Searching for the Digital Water Cooler

Did employees ever actually gather around the water cooler to gossip? I've spent a lot of years in business, and I don't recall ever gathering around a water cooler. Sure, I've sat in the Starbucks around the corner to discuss the latest rise and fall of the executive class. I've also gone to many happy hours at pubs dissecting the latest comings and goings at the office.

And once we all realized that using the corporate email system to share rumors was the equivalent of trying to gossip in the boss's office, we all switched to Gmail or another "safe" email system. We even used the old reliable phone on occasion.

The question now is, Can new services like Google+ (with its circles, hangouts and huddles) replace the random and sometimes productivityboosting benefits of casual office conversations that generate great ideas?

With the number of mobile workers expected to reach 60 million in the United States (tinyurl.com/6kwevoa) and more than a billion worldwide this year (tinyurLcom/ygmwar9), the issues surrounding how to organize, manage and build a productive company based on mobility is a strategic challenge. I haverit seen a study on this, but I think most companies still rely on conference calls, email and instant messaging to manage the mobile workforce.

In my opinion, the attempts by Facebook to build out corporatefacing capabilities have taken a back seat to consumer-driven capabilities designed to gather more consumer data, which can then be served up to advertisers. The corporate Facebooktype applications, such as Salesforce. com's Chatter and Yammer, have done a good job at containing discussions within the corporate firewalls, but imitating Facebook in a corporate setting doesn't capture mobile workers' needs.

Does that mean I think the mobile workers of the world will unite around circles, hangouts and huddles? No, but Google is pointing the way. The company took what in Internet time is old technology (Facebook and Skype use aging infrastructures and user interfaces) and updated the ability to gather business acquaintances both inside and outside the company in fairly secure and simple means. This makes a lot more sense than companies thinking employees really want to shuffle into video-conferencing facilities so they can see and hear the boss.

The role of the IT professional becomes very important in developing rich mobile workforce applications and then supporting those applications. The IT department has been in the forefront of both supporting systems in a dispersed environment and dealing with the highly paid mobile executive who's calling for the fifteenth time after losing a password, a USB device with a critical presentation, or a laptop with files that contain customer names and credit card information.

IT knows just how bad it can get when mobile workforces make their own decisions on how mobility should happen. So IT now needs to take what it has learned and champion the products and services that are secure, flexible and designed for mobility from the ground up.

- Eric Lundquist