive, and it’s enabling organizations to focus on competitive differentiators rather than systems management and maintenance.

But centralization is only phase one. If the first wave of the cloud is about realizing the efficiencies of moving software to the web, then the second wave is about making this software — and in turn, our organizations — much smarter. Software has tremendous potential to look at lots of pieces of information and make decisions to produce optimal outcomes. Then learn from these results, iterate, and do it again. We’re seeing this at work in the consumer world: think about how Facebook exposes the people we’re likely to know or updates we’re likely to engage with, or how Netflix makes personal recommendations to its users, aggregating and learning from the ratings across millions of users. As described by Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloudera, the power all this data is about being able to answer qualitative questions like, ”What do you like? Who do you know?” and no longer about simply solving basic equations.

Applied in the enterprise, our software, backed by large amounts of information to cull through, can tell us far more about our businesses than we could ever know ourselves.

From the social enterprise to the smarter enterprise

Given our trajectory, all enterprises will soon be filled with dozens or hundreds of light and heavy-weight applications that are function, company and industry specific. Salesforce.com has an app marketplace of thousands of add-ons, Jive and Yammer have their own respective ecosystems. With apps that can talk to each other, we’re seeing the emergence of a much more integrated enterprise technology stack – starkly contrasting the vertically integrated solutions from a single provider, apps are pulling from different data sources to create powerful mashups and overlays. Roambi, for instance, makes it easy for you view your CRM data from your iPad. Marketo lets you create extensive marketing automation customizations tying together email marketing, Google AdWords, and Salesforce.

But rather than the proliferation of apps creating more fragmentation, they’ll actually increase personalization and relevance of information. Driving this will be the social utilities that wrap around our enterprise applications of the future. Every action we take in our personal lives can be manifested as a social event, whether it’s checking into a restaurant, accepting a party invitation, or updating a status — our whereabouts, thoughts and actions help us engage with others both actively and passively. The same is becoming true in the enterprise, and it will create the first real ROI we’ll see from social activity in the enterprise. Yammer, Jive, Box, and Chatter securely broadcast the work we’re doing to our coworkers, and we’re about to see yet is what happens when these streams become more connected to all the other applications we’re using.

But it’s not just about creating a more social workforce with frequent status updates, file “likes” and ad-hoc conversations. In the enterprise, social is only useful if it makes us smarter. Think about it. You update a project status and all the relevant participants are passively notified of the change or delay.  Or a member of the sales team uploads content for a proposal, and someone from another department or team comments on its relevance to their own work.

As our social stream algorithms improve, user behavior will drive for better ranking of the information you and others should be looking at.  And with federation and syndication of this data and events, our applications will all work smarter together.  An HR update in Workday will prompt a response from someone on Chatter.  Customer support requests on Zendesk are analyzed by an executive in GoodData.  Software will be able to quickly connect the dots across people and data, building a combined view of the most important information. Most importantly, this can all be done passively, with little to no involvement from the user.

Rather than an increase in information and engagement yielding diminishing returns, our systems will get smarter with every interaction. We’ll be served content that has been filtered by our colleagues, and outputs that are corroborated by multiple platforms. As individuals and organizations, we’ll move faster and make better decisions based on better data. This is what we’re starting to hear from customers when they deploy cloud solutions like Box and others. This is the future.

Aaron Levie is CEO and founder of Box.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Susan NYC.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
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Robot avatars might be a ways away yet, but fractional employment — the idea of slicing professionals’ skills into smaller units and using technology to make a profit selling these bundles of hours or services — is increasingly becoming mainstream. Just look at the success of start-ups from TaskRabbit to Elance and oDesk.

This ability to purchase part of a professional’s time has obvious advantages for companies and individuals striving to be agile, but it is also impacting the ability of small organizations to afford expensive skills in small doses, including tiny operations in some of the world’s most remote regions.

Remote collaboration and “fractional” employees are part of the future of work not only in the corporate world, but also in the world of small NGOs (non-government organizations) in developing countries. How so? If you want to see these changes in action, you could do a lot worse than study the work of Minnesota-based Jay Haase and Wire Car.

