Implications for the Next Generation Office - A Day with InfoTrends

On Wednesday, I delivered a session at the Office Document Strategy & Solutions Summit - hosted by InfoTrends, a leading worldwide market research and strategic consulting firm for the digital imaging and document solutions industry.

A big thanks to InfoTrends Omri Duek and Anne Valaitis who invited me to participate and served as impeccable hosts, introducing me to a great group of like-minded digital content professionals.

Titled "Generation Gap: Implications for the Next Generation Office", (abbreviated version of the slide deck here on SlideShare), I was asked to design a session to spur some debate and discussion, to get the attendees to think about their own changing business models and the disruptive forces that are compelling their customers to think differently.

The Disruptive Forces on my radar...

• Economic uncertainty and how businesses are questioning traditional assumptions in an effort to stay lean and competitive
• Loss of Corporate Memory - the ultimate irony of the information age... poor record-keeping and content sharing practices means we risk losing decades of intellectual property and mentorship potential as experienced workers leave the organization
• Businesses - even small ones - become global. Use of the web means bigger audience to reach, companies need to create content to be consumed by all the senses in order to get around language barriers
• Greening of the Enterprise - where can costs be cut - both $$ and reduction of carbon footprint
• Gen Y Enters the Management Ranks and brings with them differently wired work habits
• We enter the Era of Peak E-Mail - no longer a productivity enabler but has evolved into a productivity inhibitor
• The Mobile Era Emerges - content is created and consumed on a whole new category of communication devices
• Rise of Open Source, Cloud Computing, SaaS - erosion of traditional IT practices and business models of software companies
• Web 2.0 - Adoption of new collaborative content creation tools becomes mainstream, increasingly recognized as electronically stored information by regulatory and legal authorities

Expect to hear more from me on many of these topics over the next few months... new approaches to Enterprise Content Management demands a recognition of the changed business environment affecting customers and prospects.

My session was followed by a fantastic presentation from Sun's Gary Lombardo. His content provided a natural continuation and deeper dive into the themes I introduced. Particularly valuable was his practical and proven methodology for how to start, maintain and grow a community initiative for business (internal or external audience).

What did I learn at the event? The most intriguing discussion I had was over lunch, with a couple of very sharp and funny ladies from Taylor Business Equipment (a certified Women's Business Enterprise) in Chicago. They educated me on the environmental and preservation issues as the printer industry evolves into adoption of solid ink devices. What does that mean for our next generation of physical content artifacts? My nerdy historian spider-sense starting tingling at this one.

Maybe that will be a topic for next year's event...