Where would we be today without the Internet? It certainly has caused a global revolution in the way we live and work. You might say that it is the catalyst for  global connectivity.  Using a mobile device, you can do everything from connect to your office email to ordering a pizza. Emily Nagle Green, CEO of Yankee Group, a Boston-based global technology research firm, calls this phenomenon ANYWHERE, a world in which all people can connect to the things they care about from anywhere and at any time. In fact, Green has written a book called ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business. In the book, she examines the fast, unfolding changes in communications technology, and shows businesses how to harness the power of ANYWHERE to create new revenues streams and ignite dramatic business growth.

Enterpriseleadership.org recently sat down with Green to talk about the concepts she presents in her book. Here is what she had to say:

EL.  What motivated you to write this book?

ENG: For the past 40 years, Yankee Group has focused on the changes in connectivity. During the past year or two, we have seen an expansion and acceleration in making the universally connected environment a reality. It is a natural follow on to the commercialization of the Internet. We have essentially computers in our pockets. Connecting all of the devices we care about will become the next big platform in computing technology. Events such as the explosion of business people relying on devices such as the Apple iPhone motivated me to write this book. I also wanted to give people some advice about how they could benefit from the rewards from an expanding network infrastructure.

EL. Can you give me your elevator pitch for the book? 

ENG. ANYWHERE is the name for a time when all of us will be able to connect to all of the things we care about. It will become the largest technology revolution in our lifetime. Technology revolutions, like lots of other revolutions, bring risks and rewards. Much is at stake here. We will see trillions of dollars of new economic value created in aggregate from the maturation of this global ANYWHERE network. Businesses need some guidance in how to figure out to get ahead of that, such as how to identify the potential impacts of their business.

EL. How well-prepared are global CIOs for ANYWHERE? What two pieces of advice would you give to them?

ENG. Some CIOS are well prepared, but as I group, I do not think they are well prepared. The challenges of the recession, in particular, from disrupted them from thinking about how to anticipate the future. As for advice, I would tell them to first understand how quickly the unconnected world is becoming connected. The unconnected world includes the billions of people who have not been online in the last explosion of the Internet. About four billion of them will join the global network through adoption of digital mobile phones. The unconnected world also includes many assets in their own organizations. The organizations they partner with will add connectivity and transform the businesses world with those assets. In summary, they need to understand the pace of the unconnected world coming online and think about the diffusion of connectivity in their own businesses. They especially need to look at what activities have not yet benefitted from a pervasive network, and then think about how automating those activities could enhance the businesses' profitability.

EL. What changes in the enterprise architecture do they have to make in order to better prepared for ANYWHERE?

ENG. The two things one - they have to start the process of moving away from a proprietary IT infrastructure. We are moving to a world where businesses will not need to buy and manage their hardware and software. This transition will take some time for larges businesses to absorb. You need to start now. You need to plan your move away from your own investments and infrastructure. You also need to start looking at all of the employees' activities that mobile technologies do not support.  Last, you need to think about how to put technology, such as mobile apps, in the hands of your employees all of the time. This way you can recapture the lost productivity when they walk away from their desks.

EL. What are some of the key disruptive technologies beyond cloud computing that are driving ANYWHERE?

ENG. The three core technologies include the adoption of IP as a standard digital networking language, explosion of the broadband technologies, and the great economics of wireless. Today, we are building things on top of these technologies. We are most interested in how we think about information display and consumption.

For example, with maps from Mapquest, we can expect to see mapping displays for all kinds of things layered on top of them. It might include augmented reality where a camera points to a real-world environment and collects information about that environment. We will never see maps as things just having street names and points of interest. We will expect maps to identify buildings, commercial resources, and distances. We will expect them to come embedded with recent images -- if not in real time. We expect real-time congestion information to show up. Our concept of a map will require anywhere from six to 10 dimensions of information. This will happen because a network appears wherever we need it, and that network has the capacity to move massive amounts of information. We do not have to reply on text.

EL. Will things such as semantic Web technology capabilities contribute to put value to ANYWHERE?

ENG. The ANYWHERE network brings us some challenges. For CIOs, it is real-time information. How do we digest information when it comes from censored networks that can tell us the status of very complex environments? The Web is not ready for that yet. How are people going to digest petabytes of information that comes in on a regular basis? Any innovation around the semantic Web yet is not ready to deal with the volume and complexity of information that is coming from equipping the world with communications technology.

EL. Has the economic downturn hampered an organization's ability to get to ANYWHERE?