Meals for Access

A former IT guy in the States with previous job titles like software engineer and large-scale database front-end developer, Haase decided to put his career on hold to give back as a Peace Corps member in Namibia. While he was serving there, a woman he met who worked with vulnerable children and orphans learned about Haase’s tech prowess and used her cooking skills to bribe him into developing a simple database for her to use to track her work.

“It’s hard to build a database. I didn’t really want to do it,” Haase admits, but his friend was persuasive. “She would make these deals: ‘You can come and stay at my house for the weekend. I’ll cook for you all weekend and you can just sit and program.’”

The end result was a simple, flexible database that allowed small organizations helping people in need to report the impact of their work to the donors who hold the purse strings, winning them more money to assist more people. Haase kept improving the database and started giving it away to other small organizations helping vulnerable people across Africa (and even one in New Orleans).

That was good for him – he ended up getting hired to build a national database of vulnerable children by a large organization in Namibia based on his work – but he found that many of the organizations he gave the database to still struggled to make the most of it.

“Even for an Access database, things go wrong. The machine gets a virus. Stuff happens,” Haase explains, citing a snafu with a memory stick at one NGO that erased months of work. “You still need IT support and the problem was I couldn’t really support them. They’d be calling me from Zambia and there was nothing I could really do.” The solution to this issue came, ironically, not when Haase moved closer to his client organizations, but when he returned to Minnesota.

Further away but closer than ever through the cloud

Back in his chilly home state earlier this year, Haase had an inspiration. By putting all the data in the cloud, he could support organizations in far-away Africa better than if he were there himself. Basing his services in the cloud means he can offer remote assistance, advice on more sophisticated queries and daily back-ups.

Haase says helping an increasing number of organizations is simplified by having everything online and amounts to a tiny monthly payment to the site’s host and the occasional trouble-shooting email or Skype chat with organizations. This enables him to offer the service at low or no cost depending on the size of the NGO and use the project as a calling card to help him win larger, more lucrative projects.

“That’s what the social entrepreneurship is,” he says. “A lot of organizations do that. They do one thing that can make money so that they can use that money to do some other good thing.”

Not all the small organizations that have the original database can afford an Internet connection to access the new cloud version – in fact, only about half can – but that percentage is still leaps and bounds ahead of what it would have been only a few years before. “In Namibia it’s just being possible now,” Haase says. “3G is really prevalent. You can get Internet almost anywhere in Namibia, relatively fast Internet, but that’s only happened in the last year or so. I think it’s probably similar for other countries like Kenya or Ethiopia.”

The ripple effects of tech

People in Namibia “go gaga” for Internet according to Haase, flocking in such numbers to get online when free internet was offered from one to five in the morning that connections became unusable in the early hours.

That’s good for a newly Facebook-mad populace, but also good for small NGOs. Previously, they faced a simple conundrum, summed up neatly by Haase: “Organizations are trying to help a lot of people. They get money to help those people, and they have to do reports on what they did with that money. The reports are getting more and more complicated every year, so you really need a database. And in a developing country where there are not many IT people, how do you get a database?”

The answer is the same combination that’s changing work in the developed world: new ideas that allow workers like Haase to slice and sell their services differently, cheap cloud computing and increased connectivity.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Manuel Ebert, CC 2.0.

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You can download Soonr via iTunes or from the Android Market and subscriptions come with a 30-day free trail. Prices have increased slightly since we last covered the service, but the company has added the new collaboration features and more storage space. Premium accounts are now $9.95 per month for three users with 25 GB of storage (a price increase of $2 per month, but providing 15 GB more storage), while Soonr Pro is $29.95 per month for five users and 100 GB of storage (a price increase of $10 per month, but 60 GB more storage). You can also now customize the Pro service to include more storage space or more users and the site instantly calculates your monthly cost.

Soonr supports Mac and Windows, and a variety of mobile devices including Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. You can also access Soonr via your iPad or an Android (Honeycomb) tablet.

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Clearvale is a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service, enterprise, social networking solution that includes interconnected internal and external social networks. It allows customers and employees to collaborate and communicate directly for customer support, idea management, and other needs. Both the internal and external interfaces have familiar components: activity streams, project management tools, communities, discussions, blogs, profiles, embedded media and links.

