Who Owns Information Architecture? All Of Us.

 By Leslie Owens

Fellow analyst Gene Leganza wrote an excellent overview of Information Architecture, available for free via this link.

Gene briefly explores the misunderstanding between “Enterprise IA” and “User Experience IA.” This tension was well characterized by Peter Morville almost 10 years ago (See “Big Architect, Little Architect.” Personally I think it’s clear that content is always in motion, and unsupported efforts to dominate and control it are doomed.  People are a critical element of a successful IA project, since those who create and use information are in the best position to judge and improve its quality. Many hands make light work, as the saying goes.

For example, if you want a rich interactive search results page, you need to add some structure to your content. This can happen anytime from before the content is created (using pre-defined templates) to when it is presented to a user on the search results page. Content is different than data, a theme Rob Karel and I explored in our research on Data and Content Classification. For this reason, IA is both a “Back end” and a “Front end” initiative.

When clients can’t find information no matter how expensive their search engine, they should investigate how their approach to information governance and metadata management might contribute to the problem. Our research indicates that improved collaboration and search are the primary drivers for a metadata management initiative.

I encourage you to read the January 22 report called "Enterprise Architecture Must Lead Enterprise Metadata Management Initiatives." At last, Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) professionals have a partner in defining a metadata strategy: the Enterprise Architect. I think of the EA as the big brother showing up at a schoolyard fight just in time. IKM pros need them for their vision, their clout and their sign-off powers. But EAs need IKM pros too. Information and Knowledge Management professionals work in the intersection between Business and IT. We facilitate dialogue between business SMEs and IT SMEs. If Enterprise Architects are the “city planners,” the IKM pros are the “community organizers.”

When appropriate, IKM pros need to adopt the EA language of metadata, structure, alignment, integration, and framework, instead of taxonomy, content types, vocabularies and navigation. But we should never lose our user-centered orientation as we collaborate across the enterprise.

My colleague Stephen Powers and I think the Information and Knowledge Management professional plays a key role in IA projects. To that end, we are researching the responsibilities of the Content Architect in the enterprise. If you spend your day defining, enriching and governing content, please add a comment here and we will follow up to interview you and your organizational model. All feedback is welcome as we explore how IA contributes to Smart Computing and Knowledge Management.

Apple's iPad Will Come Into The Enterprise Through The Consumer Door. Again.

  by Ted Schadler

Apple just announced its media tablet (we coined these things mobile media tablets in 2005 in private client conversations and in print in 2007) amidst much excitement and surprisingly little secrecy. There wasn't much if anything in the announcement that the bloggers hadn't anticipated.

This product will appear in 60 days with WiFi and in 90 days unlocked with AT&T data plan for $629 and $29/month. It will catch on quickly as an employee-provisioned third device, particularly for Mobile Professionals, 28% of the workforce. IT will support it in many organizations. After all, it's just a big iPhone to them and already 20% of firms support them.

Most of the media coverage will discuss the impact on consumer markets. I'm going to talk about the impact on businesses and on information & knowledge management professionals, the IT executive responsible for making the workforce successful with technology.

Make no mistake, this is an attractive business tool. Laptops will be left at home.

One thing's for sure, Apple knows how to time the market. And the market it's timed this time around is an important one: information workers self-provisioning what they need rather than what their employers provide. We have called this trend Technology Populism(AKA consumerization of IT), and it's important enough that we're writing a book called Groundswell Heroes about how to harness it.

Apple also timed the rest of it right. The technology, the media industry, the digital experience, the developer ecosystem, the retail presence, the applications, the operating system, the increasingly HTML5-enabled Web, the price, and the wireless industry is ready for this product.

Oh, I'm sure it will have problems. Despite the claims, battery life's sure to be inadequate for someone on the go all day, for example. But the iPad extends all the things that Apple's already got up and running. And Apple has addressed the usual problems already: cost, availability, accessories, wireless access.

