In the middle of a lengthy article in the MIT Technology Review about productivity gains expected from the increased prevalence of the virtual office, Andrew McAfee offers a few interesting tidbits about what aspects of traditional working life will likely remain basically unchanged going into the coming decade. He writes that

while the physical office is changing, certain connotations of the word “office” are not. I can think of at least two — “hierarchical organization” and “place for human interaction” — and there’s no indication that these are becoming any less important. Even the most progressive high-tech companies retain many of the organizational trappings of their industrial-age predecessors: full-time managers, org charts, job descriptions, and so on. And since humans remain social animals, conventional gathering places will remain important in business…

McAfee’s idea that hierarchy and org charts are here to stay stirs up an interesting debate about whether the content of those org charts will nonetheless change due to evolving tech tools. Some feel that new collaboration tools will inevitably lead to flatter structure.  On WebWorkerDaily, for example, Andy McLoughlin has argued that:

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.

In this vision, the org chart may continue to be dutifully drawn up but going forward it will be less and less relevant to how business actually gets done, no longer really constraining or describing who works with whom.

Are you with McAfee or McLoughlin – are collaboration tools bound to flatten organizations or are traditional hierarchies here to stay?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Nils Geylen.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Building a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content
• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

As with its Pro cousin, Virtual Office Solo includes a dedicated business phone number (or you can port your existing number). Calls may be sent and received through any Windows or Mac web browser with Java 10.0 or higher; no additional software downloads or added plug-ins are required. Existing contacts can be imported from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter.

When you’re away from your desk, or at certain times of day, calls can be forwarded to a mobile or home phone. The system includes voicemail, call waiting, music on hold, caller ID, three-way calling and the ability to record calls for storage as digital audio files.

Virtual Office Solo also includes some features that go beyond services like Google Voice, including unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada, web conferencing with video for up to 15 simultaneous participants, and Internet faxing. The system also includes free mobile apps that enable users to place and receive calls through iOS and Android devices while displaying their Virtual Office Solo phone number as the Caller ID.

What Solo doesn’t have is extensions and the “phone tree” or auto-attendant features of a full PBX, so it isn’t suited for multi-person enterprises. It also doesn’t have voice-to-text message transcriptions, and is not compatible with VoIP desk phones; you’ll need the more expensive Pro version to get all of these features.

Virtual Office Solo is similar in many ways to other phone services, like Google Voice, VoxOx and Grasshopper. Its feature set is perhaps closest to Grasshopper’s, but at $7.99 per month, 8×8′s service has more options and is less expensive. The product can be ordered online from the 8×8 website and activated immediately.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Workplaces
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• Report: Google’s Voice Possibilities

Qwaq, Inc. creates virtual spaces for real work. The company’s product, Qwaq Forums, is the leading secure virtual workspace application for the enterprise, and enables collaboration in ways that weren’t possible before. Designed for enterprises and groups with distributed teams, Qwaq Forums significantly increases productivity by bringing critical resources together in virtual spaces, and allowing people to work together as if they were in the same physical location.

Can someone say “Second Life?” or any other virtual world or virtual world application already out there?

I have a 30-day trial access to Qwaq, have logged into the Welcome Forum and followed the 3 minute tutorial that explained about:

1. moving around,
2. my avatar, and
3. documents.

I’m thinking – hey, there’s nothing to it. Simple and easy is a good thing, right?

Then as I experimented with building my own office – one with a modern, warm “decor” – I began thinking that…there’s nothing to it. Basically, you can “build” a space such as a campus, a conference room (blue for boys, rose for girls?), a gallery, a modern office (cool or warm colors), a personal office and several other configurations. Breaking it down, this is how Qwaq felt to me:

1. Moving around: I can use either my keyboard or arrows to move my avatar and view around. This is basically the same set of controls for Second Life and other virtual world environments out there, so nothing revolutionary here. Moving around as a new user is just as quirky and clunky and takes time to get used to the flow.

2. My avatar: Ugly. I look like colored boxes stacked on top of each other. It is almost embarrassing how primitive the avatars in Qwaq look. I saw a promo image of a more “custom” avatar and it consists of the photo of a person’s face on the top box that represents the avatar’s head. How can you seriously interact with a business colleague when they look like a box with their photo pasted on it?

3. Documents: This may be where Qwaq has a slight leg up over Second Life and more or less of an advantage over other virtual world environments depending on their document integration tools. On Qwaq, I simply drag a document into my virtual office space, and it appears on the office wall about a minute later, either fully readable or editable, depending on the file type.

Qwaq offers true document integration in a virtual space whereas Second Life users, for example, still struggle to find the right tools to handle a PowerPoint presentation versus a collaborative document or whiteboard. They do include voice capabilities, and although I haven’t tried it, I’m venturing to guess it is much more stable than Second Life’s voice feature.

They also have a useful feature: a 3-D pointer that works similar to a real-life laser pointer so collaborators can draw attention to something.

Despite the cool pointer, I can’t help but think that Qwaq is a watered down version of the more elegant, graphically enhanced and feature rich environments of virtual worlds. Even a cartoonish world like There.com at least has avatars that appear to be people rather than cardboard boxes. And any meeting space in Second Life that is well-designed makes Qwaq’s virtual spaces look like…cardboard boxes.

If I’m going to be doing collaborative work with my clients or team members in a virtual space, I would much prefer that space to have some degree of aesthetics in addition to functionality. Otherwise, I might as well just use 2-D collaborative Web-based tools because they simply…work.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: Virtual Worlds for the Enterprise Market
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce