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I've been wanting to point to a series of booklets about the future of work . These booklets have been put together by Novay . One of Novay's projects is about Future Workspaces. They have been and are conducting practical and fundamental research in the are of the new way of working. The booklets contain many insights from there work. The booklets are great to give away to management.

ReadWriteWeb regularly keeps us posted on "the internet of things". This is an interesting development and has even been called "web 3.0" (web 2.0 moving to devices, connect people and devices automatically, using semantic technology...). Their post gives an overview of the news in this world. What I was wondering though is: Paper is also a thing. And knowledge workers are still using lots of paper (printed articles (for reading and reviewing), books, etc.). Could "the internet of things" be extended to the office? We could 'internet' paper. With small (printable) RFID tags, paper documents and books (or even parts of them) could be retrieved (and stored) in a transparent way. What do you think? Could this be useful? And, does anyone know if this is already being done? Tags van Technorati: paperless , office , knowledge worker , web 3.0 , web 2.0

A small 'brain fart' (idea). One of the great things about paper is the fact that you can put pieces of paper side-by-side. This is great when you have to review a document or check difference between documents. This 'feature' of paper is not supported well in the digital domain. eReaders and computers have a hard time mimicking this. However, using multi-touch screens , like Microsoft Surface , brings this concept closer to the digital domain. Then again, most people don't like to read from a screen. Reading from an eReaders seems to better (more paper-like). I carpool to work. Yesterday on our way back we were talking about the affordances of paper vs. digital documents. And then we wondered: why can't we combine what eReaders are good at with what multi-touch is good at? We would then have a screen that could be integrated into our desks, giving us lots of freedom to move documents around, annotate and resize them, search on them, pile them, etc. But, b...

BusinessWeek recently published an interesting issues dedicated to "Business@work" . All kinds of work-related topics are discussed. Like: work-life balance , dealing with toxic bosses , how to go from good-to-great in the workplace, tips from experienced office workers , measuring productivity, staying creative in the workplace , working with Generation X and Y employees, etc. I'd advise you to go and read all the articles. But to get you to do just that I'll give you some highlights from the articles: - Jim Collins says : don't only make a todo list, but also a stop-doing-list. And define "white spaces" in your agenda to think. Keep asking questions. - Managers (and employees) should openly write down "how I work" to help others collaborate with you. For instance, your colleagues should know how you react under pressure and why you do or don't give much feedback. - Really nice article on "combating bureaucracy" . I like ste...

This post is not really intended for you, my dear readers. But you can read along if you like. Just wanted to collect lots of links on the Office 2.0 2008 conference after reading the posts and watching the video's. In short the conference was about 'doing everything in the cloud', interesting stuff on e-signatures, progress on virtual conferencing and creating successful communities (inside and outside the company). Here's my link collection: Office 2.0 Conference day one | Collaboration 2.0 | ZDNet.com Office 2.0 Day 1 Recap - ReadWriteWeb The Future of Documents - Document 2.0 panel at Office 2.0 conference The Office (2.0): No paper? No problem. | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com Office 2.0 Day 2 Recap - ReadWriteWeb Video: Office 2.0: Creating successful online communities | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Interesting poll on Word Processing over at ReadWriteWeb. I must admit I still mostly use MS Word at work. But at home I just Google Docs and OpenOffice more and more. I do find, though, that even within companies, document collaboration will move to the web. And we will be working directly on document content using wiki concepts and stuff like Scribd more and more. Do you agree?

A colleague of mine pointed me to a new (Dutch) book "100 Lifehacking tips" . I always love to skim through these kind of books (and websites/blogs) to see if they have new tips I can apply. This book contains the best 100 tips from the Dutch Lifehacking site . After reading the book I decided to: - turn off my 'new mail' notifier - use a different color-code for emails that are cc-ed to me I'm considering the tips: - don't open your inbox until 11:00 - do the task you find most difficult and have to do that day first

Two interesting posts on 'going paperless'. One from BusinessWeek en one from Xerox Future of Documents blog . Enjoy!

Interesting Xerox whitepaper titled "The Less Paper Office: How to reduce Costs, Enhance security and be a Better Global Citizen" . I agree with the statement made in the whitepaper that paper is becoming "a more temporary medium". I see that people still like to read from paper, comment on the paper, but after they process the comments in the digital document, they throw away the paper document. In the whitepaper I missed why “paperless” is so hard (or what the real affordances of paper are). I appreciated the part on what Xerox is doing w.r.t. environmental issues.

Sometimes you walk into a building and you just say: "Wow!". That's the experience I had when I visited the Dialogues House in Amsterdam. It's related to the ABN-Amro bank. As I wrote before I'd be there for a meeting with knowledge managers from large companies in The Netherlands. We had a great time. The meeting's topic was open innovation. The Dialogues House was set up to facilitate open innovation from inside and outside the bank. We also walked through the building. Their website shows nicely how they built it up. I also made some pictures you can find here . Go and have a look!

Stunning article on ReadWriteWeb about reading behaviour of young and old people . The numbers shocked me. I read a lot (books, paper articles, etc and of course webpages), but seem to be one of the people that will go extinct soon... I was wondering what this implies for companies. Are people reading less and less reports, memo's, etc. inside organizations too? Looking around in the company I work for, I'd say 'yes'.

Just wrote about the possible paperless office and home the other day. Here are two examples from practice of people telling us why the paperless office is not around yet. One is from Inside Knowledge on "The Simplest KM Tool", the notebook . And the other is on why some like to read printed documents/book and what the implications for the print industry.

Two nice posts here and here on why these two people think we won't have a paperless office any time soon. Although they do point to ways to make your office more paperless. I agree with both that we won’t have a paperless office any time soon. The book "The Myth of the Paperless Office" clearly describes the affordances of paper and that of digital 'paper'. Furthermore it shows why some affordances of paper will not be possible for digital documents any time soon. Try to make a pile of digital documents, for instance. However there are some interesting trends, like multi-touch interfaces , that give some hope for a paperless or less-paper office. As for now, I’m happy with both.