ENG. Yes and no. It had a negative impact at an aggregate level. The economic downturn delayed network operator's investment in transforming their networks.  The networks we have today are in transition to the networks of tomorrow. Today's networks have greater capacity and intelligence added to the network infrastructure. Billions of dollars of capital need to flow into existing networks to renovate them to meet our burgeoning appetites. That process slowed down quite a bit in 2009 as network operators carefully spent their capital. That delayed the maturation of the network infrastructure.

During 2009, everyone hunkered down and did not think about growth, but cost cutting and trying to keep their boat afloat. In that sense, it also had a negative impact. The phrase - necessity is the mother of invention - has much merit. People start turning to smaller solutions when they need to be resourceful. You see the explosion of mobile apps as one avenue where businesses could say to themselves: 'Gee, I want to create some capability. I have a workforce that carries iPhones or Blackberries in their pockets. How can I do this in a quick and simple way?' We do see some more inventive uses of technology emerging as people lower their technology spending level. They say, 'If I do not have the massive capital expense budget that I had in past and this will not change, then I have to get used to that idea and be more creative.' We have seen some emergence of creativity from that recession.

EL. Five years from now, will cloud computing be a pervasive utility we hear about?

ENG. I believe so. In five years, small- to medium-size businesses will depend on IT services from cloud computing. Small businesses starting now may never invest in much proprietary infrastructure because it is already so workable for them. We will see more widespread adopting of cloud computing in this space. For large companies, the move to cloud computing involves a long-term conversion process. These companies still have COBOL embedded in the guts of their IT organizations. It will take awhile for the current model for hardware and software computing to work its way out of the largest firms. Five years from now, cloud computing will be robust and widely deployed.

EL. Why did Yankee Group deliver a book now? Is this the first book written by a Yankee Group CEO in office?

ENG. This is the first book written by a Yankee Group CEO. I cannot speak for why Howard Anderson, the founder of Yankee Group, never wrote a book.  He left the company in 1995 at the beginning of the Internet explosion. Perhaps, he was preoccupied with other things and changes in ownership. Because I was not with the company then, I can only speculate.

EL. What are some of the major changes in enterprise architecture in global companies that will need to occur to make ANYWHERE possible?

ENG. They will start by integrating information from many more assets in the business. For example, the RFID space had a vision for years about how more objects in our lives could participate in the global network. RFID proponents have struggled to get the RFID tag cost down and sort out some network issues. The explosion of WiFi in business environments has brought with it the cost of activating the network and supporting tagging device. As a result, it makes RFID more affordable.

Another big enterprise network change involves alerting business assets to their status. We will see much less focus on fixed assets, such as real estate, as employees become increasingly mobile. We already see that now with working from home and remote offices. Businesses have to think more carefully about why they need offices in multiple locations, and how can they, instead, use the network as an umbilical cord to interact with their employees.

We will think more generously about what resources we need to give those employees at the other end of that cord. They need to have quality access devices at the other end of the network so that they can have a first-rate experience. We are not equipping them with an office any longer. We are not buying them coffee and Danish in the mornings. As a result, we need to make sure they have a device and a connection speed that will allow them to have a productive virtual work experience.

EL. Do you think the down the road there are going to be problems with this type of a workforce?

ENG. It is a huge shift. It is definitely disrupting in markets such as the North American and Europe. We have seen a disconnect about how employers and employees view their relationship. For examples, we are seeing a piecework model where work-at-home employees answering calls from a virtual call center. They get paid for their time on the phone. The issues we are starting to see include the following: Should an employee have one employer? If they can take calls for one employer, why can't they take calls for other employers?  If an employee has multiple employers, then who is responsible for the employee's benefits? This dilemma will cause some strange conversations for the next generation of workers.  We will see different attitudes about employment within the office bound environment.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a technology writer from Boston, MA. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

What does the Apple's computer mouse, Oral-B toothbrush for children and Palm V handheld organizer have in common with each other?  Each company designed its respective product with the help of engineers from IDEO, one of the most recognized global design firms.  Since 1991, IDEO has helped to design more than 3,000 new products and to reinvent many established Fortune 500 companies.

IDEO's name has become synonymous with innovation. BusinessWeek has ranked IDEO in the top 25 most innovative companies in the U.S. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal dubbed IDEO's office, Imagination Playground. The company has become the subject of two books: The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation.

