Sorry for the recent low levels of blog activity. In addition to the usual summer doldrums, I've been wrapping up a bunch of projects and tooling up for a busy fall season of writing and speaking.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been focused on revising and extending the text of Listening to the Future: Insights from the New World of Work, a collection of white papers that I co-wrote with Dan Rasmus at Microsoft, previously issued as a special-order edition from Wiley. Now Wiley plans to issue a trade edition with about 50% new content, including a series of new papers on the "new world of business" that are only just going through final review and approval. The retail edition is scheduled to ship around November 1, which is right around the corner, publishing-wise, so Dan and I are scrambling to whip the manuscript into shape.

Here's a quick preview from my draft of the introduction (likely to undergo substantial alteration as Dan and I hash through it), which gives a flavor of the theme and direction of the rest of the book.

People Make the Future

Earlier stages of the information age saw the implementation of large-scale enterprise systems to gather system data and automate business processes. While these kinds of systems still deliver value, we believe that the majority of benefits have already been realized and further refinements of their capabilities will provide only marginal gains. The real action in enterprise computing is now happening at the micro level, in the routine tasks that information workers perform dozens of times per day, which have never been cost-effective to automate through the development of “big IT” solutions. Today, the most powerful dynamics driving the transformation of work and business are at the intersection of people and technology: the systems that connect people to information, processes and one another. These are areas where end-user demand, grass-roots adoption and the wide availability of consumer-grade applications of unproven quality and business value collide with the imperatives of business and IT to provide consistent, secure processes and high levels of measurable productivity. This is also where new work-related technologies and practices rub up against the established workstyles and values of workers and managers, or challenge the prevailing organizational culture.

The influence of social computing and mass collaboration is already making its way into enterprise from the consumer marketplace. This is having a turbulent effect on work practices and culture as work becomes more collaborative and transparent, and the expectations of sophisticated “digital natives” clash with more traditional approaches to work. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, interactive multimedia, subscription-based content, remote and mobile computing, social networks, content filtering, mashups, and all the other accoutrements of the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 toolset are redistributing power from centralized hierarchies to the network, changing the way decisions are made, and affecting every process in the workplace.

These types of technologies are fundamentally different from previous waves of ICT in that they depend intimately on human knowledge and human participation. Introducing a user-created content repository or a collaborative extranet for partners is not like re-tooling an assembly line. To get the most out of the next wave of ICT investments, organizations need to look much more closely at the relationship between people, process and information and make sure they have all the bases covered – not just the application capabilities or the infrastructure. Unless you surround the introduction of the technology with a whole variety of adaptations to the management structure and culture, the technology alone is unlikely to generate the expected benefits for the organization.

Because people are at the center of the next wave of technologies, the attitudes and values that people bring with them into the workforce from their outside lives, their national backgrounds, their generational experience, the consumer culture, and all the other complexities of the modern world have the potential to deeply affect their performance as workers and managers. The complexities of the new world of work and business therefore encompass all the complexities of the world at large. Our holistic approach to mapping out a set of futures and a set of questions for organizations may seem unusual, but we feel it is the only way to get a clear picture of the challenges ahead.