While there are many  tools to meet these needs individually, Clearvale’s strength is in its ease of use, and in the systems it offers to manage and integrate the internal and external communities. Businesses can create separate social networks for each of these groups, but manage them as a whole. Employees can access the networks using existing tools such as Active Directory, Google Apps, and OpenID; Clearvale has tools to let external partners and customers use various authentication systems. Clearvale can even integrate with e-commerce websites.

The company says that the Clearvale solution gives organizations greater control, with the appropriate levels of access and security, while still enabling deeper customer engagement, and providing the means to integrate with existing social networks.

When I spoke with Richard Hughes, director of product strategy at BroadVision, he told me that after 18 years of experience with developing e-commerce portals, and their recent experiences with enterprise social marketing, the company feels that there is a market for a solution that allows businesses to manage internal collaboration and CRM in one platform.

He feels such a solution will be more effective than trying to use separate social networks for each activity: “At BroadVision we don’t agree that Social CRM is about tightly controlling customer interaction or that it’s primarily about social media monitoring. It should be about integrating all of a company’s customer engagement channels to enable better communication among customers and employees.”

Clearvale is mainly aimed at medium to large businesses of 100+ employees. More information, including a video demo of a Clearvale ecosystem and a more detailed product demo, is available from the Clearvale website.

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Of course, cloud services are generally pretty reliable, and responsible vendors will have systems in place to ensure the safety of your data, but this Gmail deletion isn’t the first example of people losing data in the cloud, and almost certainly won’t be the last. If you rely on cloud services to do your work, you should have a two-pronged strategy to ensure that a the failure of one service doesn’t bring you to a crashing halt.

1. Make local backups of critical data

You should keep local backups of important data. You should certainly make sure you have a local backup of the documents and email in Google Apps accounts, for example, but personal data, like email and photos, shouldn’t be ignored, either — how would you feel if you lost it all?

Making local backups of the data in cloud-based email services is pretty easy; most of them support IMAP or POP for exporting emails and contacts to a desktop client. There are some great instructions for exporting Gmail to use in Apple Mail or Outlook here, and Kevin has also written about various ways to back up Gmail.

Making useful backups of other services like LinkedIn, Yammer or Basecamp can be more tricky, however. Even if you can export your data from the service (either through an expert function or using its API) services, if there’s no commonly agreed-upon format for the data exported, it will be hard to get up and running with it in an alternative. However, you will at least have the data, even if it takes some work to import it into an alternative app.  If the service in question has multiple export options, pick a commonly used format, such as vCard export for contacts, for example. Alternatively, pick a very simple format, like CSV, which may take a little fiddling but is more likely to be able to be imported into an alternative app than a specialized proprietary format.

There are also apps that can automatically backup data from various cloud services. Backupify, for example,  is a cloud service (based on Amazon S3) that can back up data from Google Docs, Gmail, Zoho and Twitter. (In the wake of the Gmail deletions, Backupify is currently offering a year’s free subscription to anyone who asks for it).

2. Have a “Plan B”

While we all have our favorite cloud services that we rely upon heavily, it’s a good idea to have alternatives lined up. That way, if one of your heavily relied-upon tools or services is unavailable for whatever reason, you’ll be able to smoothly transition to an alternative with minimum fuss.

The ideal alternative is a desktop application that can work with a local copy of your data — such as a desktop email client. But if that’s either not possible or unrealistic — not many folks will want to shell out for a copy of MS Project to have ready to use just in case their Basecamp account stops working, for example — then looking for online apps that are compatible with data exported from your existing apps is the way to go.

Be Prepared

I don’t agree with WWD writer Nancy, who doesn’t trust the cloud; I think the convenience of being able to access apps and data anywhere far outweighs the risks of trusting cloud services, most of which are very reliable. But being prepared and having a backup plan and alternative tools in place ahead of time can ensure that an outage, data loss or shuttering a service is just a major inconvenience, rather than being a being total catastrophe.

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I rebranded my virtual consultancy with my long-time friend Monique Elwell to create Conversify. We shared the goal of creating a business that was entirely virtual and that would allow everyone who joined us the flexibility, mobility and better work/life balance we wanted. She and I were based thousands of miles apart when we joined forces, in Denver and Alaska respectively. More recently, we brought on a third business partner, Steven Jackson from Boston, and have built a team that spans the U.S., with a U.K. presence as well.