Collaboration among IDEO's clients and myriad of engineers who specialize in discipline ranging from human factors to interaction designs has played a critical factor in the company's success. Doug Solomon, IDEO chief technology officer says, "Because we are not content experts about the thing the clients come to us about, we need to learn from them and their colleagues, and them share this information with our colleagues." In fact, Solomon and his design team devised a collaboration platform, called the Tube, to improve the cross-pollination of ideas across global constituencies.  Employees generated more than 1,000 pages six months after the Tube went live.

Enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Solomon to discuss what design considerations that went into the Tube and what CIOs can learn from them.

EL. What challenges did you face in designing a collaboration platform for a company such as IDEO?

DS. We have employees in eight offices on three continents. In the past, we worked in a distributed manner locally with our colleagues. We might have five or six people meeting face-to-face to discuss a project. Now our global clients expect us to collaborate around the world. We had the challenge of scaling our local work process to how best to collaborate across all of these time zones.

Experiencing something works best when it comes to innovation. As a result, we like to take our clients on observations in the field, such as on shopping visits, or looking at analogous kind of problems and other companies in the ecosystems. We had to find ways to make it easy and convenient for our clients to be part of the process without having them be physical with us the entire time.

We also work with people in the ecosystem who might be affected by some product or service or idea we work on. We use an anthropological type of methodology where we do more than interview them. In fact, we might live with them, go to work with them, or go shopping with them.  Since our projects are so diverse, we never know in advance what kinds of interests and people we want to speak with.

EL. How did apply your experience as an innovation company to the design of your collaboration platform?

DS. We treated ourselves as if we were a client of IDEO. We used our human senses design techniques and methods to observe our environment. We talked to people to understand how they would like to collaboration, but felt it is difficult to do at this point. We looked at the culture within IDEO to understand what would motivate people to share what they knew. We looked at what kinds of technologies we could experiment with and use for system prototypes. We also looked at our business constraints to make sure we could support this initiative.

EL. Can you summarize the concept of the Tube?

DS. We designed the Tube, which is our Intranet, based on the London subway system. It connects all of the people around the company, and provides them with a way to share information with each other. Some parts of our Tube consist of homemade components. We designed a consistent, human interface based on Ruby on Rails and other Web 2.0 technologies. It pulls in information from many of our legacy information systems, such as project management and time cards. We also have third-party tools we have built in. For example a screen sharing tool makes it easier for anyone here to make a presentation to a client or a colleague in another office. You just click on a link and you automatically you will have your screen starting to share with whomever you would like to invite.

EL. What are the various page types that one has available via the Tube?

DS. Our system is built around a number of page types, such as people pages similar to Facebook.  Active Directory pulls in a person's official data, such as phone number, to create the page. People can also describe themselves in anyway they like to pull their official biography. They can turn their bio into a PDF document, click on a link, and mail the bio to a client. We have project pages that have a start date and an end date. If someone enters a new project, then the system will pull in all of the people who have ever worked on that project. The information will include their bios, photos, and email address.  Our digital assets pages pull in all of the different rich media, such as videos, PowerPoint presentations, images, or documents of any sort.

EL. What tagging capabilities do you have in the Tube?

DS. We also have tagging built throughout the system. You can tag every kind of object, such as rich media. You can search on the tags, on the people, and the digital assets. You can easily search them across our entire system. All of these associations are noted. You can easily find who you should talk to about something, in addition to reading about it. We call this feature our knowledge sharing rather than knowledge management.

The data feeds pull in feeds from external sources, such as blogs. You can even push out internal information, provided it is not proprietary, to external blogs. We have very little top down control of the information. Users generate everything except for a very small piece of our home page. Here our internal communication groups tell what is going on within the company. Each project page lists what information you can share with the public and which information must stay in-house.

EL. Do you have separate pages for clients?

DS. We have a page for each client that aggregates all of the projects that we have done for that client. You can easily look and see what we have done in the past. You can even see information about discussions we had had with the client. These pages help us with business development activities.

EL. How are you handling blogs and wikis?

DS. We are on our fifth Wiki system at IDEO. It is simple to use and does much of the work most wikis ask people to do, such as create the navigation. We have more than 15,000 wiki pages. They are the first place where people want to go and to collaborate with their team members around projects and personal interests.

We give everyone a blog when they join the company. They can decide whether or not to use it. We also have many group blogs. We get 100s of postings per month to the blogs. The ethnographic research about ourselves that we learned as an email culture has helped to make our blogs popular. In the past, we have had different types of blog systems. In fact, our blogs went through a cycle of ups and downs. Some people would blogging and then stopped because no one was reading the entries. People would stop looking for the blog. We built a small tool called Feedmail which watches the blog for you. Initially, we subscribe you to all of the blogs. You can unsubscribe to the blogs and custom which ones to watch. Each day it generates a HTML email with the images and a short summary of what is in the blog posting for that day. You can click through and read the entire posting or skim the blogs. In a minute you can see what's new on all of the blogs and decide what you want to read. That is where much of the content of projects comes from.