And it offers some superior characteristics for the things that Mobile Professionals care about. Mobile Professionals are one of the four Workforce Personas we've defined. This segment is 28% of the US information workforce defined by a high need for mobility and a lot of applications. Mobile Professionals care about:

• Messaging and collaboration on the go. (Need email, calendar, contacts, Web conferencing.)
• Full Web experience. (Big screen, big Web pages. Duh.)
• Business media. (The New York Times app is just the beginning).)
• Full-size document tools. (Execs review, tweak, and present a lot on the go.)
• Secure wireless connectivity. (Any time, any place. This one needs work.)
• And let's not forget, looking cool. (Haven't seen it yet, but it's sure looking good.)

This thing will take off among high net worth mobile pros. And IT should be okay with that, at least in non-regulated industries where the lack of application management and device control tools are not big issues. After all, iPad is really just a big iPhone.

And in April 2009, 17% of enterprises and 25% of SMBs supported iPhone and in September 2009,16% of US information workers used iPhones for work, even at the world's largest organizations.

Now, some "What it Means" (WIM) points:

 

WIM #1: The importance of great document tools just increased. Apple's support of iWorks on the iPad gives execs what they need to present on the road and leave the laptop at home. Microsoft should build best-in-class iPad software in the Office formats. (Or watch execs move key material to the iWorks formats.) Adobe should take responsibility for a great PDF reader. And these readers must also be great presentation tools.

 

WIM #2: The importance of application push just got greater. Apple should make this a priority in its v4 release of the software. (We expect to see the v4 release in July 2010.)

 

WIM #3: Google has even more need now to retain control over the Android experience so developers can target that platform with the same relative ease as they can target the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad market.

 

WIM #4: The market for device and application management just got more important. Apple, make the management APIs a key initiative to allow vendors like Good, Box Tone, and Sybase to solve that problem. (Device management vendors, feel free to comment below if you want to be included in the conversation.)

 

Comments?

Web Content Management and Portal: Together at Last?

 by Stephen Powers

Just got back from the Lotusphere conference in Orlando (which sure beats Boston these days in the weather department – thanks, IBM!). At one of the sessions, IBM execs gave their take on the Web content management (WCM) and portal markets. Or should that be market? IBM is betting that the WCM and portal markets will converge and cease to be separate markets, with vendors offering combined WCM/portals suites that have one administrative tool set, one presentation management structure, one repository, and so on. From a road map standpoint, IBM is also making it clear that they don’t have a “portal plan” or a “WCM plan”, but rather an “experience” plan that includes both portal and WCM.

Will it really happen? Certainly, many intranets and extranets rely on content/experience delivery via portals. Also, many companies utilize public-facing Web sites for customer self service – a good fit for portal delivery. Already, SharePoint has made some noise with WCM and portal functionality within a single product. And given many firms’ clunky customized WCM/portal integrations, IBM can look attractive with its combination of Websphere portal and Lotus WCM.

So what are the obstacles to total WCM / portal convergence?

• A good chunk of customer experience sites that still don’t necessarily need the user-customization and application consumption capabilities of a portal.
• None of the vendors named as leaders in our WCM Wave evaluationfrom 2009 also offer portals. So currently, WCM buyers are faced with either giving up some functionality for a (semi-) integrated portal from the same vendor, or have to do the integration themselves. IBM, to its credit, recognizes that it will have to invest in its WCM product to better compete with top tier products in the market.
• Some portal-less WCM vendors without an associated portal will claim that they can accomplish some portal-like functionality through widgets (FatWire is making a big push in the widget area).

From our inquiries, there is some demand for a WCM product suite that includes a truly integrated – but optional – portal delivery. Vendors offering both don’t necessarily have to license them together (many already have a la carte options in their WCM suites), but they could be part of the same product suite with truly integrated environments and user experiences. In addition to IBM, Oracle and Open Text could possibly compete in this area as well, as both have portals.

What do you think?

What Does $100 Million Buy You? A Semantic Search Engine That Works.

 by Leslie Owens

The technical folks behind Monster.com invited me to visit last week. I somehow couldn’t convince them to show me any Superbowl ads but they did demo their cool new search engine. It’s based on technology they acquired when they bought Trovix in 2008. What can it do?