Here’s what I learned from the members of our virtual team. Note that most of our agency’s team members came from more traditional work environments.

1. Develop clear communications processes. Social media strategist Nik Hewitt emphasizes that one thing that helps our team work well together is that we spent a lot of time developing clear and detailed work processes so we could be consistent and efficient. “We share ideas and discuss them, and a nominated person writes down the salient points based on the knowledge of the team,” Hewitt explains. “Then this information is collated and edited by one team member then passed to another team member for comprehensive expansion.” At each stage of our communications process, we notify each person when it is their turn to participate and give clear deadlines along with scheduled reminders so everyone knows what is expected from whom and when. Attention to a detailed process leads to more consistency and accountability.
2. Shared calendaring is key. According to Haley Kilgour, senior account manager, virtual team members have to be more efficient with their time because of the need to schedule specific meetings with one another to discuss issues or make decisions. Even a quick 15 minute chat requires coordinating schedules across time zones to ensure you can “meet” with someone else. We use Google Apps and heavily rely on Google Calendar; we can see the availability of all team members at all times. Plus we can specify our individual work hours that are based on a core set of hours when we are all available at the same time. Those critical mutual time slots are the sweet spot for getting the whole team together for real-time collaboration.
3. Make use of time zones. “When we have something that is due on Monday, I feel like I have two Mondays in which to do it,” says Karen Woodward, social media manager, referring to the fact that Hewitt, who is based in the U.K., can begin working on something on a Monday during his work hours and then Woodward and social media specialist Shelli Martineau can pick up where he left off during their workday in Pacific Time. This elongates the team’s productivity and can be a bonus during critical communications periods, providing our clients with 24/7 social media monitoring and management.
4. Instant messaging can trump email. Email can be a big challenge for virtual teams especially when team members begin to over-rely on it and everyone can gets buried in emails. Email can also be ineffective if you fail to specify in each email sent to multiple team members exactly who needs to take action, says Elwell, Conversify’s CEO. “If you send an email to five people and say ‘check this out,’ everyone will assume at least one of the others will, and no one will check it out.” Sometimes, instant messaging can be far more targeted and effective. Woodward says that IM has has become her virtual version of “popping my head over the cubicle wall.” But IM can also present a more immediate messaging overload, especially since we usually have both GTalk and Skype running. Sometimes you just have to turn them off to get work done.
5. Don’t knock virtual worlds. With several Second Life enthusiasts on our team from the beginning, we decided to bring the rest of our team members “inworld” for both a weekly “watercooler” social as well as quarterly “state of the company” meetings. Kilgour admits that at first she was opposed to meeting in Second Life, but eventually she came to enjoy it. “There’s something to be said for having a visual representation of a meeting that makes me feel more connected,” she says, adding that the format appeals to her visual nature.

Hewitt says that virtual team members need to make an effort to get to know one another. “We take time to just chat, one-to-one and in teams. We just chew the fat sometimes on Skype as though we’re (sitting) next to each other. I pretty much talk to to everyone personally once a week just to catch-up.”

The team also holds meetings for joint creativity such as their “Production Playtime” where they exchange ideas. Martineau, in particular, appreciates “Production Playtime” noting that it’s an opportunity for the team to jointly explore new tools and networks that may be beneficial to clients. “This is how we all got hooked on Get Glue and what reinvigorated our interest in Tumblr,” she adds.

Says Kilgour, getting together in person a couple times of year, if possible, is important, “Human energy can still be missing in virtual settings.” Another caveat for working virtually is to acknowledge that working from home isn’t for everyone and requires self-discipline, the ability to stay focused and being able to avoid distractions.

What does your virtual team use — and do — to work well together?

Top image: Photo by Mike Kilgour, Second Life screenshot by Nik Hewitt

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The company recently announced some new features and a shift in overall direction. I had the chance to speak with Wayne Pope, founder of Glasscubes, to get some insight into what’s happening.

