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msweeks@cisco.com's blog

Working smarter

Martin Stewart-WeeksWith a rich mix of work tools and capabilities, you can be as productive in the office, at home, in hotel rooms and airport lounges all around the world. 

The nature of work is changing and consequently we're witnessing a proliferation of workstyles that reflect new demands for flexibility, balance and autonomy. Organisations in all sectors confront the need to respond urgently to a bunch of demands that include the ability to work in less predictable patterns of time and location and to work in new and more complex patterns of collaboration and co-presence. 

Some days you need to work on your own, some days you need to work with a team of people who are all in the same physical space and the next day you need to work with team members who are all on different continents. On top of that, people are juggling professional ambition with personal commitments to family and community. 

Maintaining personal good health and looking after the health of the planet are dimensions of life that can't be conveniently forgotten or pushed to one side in the face of work demands and routines that are physically, emotionally and environmentally unsustainable.

Social Networking: A new 'point of view' from Cisco

Martin Stewart-WeeksSo, here's a provocative question - if the answer is social networking, what was the question?  

It's easy to be carried away these days by an uncritical tidal wave of emotional engagement with the wonderful world of social networking with its evocative call to connect, communicate and collaborate.

And the evidence is mounting that we're past the stage of passing fad - 70 million blogs and counting, 120,000 new blogs created every day, the social photo site Flickr uploading anything up to 5,000 pictures or more every minute of the day. In 2007, Forrester research suggested that nearly 70% of 12-21 year olds were actively involved in social networks of one sort or another.

A new "point of view" paper from Cisco confronts one of the big questions facing government and public policy arising from this astonishing phenomenon: 

So how does the phenomenon of social network­ing affect government? Why should the ability of a single user to share a video of a skateboarding dog with a global audience of more than 100 mil­lion cause governments fundamentally to rethink not only how they interact with citizens, but what they actually do?