Content Log

The Digital Enterprise of the Future

During the past month we have had our user conference, Alfresco Summit, in San Francisco and London and it was great to see everyone. I normally give the corporate direction keynote at the end of the first day. Given all the sessions that are presented during the day, I like to add a theme to lighten up what can be serious and technical information. This year's theme was Star Trek only because I liked idea of the pun on the Enterprise, but also because I have been watching Star Trek all my life and it truly was an inspiration to get into technology. When my father became the Operations Officer on the real USS Enterprise, I considered it destiny.

The more serious theme in the presentation is the transformation of the enterprise into a digital enterprise. Immediately many people think, "didn't that happen in the 1990s?" Well, no. Companies put a eCommerce front-end with their web site and although they put the label "Digital" on it, it's not exactly restructuring the organization. As Gartner has put it, "Digital business is not the decade-old concept of e-business in a new wrapper. It is a radically different and more disruptive change.” This was in a report titled "What the Board of Directors Needs to Know about Digital Business", a title which in itself indicates things must be different. Also, with Gartner's Nexus of Mobile, Social (really more like Forrester's Consumerization of Software), Cloud and Big Data, there is more of a point to that Nexus other than forces colliding and doing what exactly? I guess you can call it Digital Fusion.

I have been able to talk to a lot of analysts, consultants and customers about their digital initiatives and have had a chance to reflect on them. Also the AIIM board has taken this up as a topic and it has become a theme of AIIM's next conference. I even saw Geoffrey Moore get into it with his "Let's Get Digital" post on LinkedIn.  However, despite all the excitement and amount of words that have been expended on this transformation, there is still not a clear definition of what a Digital Enterprise is, let alone a road map to get there.

I believe that there is a significant place for Enterprise Content Management, Process Management and Collaboration in making this transformation. The transformation itself will have a dramatic impact on our lives as knowledge workers as well. You can see my thoughts in the presentation on SlideShare below. I'd like to know yours.

I hope to write more about this topic, because I have a heck of a lot of thoughts on it already. But you know me, maybe I will and maybe I won't. ;-)

The Digital Enterprise - Alfresco Summit Keynote 2014 from John Newton

Future of Work Video Series

About a year ago, we started filming a series that we called the Future of Work. We sought out experts in the field who are looking at the future of how we work from very different angles. This will probably be a long-term project that explores our work, our tools, our workplace and our place in business and tries to imagine what each will be like over the next ten years. We have material to fill several episodes and plan to release them over the next several months.

In the first episode, we explore what our workplace will be like and the role that technology will play. For this episode, we talk to Tim Tuttle, CEO and Founder of Expect Labs, Matt Mills of Featurespace and previously of Aurasma, and John Mancini, President of AIIM.

 

We chose Tim because of his background in Artificial Intelligence (AI) at MIT and his application of AI technology in the workplace with Expect Labs. We discovered Matt when we were exploring Augmented Reality. H, he is now at Featurespace, which is applying research on behavioral analytics in the workplace. Both subject areas are fascinating. I have been involved with AIIM for several years now and it is always worth talking to John Mancini about how content and process technology will affect our workplace and how we do work.

From my personal perspective, I am hoping and expecting that technology is going to make work easier and more natural. Being an early adopter of technology over the last three decades, I can't say that technology has always made life easier or more focused. Adopting the latest technology, although almost always fun, comes with the cost of adoption, a learning curve and a natural distraction.

My early adoption of blogging, Facebook, Twitter and Quora have always come at the expense of getting stuff done at work. I may be in the know, but it's not necessarily helping me get my job done. What I hope and I expect is that as it develops, technology will become less distracting, more focused, more natural and simpler than preceding versions.

The technologies that Tim, Matt and John discuss may well be the solution to these problems of lack of simplicity and focus. For example, rooms that comprehend who has entered and can listen to and understand conversations will be able to provide a context to capturing and delivering information. Ubiquitous technology that includes being surrounded by touchscreen devices will make that information available wherever and whenever we need it. Artificial intelligence that is statistically driven will be able to understand what we can and cannot do and automatically provide support when we need it. Not just one, but multiple intelligent assistants will be built into all the applications we use and will be expert at how those applications work and the support you as the user need. These are pretty fantastic things to consider. 

In future episodes, we will be exploring how we collaborate, what the new tools of the office will be and how our businesses will be fundamentally changed by the future of our work. It won't be surprising that we will be focusing on information, types of activity, work process and the nature of work itself rather than the latest shiny devices. These are my interests and it is difficult to purely extrapolate technology to see where we are going. It takes a range of skills and insights to try to determine where we are going rather than just trying to figure out what the next five versions of an iPhone will be like. Therefore, we will be talking with people like Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame, Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, and many other experts on the future of work to see how technology will be applied rather than just how it will evolve.

Take a look and see what you think. Join the conversation on how these and other technologies will affect the way we work and the very nature of the work we do.