The feature changes included:

1. Document approvals. Your team can now approve documents — or any file uploaded into Glasscubes — to ensure the correct version is used with everyone’s sign off. You can specify who on the team needs to be part of the approval process, and they are notified by email to review and approve the document or file.
2. Quick links. Click the “Share This File” button once you’ve uploaded a file to a Glasscubes workspace, and you’ll get a link to the file that you can copy and paste into any message or email. You can also use this feature to share a specific file on Glasscubes with people outside your team including via a tweet or status update. Anyone who has the link can view the file without having to sign into Glasscubes or have an account, but they can’t access anything else in your workspace, and you have the benefit of being able to revoke access whenever you want.
3. Unlimited users. Glasscubes now allows unlimited users across all its accounts, also provides caccess to all of its features across all the accounts. Now the only differentiator between the different package levels for Glasscubes accounts is the number of workspaces used and the amount of storage used.
4. Three packages. The company has reduced its multiple paid offerings down to three, all with a 28-day free trial: Max at $199/month; Professional at $125/month and Standard at $49/month. Pope believes its Free package is also now much more useful, with two free workspaces and access for unlimited users, with up to one gigabyte of storage.

A Shift in Direction

According to Pope, Glasscubes is moving away from the idea of being an “online intranet,”  complete with files, workspaces, a CRM system, and even a “coffee break” area.

“We watched over time how people were using the accounts, and we found that the accounts the made the most of the product were based around the workspaces rather than other elements in Glasscubes,” explains Pope. “From a startup perspective, it’s hard to deliver a clear marketing message when doing ‘intranet.’ It’s easier for people to grasp collaboration and ‘to simplify.’”

To avoid spreading its own team too thin, the company decided to focus on being the best at one thing: online collaboration. It also wanted to continue offering a free version of the product, but not a stripped down, feature-poor version meant to encourage upgrades. Instead, it now includes all the functionality, only with fewer workspaces and less storage space.

Pope says that while the company is concentrating all of its efforts around the Workspace and upcoming communication and social features, it still supports the CRM/Connect feature, but is no longer actively developing it. He did suggest that the company may spin that feature off into a completely separate free product at some point, time permitting.

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Here’s a breakdown of some things you should consider before taking a leap into the cloud and trying to bring your team along with you.

1. Portability

How portable is your business? If you’re dealing in intellectual property creation or knowledge work — anything that can be produced and delivered electronically via computers, the Internet and phone — then you’re probably in good shape for moving your company into the cloud. Andy mentioned public relations and marketing as good candidates for virtual companies: the virtual agency model. Any content creation shop with creative teams — ad agencies, news agencies, copywriters, bloggers, podcasters, editors, online producers — can work remotely.

2. Process

Just asking yourself the simple questions: “If we didn’t go into an office together, could we still get work done?” and “If so, how?” These will lead you down the path of thinking about how to configure, or reconfigure, your business. You need to deeply analyze the way you currently get things done and document it. Illustrate your work process using a mind-mapping or flowchart tool. Break down how your projects are handled from start to finish. When does your team meeting face-to-face? Envision how that would look as a videoconference instead. What are the steps you might be eliminating by going virtual? Don’t just stop at mapping out your process and translating that to a virtual workflow. Add dollar amounts to your current process versus a virtual process. You should begin to see why virtual work makes good financial sense.

3. Personality

Even if you’re in an industry with proven virtual models, this doesn’t mean that your company that has been entrenched in “the office” can eschew physical location and hit the cloud running. As you probably know from managing people: people hate change. Even if change is for the best, the very act of changing can paralyze some. You may have to make some hard decisions about how to handle resistance against the change to virtual work. Start with open communications, present the concept of going virtual to your team, and suss out the champions of this model. Chances are, you’ve been approached in the past by someone or several team members who’ve asked about telecommuting, even part-time. For the nay-sayers, find ways to offer support every step of the way as they transition from being in the office to working from home.

You may want to bring in consultants to assess your team and offer individual consulting on setting up their virtual workspaces. Set up training sessions for workers and their managers to make sure everyone is up to speed, not just on the technology changes but the culture changes as well. If not everyone is thrilled with your intention to go virtual, don’t be shocked. Be prepared.

4. Infrastructure

In my post What Does It Take To Run a Virtual Team (Redux), I listed the needs of a virtual team, namely:

• Communications amongst your team members and externally;
• Management of projects, team members, deadlines, and document;
• Archiving of files, knowledge and communications content;
• Interaction between team members including integration, collaboration and socializing.

