Every day we move into a world that is increasingly virtual, one in which you and I can work together without physically being in the same place at the same time.
This very cool.
It has the potential to increase both productivity and the quality of individual lives. We can work better and faster because we are working on our schedule, without overhead interruptions.
It lets us find ways to balance life and work demands.
It saves money on commute costs, wear and tear on roads, and office space expenses.
But, it also requires tools that enable this process. It means we need infrastructure to support them, knowledge to use them, and the culture shift to accept them. And this is not as easy as it seems.
Right now, we here at CCTC are trying to make the jump to virtual shared workspaces. And we're bumping into every one of these requirements.
For me, part of the problem is the cultural shift. I'm really comfortable working with people over the phone in locations around the globe and around the clock. I control my voice and know how to turn it on and off. But when it comes to my data, to my surprise it turns out I'm not quite so comfortable.
I like having things on my desktop. I am old enough to have lived through the transition from mainframes to desktop and I still retain the thrill of "ownership." To my surprise, I find myself reluctant to let documents live only on some server somewhere out there in cyberspace.
I want to know that what I need will be there, always accessible.
Perhaps one of the contributors to this is the infrastructure requirement. To have truly functional virtual space requires always-on, always-reliable connectivity. And across this region, we lack that.
Little is more frustrating that to sit down to update some information in a spreadsheet, one that lives in a remote, shared location, and to have the bandwidth be so slow as to render the process useless. Or, to have the connection drop off in the middle of a save. For the data-paranoid (hum, like me), this is Tums- consuming time.
The tools themselves turn out to still be rather lacking. The interfaces are not intuitive. Like most of us, if I have to think about using something, I'm probably not going to use it. I really hate it when the UI gets in the way of doing. It isn't so much that they are "hard" to learn; they just require an extra annoying step. And that quickly becomes a barrier.
The trick to technology has rarely been the technology itself. The real challenge has been one of workflow and process. The pieces need to work AND they need to work the way we work.
I think this is the biggest barrier right now. Most of the enabling tools for shared workspaces and remote applications don't offer the flexibility to adjust to our existing workflows and processes. Using them requires an extra step ... or two.
On the surface, this doesn't seem like it should be a problem. After all, for improved productivity in the long run, why shouldn't we adjust the way we work? Except, of course, that line of thought is destined to be filed in the 'best intentions' circular file. We don't change very easily.
Meanwhile, I find myself grouching about duplicate and triplicate versions of logos, of not being able to find a set of numbers when I need them, and of retyping the same stuff over and over and over. We are working virtually but without the tools to make our work seamless.
And we're not alone. All of us who are migrating to virtual models are dancing out there on the bleeding edge. We can see the benefits. We are finding way of balancing face-to-face time with effective use of other times, all in the name of doing more with less - and reclaiming quality of life. But we're still in the early stages of infrastructure, tools, and cultural acceptance.
But I have hope. In the past decade we've developed infrastructure, tools, and cultural acceptance around one-to-one digital communications. We forced the tools to become more like us. We moved en masse when they looked like places we wanted to be and acted in ways that we expected.
It's just a matter of time ... of a short time, I hope ... until virtual tools move from the realm of IT and computer-focused interfaces into the hands of the Rest-of-Us.
We're still going to keep stumbling forward because the benefits of virtuality are so great. And it has been humbling to realize how old school all of us can be sometimes. But the world is shifting and we're got to keep shifting with it - and shaping that shift to serve us and our needs.
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