This story was printed from silicon.com.
Unwired: The office of the future
Expect RFID, mesh networks and an explosion of intelligent surfaces...
By Richard Leyland
Published: Wednesday 15 November 2006
Which technologies and working styles will dominate the office of the future? Unwired's Richard Leyland makes his predictions based on today's strongest trends.
This morning I left my automated home, bound for my paperless office. I commuted on my Segway, stopping in at my local coffee shop for a caffeine fix, where I donned my virtual reality headset for a quick chat with my key clients before the day started...
Except of course I didn't.
As Arthur C Clarke, the patron saint of future gazing once said: "Forecasts are difficult - especially about the future."
Predicting what the office of the future will look like is fraught with danger because the major drivers of change usually come out of the blue. Few predicted that the simple notion of making phone calls over the internet would start a personal communications revolution, change how we work and challenge the business model of the multibillion- dollar telecoms industry.
The good news is that there are clues out there. By piecing them together, we can begin to see where we might be heading.
Technological advances such as Wi-Fi and VoIP enable us to work outside the office, in public areas or at home. As wireless coverage envelops whole cities, the importance of 'place' will be eroded still further.
But this trend doesn't point to a future without offices. As we continue to move towards a knowledge-based economy, interaction and collaboration are keys to success. The office will become the centre for this collaboration, a flexible space to connect with colleagues and stakeholders. Mobile working injects flexibility into our working lives but the office will remain the bedrock.
Most businesses are already moving away from rows and rows of PCs and desks - an environment built with the tools rather than the people in mind. In its place we are seeing the growth of task-based environments, where space is shared and knowledge workers converge and interact for the duration of a project.
Some professional services companies are even engineering their environment to produce 'chance' encounters between colleagues. PricewaterhouseCoopers in Birmingham, for instance, uses shared social zones such as coffee shops and a central market-place to ensure these encounters happen, and has seen significant productivity gains as a result. Why? They're attracting the best graduates, keen to work in this vibrant environment and the socializing leads to the sharing of knowledge, business leads and opportunities.
Another fundamental question being asked about the workplace: if the importance of the office is to bring people together, does a worker need to rub shoulders with colleagues from the same company, or will it be more beneficial to share the office with people who share the same skills from different companies?
The future office may look more like the guilds of medieval times, where specialists clustered together to support and learn from each other. The BBC Media Centre in White City, London is an early example - it's an office populated by professional peers (in this case media workers) rather than co-workers.
What technology might we find in the future office?
The biggest change we expect to see is the pervasive use of RFID. This low-cost tracking technology will be used to locate and monitor people, documents and assets, creating a truly connected building.
The benefits of being able to instantly locate a colleague, file or projector are obvious but consider what else can be achieved. On entering an office, your phone could instantly establish which colleagues are present, check their diaries against your own and organize your day's activities, meetings and rooms accordingly.
Consider this stage one of intelligent office organization. Stage two is 'metadata', when intelligent office organization reaches our software.
Metadata is identification information tagged to electronic documents such as appointments, spreadsheets, web browsers and so on. The metadata develops and is built over time, so software can learn how you work and eventually is able to spot patterns and automatically anticipate a worker's needs - for example proposing meetings with relevant colleagues or providing research relevant to a task.
The user stays in control by setting personal priorities but the technology moves from reactive to proactive. Who says this will happen? None other than Microsoft.
Green issues will drive office technology in new directions too. The future office will have mesh networks built into the fabric of the building, quietly going about their business monitoring the office environment. Wireless sensing technologies such as ZigBee will be used to automatically heat or cool a room, to close an open window or to power down lights in an empty room, based on the actual occupancy.
How about the technology tools we will use? The bewildering pace of change amongst device manufacturers makes firm predictions difficult but two trends look solid.
Firstly, device convergence will continue. We will use a single phone in the office and on the move. In the near-term this phone will roam between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, and down the line it will probably operate on a single metropolitan wireless network, perhaps based on the mobile WiMax standard.
The future will also see the key tools for today's knowledge worker - the mobile phone and laptop - converge into a single, portable, high powered device. Ultra-Mobile PCs (UMPC) from Samsung, Nokia and others are the first indications of this change.
Secondly, expect to see an explosion of intelligent surfaces. With all this worker collaboration, chance meetings and shared space, workers will need access to information in all parts of the office. Imagine an architect explaining a vision to a colleague by sketching directly onto a meeting room table, then saving this as a digital image and emailing it to other co-workers or a client.
A complete picture of the future remains elusive but by keeping an ear to the ground, and understanding the nature of 'work' in the future, we can answer some of the unknowns. And that's the fun part - we'll know it when we're living it, and I for one can't wait.