There is no “one size fits all” technology solution for every company that goes virtual, although there are many enterprise solutions available from Microsoft to Cisco to a never-ending procession of innovative startups looking to solve the problems of virtual work. If you pick a fully-integrated enterprise system, keep in mind it may be more expensive and less flexible than newer, more innovative solutions. The rub of going with smaller startups for your virtual infrastructure needs is that you may have to cobble together several tools, so while they might be highly affordable, you’ll be looking at issues such as cross compatibility and integration.

5. Accountability

A common question managers ask when confronted with the prospect of managing a virtual worker is “how am I going to make sure they get their work done?” A manager who is constantly looking over a worker’s shoulder to make sure they are working is going to have to go through a fundamental shift in how to manage — and how not to manage — to be able to handle managing a virtual team. Managing virtual workers isn’t about watching them like a hawk and micromanaging their every move. Instead, the infrastructure you put into place should have built-in checks and balances to watch productivity and on-time delivery.

Make sure your processes and expectations are not only clear but also communicated clearly to team members. Not everyone will thrive in a virtual work environment, but the issue may be less an inability to get work done and more to do with a feeling of isolation or being disconnected from the team. Be ready to address any issue that crops up as you move toward virtual work and have a plan for addressing issues including missed deadlines, lack of participation, failure to properly document or archive, and forgetting to log time, if that is a requirement.

6. Commitment

You need to decide how committed you are to going virtual and how flexible you’ll be with team members who resist. Can you afford to move in phases, first deploying the team members who are ready, willing and able to take to the cloud, while leaving the others in the office? In order to get the real benefits of going virtual, you should at least consider downsizing the physical work space and look for suitable alternatives that offer real cost savings.

As more and more of your workers opt to go virtual, pretty soon those who are resisting may give in or give up. There is no way to please everyone, but having an understanding that you may have some very unhappy team members from the moment you say “virtual” should help to guide you in your approach. Consider consulting your lawyer to make sure any drastic changes you make in your workplace don’t infringe on workers’ rights.

By thinking through your process carefully and thoughtfully in advance and spending time considering and reviewing the technology you’ll use to build cohesion amongst your dispersed team members, you can certainly construct the ideal virtual workspace. Bringing everyone to the cloud without encountering some digging in of heels is the best scenario, but as a leader and manager, be prepared for the worst.

What do you think about bringing your own company into the cloud?

Stock xchng image by user linder6580

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

• By The Numbers: Running a Coworking Space
• Making Coworking Corporate-Scale
• Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Quite simply, HP’s new range of “ePrint” products enable any device to print to any printer, anywhere, as long as they’re all connected to the Internet.

Cleverly, HP will be issuing all of its ePrint-based printers with a unique email address; to print a document, users simply send documents to that address. Harnessing the ubiquity of email ensures that you will be able to print from devices that don’t even support printing!

It’s easy to consider the downside of web-connected printers; from a new generation of “printer spam” to transposing inbox overload into even more unmanageable paper form. However, I think the development is exciting for a number of reasons:

• The potential for a “social letterbox” perhaps limited to really close family and friends — sending a tangible, printed letter, article or photo could return value and intimacy to the printed word.
• Being able to use existing email filters and tools to determine what arrives at your printer’s inbox. I can envisage “print@yourdomain.com” becoming a useful communication end point for individuals and companies; finally killing the fax.
• A new means of permission marketing where the sender pays me to send me a printed flier.
• Postal services that transcode snail mail to electronically delivered prints that are also archived digitally.
• iPhone apps that locate the nearest available printer when you’re on the move and need a hard copy.

Looking further ahead it’s not difficult to envisage a time when a range of email-able “HP Deskfab” 3D printers will allow users to email real objects to each other, transforming bits into atoms. ePrint’s simple innovation of an email inbox for printers can inspire a multitude other ideas and is a true platform opportunity.

See also:

• Jan Chipchase’s “Thoughts on Cloud Printing“
• BERG’s “My printer, my social letterbox“
• HP’s ePrintCenter
• Google Cloud Print
  

(Editor’s note: If you’re interested in learning more about cloud computing and how it enables web apps like this, check out our Structure conference in San Francisco later this month).