Finding smarter ways to work is critical to a lasting economic revival, IBM announced today.
Through a set of technology and work-style trend predictions, IBM outlined how people will conduct business more efficiently and effectively within a "smart planet," IBM’s view of an increasingly connected and instrumented world, shaping tomorrow at work.
IBM’s nine Smarter Work trends for 2009 include:
1 - Universal access to collaboration technology on any device will redefine what it means to be "at work" in an increasingly mobile and globally distributed workforce. Improved applications for mobile devices will offer enterprise office levels of security, flexibility and ease-of-use.
2 - Messaging will move beyond basic email and calendaring to become an integrated platform for communication, collaboration and sharing of resources.
3 - Organizations will begin managing their workforces primarily through the use of human networks. Employee skills and interests will be easily catalogued, helping employers find the perfect fit for projects and assignments.
4 - Unified communications will enable interaction through any mode via any computing device. Rich presence will drive interactions; instant messaging will be the defacto form of communication; traditional telephony will give way to "voice collaboration."
5 - Despite challenging economic conditions in 2009, the affordability and ease of using cloud-based software services will transform many small-medium businesses and individual corporate departments into global trading partners.
6 - Free and inexpensive technology will spread, allowing cash-strapped organizations to weather the storm of economic uncertainty with everything from office desktop productivity to social networking and collaboration in the cloud.
7 - The availability of essential business applications, the growing popularity of Netbooks, budget pressures and general maturity of the platform will push Linux on the desktop towards critical mass.
8 - Business applications will increasingly become interactive on mobile devices.
9 - Mashup technology will become increasingly used by IT and line of business workers to create a millions of morphing situational applications to solve daily problems.
"We have more reasons to change now," said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software. "We can’t simply go about our business relying on resource-draining business trips, over-crowded inboxes, paper-based operations and hierarchical methods of finding the answers we need. It’s time to work smarter and build a smarter planet."
Here are some tips on how individuals and businesses can start working smarter right now, according to Picciano. He suggests that people start working one day per week without using email as the primary application. Instead, they should rely more on collaborative Web 2.0 technologies like social networking, instant messaging and unified communications. Picciano recommends that people at work form social and professional networks with the experts in the fields most important to them based on the daily demonstration of their expertise, not based on their title. Businesses can also connect with people and resources more efficiently and economically in the cloud — or over the Web — with reliable, secure software services.
Another tip is to conduct instant, Web-and-voice meetings instead of forcing people to fly or drive great distances, saving time, cost and greenhouse gases. Eliminating paper-weighted processes altogether with digital forms and systems for capturing and conveying company information will also streamline business and help the environment.
