Digital Media Buzz > Googlization: Project Management for a New Generation

Googlization: Project Management for a New Generation

By Patrick Patullo

An organization’s communications strategy used to be as complex as its phone service. Today, with online project management systems, wiki’s, blogs, chat, social networks, not to mention email (the office workhorse), organizational communication models that have been in place for decades are being turned inside out.

It’s not just theory either. Business processes, technology and culture may be combining to fundamentally change the face of work, creating opportunities for companies that get it and pitfalls for those that don’t.

“I don’t think they are [new] models, but there are potential opportunities for communicating in different ways and for changing organizational processes because of Web 2.0 technologies,” says Michele H. Jackson, associate professor of communications at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Computer-based communication has been going on since the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the web was commercialized and access prices dropped in the 1990s that companies began leveraging these technologies. The result was an attempt to mimic old-world communication using the new technology.

“It took off because of the accessibility of the technology and the technology ran faster than what we knew what to do with it,” Jackson says. “We were very concerned with making email communications the same as face to face. Is tele-work the same as when a worker is in the office?”

Over the past five years as the adoption of communications technology has become more commonplace, almost universal, a revolution, not so much in the technology but in the way companies and organizations leverage that technology, is at hand.

“It hasn’t been up until the last five years that we’ve moved from conversion to transformation,” Jackson says.  “I think increasingly what you see is a different kind of mentality in workers and in organization that instead of using technology to do online what we did offline before, instead employees, and workers and organizations are looking for ways to do new things to change their process and trusting this new information architecture to make this possible.”

Instead of using communication to control data streams, for example who sends what email to whom, smart organizations will focus on harvesting communications to accomplish tasks.

Think of cloud computing or open source development on the organizational level. In the not too distant future managers may simply define goals and let the organization as a whole develop the product.

“We are less worried with coordination and making sure we know all of the parts and how they are coordinated together and more concerned that we know all of these things are being created and how we can gather them,” Jackson says.

There are two things driving this: one, the aggregation of data on a scale not seen before and two, the ability to access that data from almost any location at any time.

“Google maps is an excellent example of this where information from all different databases can be brought onto one product,” Jackson says. “Information that’s collected for reasons totally unrelated, yet the fact that it’s captured in the database means it is potentially available for use in these unknown and emergent ways.”

Key to managing this model will be the ability to multi-task and hold multiple conversations, according to Jackson.

Younger generations have accomplished this already. There is plenty evidence suggesting that those who have grown up in the social computing era are well equipped to harvest data when they need it and multi-task, but for the rest of us there will be a learning curve.

Technology will help
There is a proliferation of tools on the market from online project management applications, enterprise wikis and open source instant messaging to try and make sense of this. No one system dominates but one new tool on the horizon could be the game changer and it comes from a familiar innovator.

Google introduced its new Wave product to developers late last month and it has produced, if not excitement, at least a healthy dose of intrigue.

Wave has been in development for the past two years by the same team that produced Google’s highly successful Maps program. Wave promises to merge email, chat, photo sharing and host of other communications under one roof and in context. Most exciting is that, like Google Maps, Wave is open source so its potential is seemingly only limited by the imagination of developers across the web.

Wave has ramifications not just for organizations and how they communicate but also for the cottage industry of companies that have built products to manage business communications.

Tim O’Reilly, of O’Reilly Publishing fame, is thoroughly impressed. He wrote in his O’Reilly Radar a day after the developer release that, “A key point here is that Google’s relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication.”

O’Reilly wrote that someday we might look back at Wave as a milestone. “When I saw Wave for the first time on Monday, I realized that we’re at a kind of DOS/Windows divide in the era of cloud applications. Suddenly, familiar applications look as old-fashioned as DOS applications looked as the GUI era took flight,” O’Reilly wrote.

Jackson too believes that Wave will be a phenomenon, but the true transformation of a new communications dynamic will come from the people putting the technology into practice.

“We need to develop the skills so that when we are in the moment we know how to pull up the information, how to access the information we need, and put away the rest until the time that we need it,” Jackson says.

Patrick Patullo is an experienced online marketing consultant with nearly 10 years of website content development and management experience. You can reach him at ppatullo2000@yahoo.com