July 2008 Archives

Here is a Making Light thread with interesting commentary, built on an essay by Jon Stokes on "IT consumerizaton and the future of work". Lots of good discussion on how technologies sold directly (or, in Googlish cases, made freely available) to consumers nowadays easily outpaces the technology and work-paradigms typically found in offices and enforced by IT departments, often by a factor of years.

For me, it brings to mind the continually increasing feasibility of distributed work environments, where a professional team doesn't work together nine-to-five in a physical office, but instead works wherever they happen to be, applying their own resources as they see fit, and using the internet to collaborate. I find this sort of discussion serendipitous, as I'm just starting to move Appleseed towards this sort of configuration, slowly and carefully bringing colleagues on-board as fellow consultants. It's a trend I've been noticing among several other newer, information-based businesses like mine.

The goal in our case is to allow Appleseed to serve more customers, without diminishing our level of personal attention to each. But I want to do it without sacrificing the independence I've enjoyed - and which has directly translated into higher-quality work for Appleseed's customers - since I launched the business, nor would I ask the same sacrifice from anyone I work with.

It's not something that's going to work for every kind of business. While a distributed office must maintain a minimal set of IT-style standards in order to keep all its team members synchronized, there's still a need for everyone to serve as their own personal system administrators. This is a lot easier to pull off if the company happens to be in the software consulting biz.

The results so far have proved quite promising. I feel quite confident about Appleseed's continued growth as both a great source of software expertise and a great place to work. (Sorry, though; no "careers" link on our website header just yet. :) )