By Sam Huleatt, CEO

Last month the Wall Street Journal compiled a list of seven common activities technology is helping to transform. Notably absent was ‘how we work.’

My last post discussed why I feel the phrase Enterprise 2.0 is not the best one to represent the next generation of enterprise software. I arrive at this conclusion based in the fact that work culture is fundamentally changing. As a result of these changes, the next wave of software innovations cannot simply be ‘additions’ to already existing architectures. Maybe this would be fine if we were in a maturing industry; but we are not. Thus, our next software innovations must utilize new architectures that are specifically designed to address our new era. Likewise, the terminology we use to define new software should reflect such changes.

So what exactly is going on?

One of the biggest changes I see (and that Stowe loves to talk about) is a movement away from the notion of hierarchical ‘enterprises.’ There is a shift from large corporate-shells to individual ‘enterprising’ individuals. Thanks to technology and globalization, power is shifting away from large corporate structures and returning to individuals. More and more, it’s about niche specializations, not generalists. We see this manifest itself in an increasing number of freelancers and consultants. In the United States alone there are 42 million independent workers; 30% of the entire labor force. We are now in a project economy where the creative class is flourishing thanks in large part to lowered barriers to entrepreneurship brought about by advances in technology and the internet.

Next, people are coming to understand that work is improved when it is ‘social.’ We all know the role of swarm theory in nature. Swarm theory comes into play with power participation laws, collective intelligence and wisdom of the crowds. The social also feeds entrepreneurship and innovation. Just this week the New York Times suggested that freelancers excel when in a social environment. On top of this, there is also a blurring of work/life boundaries for young workers. While millenials expect longer hours they also expect social interactions at work — and the tools to allow them.

Mike Gotta of Collaborative Thinking sums it all up perfectly:

The “social enterprise” (e.g., Enterprise 2.0), reflects a desire to transform organizations governed by industrial-age management practices. Establishing a more participatory culture across internal and external stakeholders is essential for enabling the level of workforce agility and resiliency necessary for organizations to continuously innovate and grow.

Closely related to the ideas of ‘enterprising individuals’ and the ‘social’ is the role of presence. While people may be working collaboratively and with specialists, it’s often not face-to-face. Technology has empowered us to be able to find and hire the best talent – no matter where in the world it exists. Collaboration is now geographically dispersed. Outsourcing and offshoring is increasingly common, and not necessarily related to cost-savings. Similarly, millenials are demanding the ability to work from home, allowing for better flexibility and work/life balance. These changes must all be reflected in new enterprise software, especially as the mindset shifts away from the necessity of physical spaces and presence.

Finally, I think there is a healthy shift away from talking about ‘productivity increases’ and instead talking about ‘quality increases.’ ROI is obviously important, but as younger people work longer hours and more commonly have niche specialties, I believe they also take more pride in what they do. It’s not about getting it done faster; it’s about getting it done better.

While there are undoubtedly more changes occurring (multi tasking for example), these are some of the most significant I recognize and which I believe Workstreamr will begin to address.

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Tags: collaboration, millenials, multi tasking, offshoring, roi, sam huleatt, stowe boyd, workstreamr

By Sam Huleatt, CEO

I have been following the progress of FASTforward 2008 with great interest. Our new project - Workstreamr - is to be a new entrant in what most now refer to as the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ space. Very talented folks such as Andrew McAfee of Harvard University have spent vast amounts of time researching, debating and ultimately defining this industry.

Now I must humbly disagree with their vernacular.

For many younger people (and I assume older ones too!) enterprise software is a big ugly word. For myself and my fellow millenials, enterprise software provokes nightmares of installation CDs, dedicated servers, bloated Microsoft products with thousands of buttons — heavy applications littered with acronyms and hardcopy manuals. Enterprise 2.0 is not about making the old new, it’s about making new, new. We should be talking about “fill-in-the-blank 1.0″ not “enterprise 2.0″ because there is a fundamental change taking place in how we do work and software should represent that (more on this later).

Personally I see majority of current “enterprise 2.0” offerings as attempts breathe life into versions of yesterday’s software and systems. This is a problem. Old solutions are designed for old work environments and old office cultures. The notion of work understood by my generation is has changed and is still changing. Overall work culture has substantially shifted in only the last 20, even 10 years. However, addressing change from an IT perspective is difficult. Most major U.S. corporations are entrenched in products they have spent small fortunes maintaining over the years; system built by such iconic names as IBM and Microsoft.

For many CTO’s, instituting a ‘radical new offering’ such as a SaaS-based product is viewed as more of threat to the office than as an opportunity. However, many of these same CTO’s see also the long-terms benefits of web 2.0, social media and SaaS. CTO’s understand that they must - at a minimum – experiment or ‘dabble’ in such functionality. However, for the majority of dabbles, they turn to new offerings or extensions from the old guard brands. As a result, IBM and Microsoft continue to add new “2.0” offerings to their existing platforms. Unfortunately, they are simply ‘adapting old software’ and not innovating something new; a change agent.

A metaphor I have used recently is that Workstreamr is like the Barack Obama of its domain. While the products from ‘establishment companies’ may be functional and competent for the moment, progress does not come from living in the past. Both end-users and CTO’s need to look beyond past successes and recognize that staples such as exchange servers and Outlook are soon to be old news.

