As Work Changes, New Tools Are NeededAs Work Changes, New Tools Are Needed

In the company of the future, static hierarchical organizations will be replaced by teams of employees focused on specific activities, collaborating across organizational boundaries inside and even outside the company. That was the somewhat utopian vision described last week as IBM's Lotus Software business unit brought together researchers and customers to define the future of work. IBM developers also demonstrated prototype collaboration software aimed at making that vision closer to reality.

As hierarchical business structures become more decentralized in a knowledge-based economy, employees will be more autonomous, flexible, and creative, said MIT professor Thomas Malone, author of The Future Of Work (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Work will increasingly be organized around projects and activities. "Activities will be the atoms out of which organizations will be built," he predicted.

"Activities will be as fundamental to future IT as transactions were in earlier generations of IT," said Mike Rhodin, development and technical support VP for Lotus. New generations of collaboration tools will be needed to coordinate those activities by connecting workers to each other, to business processes, and to information sources, Rhodin said.

IBM developers demonstrated collaboration software that handles activity management. Some of the technology will be built into IBM's Workplace messaging and collaboration software and Eclipse development tools.

The first tangible results of the development work will be a new Workplace user interface called Activity Explorer that lists a user's projects and makes it easier for co-workers to share documents, PowerPoint presentations, and other project-related materials. For example, a user can drag an icon onto a co-worker's name from an instant-messaging system's buddy list, giving that person the ability to view and edit project materials. A technology preview of Activity Explorer will be available next month, and the software will be part of Workplace 2.5, due by year's end.

IBM demonstrated new E-mail technology that identifies messages from the same person or that are part of an E-mail string. Lotus project manager Dan Gruen said picking out important messages from the volume of E-mail that workers get each day is a growing problem. The prototype software also scans mail for notes about possible appointments and helps users add the information to their calendars. No date has been set for releasing the technology as a product.

Desktop tools with that kind of built-in intelligence are what Michael Boatwright, Prudential Financial Inc.'s corporate VP of IT, is looking for to make employees more productive. "There's just too much information, too much mail, too much stuff the employee has to deal with right now. That's our No. 1 challenge," he said.

Linking business technology across organizational boundaries also is a challenge. Prudential Financial runs some 4,000 Notes applications, IBM WebSphere middleware, WebSphere portals, and Workplace collaboration applications. "We as a company need to try to knit those applications, services, and tools together to better serve our customers," he said.

IBM also demoed team collaboration software for the Eclipse development environment. Called Jazz, the software interface provides a list of development team members and their photos, indicates if they're online, and lists each member's projects. With the interface, users can initiate chat sessions with other team members. It also shows what code a programmer has checked out of a central repository to work on.

Jazz is being developed by IBM Research and IBM's Rational Software business unit and likely will be added to Rational development tools at a future date.