The Future of Enterprise Computing and Collaboration by Alan Cohen

In the recent past, you would remember I have been putting together a number of different blog posts on various video interviews that John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, has been doing at several events where he has been sharing some further insights on the future of collaboration, knowledge sharing and, specially, Enterprise 2.0 or Social Computing within the corporate world and beyond. So I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks another interesting video interview I bumped into from another executive at Cisco Systems.

Check out the YouTube video "Alan Cohen, Cisco VP Enterprise Solutions, on Enterprise Strategy" where you will see an interview with Alan Cohen himself, Vice President, Enterprise Marketing, that lasts for a bit over four minutes and which touches base on a number of different topics related to the future of Enterprise Computing and Collaboration, as he has written over at the blog Collaboration – The Workplace: A New World of Communications and Collaboration. Plenty of very interesting and juicy insights on where we are heading with all of this social networking in the business world.

My favourite parts of the video? A few of them eventually, but here are a couple of them worth while mentioning over here as well:

• The changing nature of our workplace, moving away from the traditional concept of the physical office, where we are now more mobile than ever (With a great set of choices in mobile devices to chose from!); where our work spaces are defined by who we are and how we get connected regardless of the place and the time; where we, knowledge workers, get to define and establish our own "offices" no matter our location or environment to carry out our own tasks. Remember that great quote from Thomas A. Stewart? Yes, that one of "A knowledge worker is someone who gets to decide what he does each morning". Well, it would fit in here rather nicely, don’t you think? 

  And talking about reminders, this trend of thought reminded me of a recent great blog post put together by Corbett Barr on that very same topic: 10 Digital Nomads to Learn From (Check out, by the way, the interesting survey Corbett is about to embark on and which I do hope to be able to contribute as well very soon… But that would be the subject for an upcoming blog post).

• Knowledge Management and / or / vs. Social Computing: very thought-provoking remarks as well trying to associate each of these movements with the generations being exposed to them; resulting in baby boomers driving Knowledge Management and Gen Yers driving Social Computing themselves. And right in between is us, Gen Xers, acting as bridges between both groups and becoming the glue that will help connect both strategists and doers within the corporate environment trying to drive innovation, knowledge sharing and collaboration into a new wave of open, public and more transparent interactions!

  I guess that when the always creative James Governor called my good friend Andy Piper a social bridger he was probably thinking about something like this in similar terms and I suppose we are just starting to witness how that role of the social bridger, the Gen Xers, is perhaps going to be a bit more important than what most folks thought about so far.

Like I said, a short, but rather interesting video interview with Alan Cohen sharing some very innovative thoughts of what’s expecting us in the short term in the current knowledge economy we live in.

Exciting times, if you ask me…

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