Workstreamr represents a departure from old notions of enterprise architecture. But it is also more than that. Workstreamr represents a shift in how we collectively accomplish work. The model of the traditional 9-5 office is rapidly changing.

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Tags: andrew mcafee, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise architecture, harvard, IBM, politics, SaaS, sam huleatt

Quoted from Anne Zelenka, Web Worker Daily

I defined workstreaming last March as “the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues, usually via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.” This jumps off the idea of lifestreaming: sharing a moment-by-moment or event-by-event account of your life, whether through video or blogs or tools like Jaiku and FriendFeed.

How can you do workstreaming? Message boards can work well for corporate teams: post a message when a project milestone is reached, a document is available for review, a sale has been closed, a bug fixed. On her new blog Anywired, Skellie offers tips for using micro-blogs like Tumblr, Twitter, and Soup.io to do it. A macro-blog like WordPress or Blogger works well as a coarse-grained, person-focused workstream. Stowe Boyd is working on a secretive project called Workstreamr that he calls his greatest obsession. I can’t wait to see it.

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Tags: anne zelenka, lifestreaming, rss, web worker daily

By Sam Huleatt, CEO

Apologies for the lack of posts over the past 15 days, but internet is somewhat unreliable in India and the Middle East and I have been swamped with issues more pressing than blog posts (I know, I know).

After returning from India last night I was greeted by a barrage of unanswered emails, including several concerning a post on /Message.

So the cat is out of the bag – Workstreamr is the name of the ‘mystery’ project that Ben, Stowe and I have been working on since last summer. We have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy into the conceptualization of what will hopefully be a revolutionary new platform focused on doing everyone’s favorite activity: work!

In the coming weeks I will begin to reveal more about Workstreamr’s architecture and more importantly — our mission and approach. Nothing about Workstreamr is conventional and that’s the way we like it.

Big things to come…

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Tags: /message, architecture, india, sam huleatt, workstreamr

By Stowe Boyd, Lead Designer

I was in New Delhi for almost a week, and it was — on one level — an assault on the senses. The zig-zag driving, with endless honking of horns, and a streaming chaos of bikes, pedicabs, motorscooters, cars, trucks, and semi-immobile sacred cows makes for a harrowing experience.

But I wasn’t visiting Delhi for a vacation: I was there with my partners in Workstreamr, Ben Schippers and Sam Huleatt, to kick off the engineering development on the product, which will be the first real workstreaming application. We are working with Global Logic’s newly formed Version 1.0 group, and the progress we are making is extraordinary. We have been working with Saumitri Chaudhury of Global Logic for several months on the conceptual design, and he has become an invaluable partner, especially to me, in my role as designer. Workstreamr is truly my baby, but the Global Logic folks are doing a great job of playing midwife. An amazing bunch, and the level of their expertise will be obvious when we roll out the beta in a few months. They showed me the first working demo on the first day of our meetings: wow. It took my breath away.

We also overlapped with Global Logic’s first annual Partner’s Conference, where I met several dozen partners and the executives from Global Logic.

Here’s Peter Harrison, the CEO, who I have known over five years. I first worked with Global Logic — then known as Indus Logic — in 2001, when the company was only 16 employees: it is now almost 3000. Peter announced raising another venture round of $30M from a groups of firms, including Sequoia and Draper Atlantic. Lots of growth ahead.

While New Delhi challenged me in very fundamental ways, there is a dynamic explosive feeling there. I can understand why Peter said to me at the party that he considered moving to New Delhi, to be right there in the center of that economic revolution.

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Tags: ben schippers, globallogic, india, sam huleatt, stowe boyd, workstreaming, workstreamr

Quoted from Anne Zelenka, Web Worker Daily

There is a web worker replacement for face time: workstreaming, the publishing of work-related activities and events to your remote colleagues, usually via RSS but sometimes in other formats and ways.

Workstreaming is the next generation of the 11 pm email you send to your team to show them that you’ve been working all evening. Workstreaming is related to lifestreaming, producing an RSS feed of all the bits and pieces of your online self in date-time order. But lifestreaming incorporates everything from the personal to the professional to the trivial, while workstreaming is only about showing what you’ve just accomplished, what you’re working on now, and what you’re planning to do in the future.

The benefits of workstreaming include satisfying your boss (or client) that you’re making regular progress towards shared goals, notifying team members of your status in case it affects their work, and even giving yourself a sense of accomplishment and progress. Because it’s oriented to what you’re producing and doing and not just about how much time you’re spending on it, workstreaming isn’t so burdensome and misguided as face time requirements. However, workstreaming could certainly be manipulated to give the illusion you’re working when you’re not.

There are a wide variety of tools that might be used for workstreaming, and which ones suit you and your team depend both on what kind of work you do and what tools your coworkers are using. It’s not effective to use an IRC channel if you’re the only one on the team who knows what IRC stands for, but it can be great for a techie crowd. Twitter creates a virtual shared office space that can reproduce the chatter and intimacy of a physical office while allowing team members to share what they’re working on and what they’ve completed. RSS feeds from blogs, message boards, photo sites, and project management apps could all provide useful workstreams—especially if these are aggregated for a whole team. Source code control systems like Subversion can output RSS feeds too so you can make team members aware of new features and bug fixes as they’re checked in.

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Tags: anne zelenka, lifestreaming, rss, web worker daily, workstreaming