Building a Social Business Environment

Mark Fidelman recently posted an interesting article on Forbes.com titled “Microsoft’s View of the Future Workplace is Brilliant, Here’s Why” in the article Mark shares how he’s visited Microsoft Technology Centers  in the past couple of months and its left him
“feeling both energized and alarmed. Energized because I am seeing a dramatic rise in the attention given to social business and the foundation for it is being laid by social CIOs. These CIOs and their executive counterparts understand how the social and mobile transformations are changing the game. Never has business been handed so much opportunity and so much risk.

The blueprint for this opportunity has been drawn by several social business thought leaders. But rarely has it been represented in physical form.
To see that, the opportunity is best demonstrated at one of Microsoft’s MTC around the world. If you haven’t seen a demonstration there, it can best be described as the Enterprise equivalent of a Microsoft or Apple Store. As Microsoft MTC Director Adam Hecktman put it to me, “We’re here to help envision, architect and demonstrate the needs of our customers.” Thanks to the fully equipped MTCs, anyone can see a live simulation of their current and future technologies under several different circumstances.

The MTC demonstrations are leading to a rush of new technology implementations. “Every square foot is built around some element of the customer’s decision making process,” Hecktman explains, “we’re reducing the risk for businesses to quickly prepare and implement Microsoft technologies.”

It struck me while visiting with the Fortune 500 intertwined with my stopovers at the MTCs that the future workplace will need to evolve. Seeing the juxtaposition of the digitally enabled MTCs next to the analog (think 1960s Mad Men era) workplaces of today, I was alarmed by the amount work that needs to be done to accommodate a more social and mobile workforce.
In this new workplace model, born of the social and mobile age, what are the best ways to meet the workplace challenges of the future? What do we see as the digital office of the future? How do we accommodate the unprecedented numbers of mobile devices entering the workforce?”
Mark’s post immediately made me think of Perficient‘s Chicago office.  This is a physical office space built for collaboration – from the open spaces,  meeting rooms and conference room that has a rolling door that opens it into a large collaboration area (with a kitchen) everything about the office says ‘lets collaborate’.

Using SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites the team collaborates both online with remote team members and in person leveraging Lync (on mobile devices too) to seamlessly move from online to voice collaboration.
I think Mark raises a really interesting point, when you start to think about physical spaces being built for how, when and where we work today and where we’re headed, we may increasingly find physical office spaces built to enable Social Business requirements.
You can follow Mark’s blog on Forbes.com here.