EL.  Is there email within your collaboration system?

DS. You just click on a link within the system and it opens your email...it is integrated with our email.

EL. Do you made any provision to use the Tube as a repository for company documents?

DS. We have also a tools section within the Tube that allows us to post a variety of different tools, everything from HR forms, such as health benefits and time cards, and screen sharing tools.

EL. How often do you update the Tube?

DS. Our internal development team pushes out a new version of the Tube weekly. Each new version contains bug fixes and new features.

EL. How would the Tube help me to facilitate putting a project team together?

DS. The Tube can help you look at what manpower resources are available to work on a project. If you use a combination of data from our enterprise management system and our time card system, you can see the kind of people who are available for a project within your time frame.

EL. Have you opened up a section of the Tube to your clients and do you plan to expand it?

DS. Yes, already have a custom section of the Tube opened to our clients. They cannot get confidential information about other clients. They, however, can get access to any work that is happening on their project, such as status reports. In fact, we give them access to all of their information in one place. They don't have to search through their email to find the last update on a project or a report that IDEO showed at a presentation.  It allows us to have a very direct link with our clients and share with them the work that is in progress, such as drawings, illustrations, or storyboards. We can even share videos people we interviewed to get information about the project.  Many clients like this way of interacting, but some clients prefer a more conservative way of sharing information, such as email.  The majority of projects with our clients include some external Web-based tool for collaboration.

EL. What can CIOs learn from you folks about collaboration?

DS. Like many companies, when we started looking at collaboration, we first looked at the technology piece, especially the dozens of existing tools. Of course, we wanted to see if we could find something that could meet our needs.  We experimented with all of the Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis, social networking sites, telepresence, and video; conferencing. The more we spoke with other consulting companies about their collaboration tools, such as McKinsey & Company, we found the reason why most of these systems do not  meet the expectations of those who buy them. It does not have to do much with the technology as it does with the social network within an organization that wants to drive more collaboration. You need to understand the organization's culture. What are the rules around collaboration?  Do we really encourage it or discourage? Many companies do not look at the motivations that would really provide some benefit for people to collaborate. Unless it really meets some needs people have, you understand those needs and their rewards, then it turn into a system that people will not use.

You also need to understand the kinds of concepts you want to share. People carry around much passive, not explicit, knowledge of things. That explains why we decided to create links between people. This proved to be a better alternative than creating a knowledge management to suck information out of peoples' heads, put it in a database, and then download it in their heads.

So, the trick consisted of finding the intersection between what motivates people and what is important to the organization. People need to get some benefit from collaborating with the system. Most benefits will vary company by company. It takes a custom system to provide that kind of motivation. People at IDEO really want to express their interests, to share their work, and to be known to other people in the organization. We never told people they must use the system. We designed the system so that it would appeal to people. We then unleashed it, trained people, and watched what happened.

EL. What is the key to designing intuitive interfaces?

DS. Many systems are not designed to be intuitive. We have tried to do things such as eliminate all of the little roadblocks that make it difficult for people to use the system. For example, we made is very similar to use across every part of the Intranet. We use the Active Directory system. You only log on once. You do not need different passwords for blogs or wikis. For example, special wiki language can cause people to stay away from the system. We have a simple editor in our wiki system.

You need to allow people to go where they already are rather forcing them to go to new places. We tried to understand the work processes we have in our collaboration today. We provide ways for people to use the same type of methods but do it in a better more effective. For example, Feedmail brings the blog digest to you via email. Most companies make you go to each blog and search around to find what's new. People waste time searching through dozens of blogs.

We built our system to adapt to changes in the environment. To this end, our collaboration system is a constant work in progress. We always look for new ways to improve it. We have a built in feedback system which people can click on a link and send our team a message. We want to find the functions that people want and overcome any barriers to them using it as fully as possible.

Our innovative process as a company is based on prototype early, and often. We try to get things out as early as possible as we can get feedback from users. We set the expectation that we will need to change things. I recommend that CIOs do that over time.

EL. What has been the payoff from the Tube?

DS. It has helped us to understand how we can improve collaboration and use technology to improve our innovation process. It has also helped us to improve our efficiency and our quality of work. It has helped us to generate more revenue because we have been able to attract new types of project outside of our traditional IDEO community.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrrini@yahoo.com.