• Understand the meaning of words: The search engine knows the difference between “development” in the fundraising context and “development” in the software context.
• Appreciate the relationships between words: A custom ontology fortifies the search engine. The ontology rolls up skills like auditing into the larger category of finance. It differentiates between a top ranked school and a lower ranked school. It understands that years spent working as a prosecutor should count towards a candidate’s overall legal experience.
• Cut text-heavy resumes into nimble content components: Recruiters can use the power resume search to compare candidates side-by-side, because the search mixes and normalizes the information into simple, clean categories like “Experience,” “Education,” and “Skills”.

Information access vendors like Exalead are hot on the concept of “search-based applications” (SBAs). SBAs are purpose-built information access applications that integrate diverse information from multiple sources. Given that Monster.com is one of the most visited sites on the Web, and a top-tier vertical search engine, what does Monster’s experience tell us about SBAs?

• Search can be a competitive advantage… but it takes management commitment and serious resources. Monster.com invested in search because search success is crucial to its bottom line. But building a search app is not for the faint of heart. It took over 120 FTEs, 18 months and $30m to integrate, scale and customize the Trovix technology.
• It’s important to focus on the user and his/her tasks. Monster execs claim they didn’t build a search engine, they built a match engine. Their goal is to match candidates to jobs. Consider the difference between a match engine, a “discovery” engine (as seen on PubMed), and a “recommendation” engine (such as Yelp). These engines have different relevance models to support distinct information needs. A specialized, focused business model is a pre-requisite for a successful SBA.
• It takes time and traffic to optimize relevance. With millions of queries to interpret and over a dozen analytics staffers, Monster has a lot of data crunching ahead. Human beings must edit and govern the ontologies, and amend the relevance algorithms to match user expectations. Just another example of the operational scale required to pull off vertical search success.

If you have a story to tell about deploying search technology, we would like to hear about it.

Lotus Knows, But Do You Know Lotus?

by Sheri McLeish

First, thank you IBM/Lotus for getting me out of Boston before the snow. I know that has something to do with my good mood. But that aside, what Lotus unveiled at its 17^th annual Lotusphere in Orlando this week warms my heart in another way. For all the advancements in its product portfolio and technologies, the real accomplishment is Lotus' keen focus on people, context, and simplicity.

IBM wants us to have a Smarter Planet, and Lotus "Knows" how to get there. Its vision for collaboration is deeply connected to personal productivity. With LotusLive, launched just a year ago, the effort is to allow people to be able to stay in their in-box and bring work tasks, information, and people together, in context. It has 18 million users today compared to just about 1 million each for Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and Google Premier Apps. It's landing more huge enterprise accounts, including the just announced more than 150,000 seats with Panasonic. Yet it still seems that many people don't know Lotus, because most of my inquiries continue to ask about Microsoft or Google. Let me share.

So much of the iWorker's day is spent searching for information, toggling between applications, and pulling content together from various sources to support a business activity or process. Unlike Google Wave, which does try to innovate to accomplish similar collaborative experiences, LotusLive doesn't require radically altering behavior to get there (see Ted Schadler's related Lotus blog). Email is an hourly addictionfor iWorkers, so LotusLive starts there and integrates Web conferencing, social networking, and collaboration within the environment.

Symphony, Lotus' free Open Office productivity suite, will soon also be integrated to provide a web-based document document editor for creating and sharing (which surprisingly drew spontaneous cheers from the crowd).

Critical mass matters for the success of social networking and collaboration. So does trust and track record. IBM/Lotus meets the security litmus test because of its proven ability to support enterprise needs across its product portfolio. Google has yet to earn that trust. Microsoft engenders the same level of trust and is hot on the heels of Lotus with its 2010suite of products, slated to be launched midyear. But in the cloud, Lotus is way ahead and offering the kind of ease of access to people and content in context that Microsoft has yet to master. Consider:

• iWorkers suffer from ADD. With plenty to distract iWorkers from their task at hand, people increasingly need help to compartmentalize their work to stay the course. Need to locate the latest sales numbers to put in your presentation to the board? This can trigger a investigation to find who has the latest information, how to best reach them, or perhaps to try and discover if the information is already documented elsewhere. LotusLive addresses these challenges by enabling easier connections to people and content through searching and social networking that don't require switching applications. You can contact someone based on information published, through integration of a “business card” fed from Connections/SameTime, and escalate from a threaded discussion to voice, video, a meeting, and presence.
• iWorkers need context. We know that information taken out of context is misleading. Value comes from understanding the genesis of information as well as its application in a given scenario. Because of the ability to filter by a lot of work dimensions, such as people, projects, time/date, or specific keyword searches, it's much easier to surface content and people in relation to what your information needs are. With the ability to find sales numbers and also view related discussion threads or additional presentation materials or documents, greater understanding of the data is possible because more context is provided.
• iWorkers want simple. Ok, I admit it, I am the epitome of the KISS principle. I really don't adjust well to new technology. I'm lucky to have a husband that manages all of the electronics at home. But I do know good design. It's simple. It's clean. I don't have to think about it. It's intuitive. What LotusLive accomplishes is a strikingly simple UI that doesn't force me to change my behavior. iWorkers will relish being able to do what they've always done and delight in the ease of discovering more content, more people, and ultimately, be more productive.

Given the concerted effort to solve iWorker pain points through actual use cases, within their core customer industries like banking and healthcare, Lotus is able to deliver what Google Wave fails to address: providing a solution that improves personal productivity without forcing a change in work behavior. The “build it and they will come” approach generally fails. Just look at any efforts around document collaboration and team sites usage. Incrementally improving upon the investments that you already have without forcing a cultural change, however, will be a powerful differentiator. Who knew? Lotus.

IBM's Project Vulcan: A Blueprint For Business Inbox Next

by Ted Schadler

I can't deny it. Gmail intrigues me. No, not the idea of Web-based email client. That's old hat. Rather, it's that Gmail gives me a box of tools that taken together are my personal command and control center. Everything I need to be connected, get to appointments, find a friend, stay in touch, locate stuff I need, and remain on task is in one spot.

It's convenient. It's my inbox next. It's my touchstone for personal communications.

But at work, I'm using an email client, an IM client, a calendar client, a task list client, a microblogging client, a browser client, and a bunch of other applications. Just getting from one to another gives me a headache.

So where's my business Gmail?

From where I'm sitting, that's the mission of Project Vulcan. Read Ed Brill's post for the official IBM description of the vision of a hyperlinked, rapidly-evolving, highly tailorable, multi-modal inbox. I've spoken with Alistair Rennie, Lotus's new GM, and Kevin Kavanaugh, VP and head of Notes & Domino, about this project.

My take is that Project Vulcan is nothing less than IBM's blueprint for the future of business messaging and collaboration. In particular, it will:

• Build on Lotus's market and technology foundations.
• Unify many kinds of communication media and apps into a single frame
• Provide an anchor point for employees' information work day.
• Use Web deployment to rapidly experiment and learn what works. (Yes, it's a code fork.)
• Show up on LotusLive labs in pieces this year.
• Serve as a laboratory for the next version of Lotus Notes.
• Formarlize a new model for how innovation is deployed and tested.
• Make a big bet on HTML5 to solve the mobile device deployment problem.
• (For the record, I believe that HTML5 is the foundation for basic mobile applications, and I'm happy to see IBM join Google, Apple, and Microsoft in improving this important Web standard.)

As a blueprint, Project Vulcan creates the vision and puts up the guardrails for other parts of IBM to exploit and for information workers (empowered by IT professionals) to experiment with. It's a blueprint for inbox next. And:

• Unlike Google Wave, which currently requires a wholesale transfer of a person's attention from the inbox to the Wave, Vulcan builds on the experiences and applications you currently use.
• Unlike Outlook, which is stuck in a three-year release cycle, Vulcan uses the Web to extend and enhance the messaging and collaboration toolkit on a rapid release cycle.
• Unlike Cisco's next-generation inbox, which has yet to be launched, Vulcan will have an 18 million user head start.

I'm intrigued. Are you?

Why VMWare Bought Zimbra: It's The Seats, Stupid

 by Ted Schadler

Zimbra has been the sleeper cloud-based email provider for the enterprise. I've known about the Bechtel deal -- roughly 50,000 seats globally -- for some time, but couldn't talk about it. Though it's been a while since I've spoken to Ramesh May, he did share some important facts with me:

1. Zimbra's code base is open source, with a 20,000 active members in the community. The Zimbra code base runs on Linux. It can be downloaded to run on-premises and it also is the foundation of Zimbra's cloud email service.

2. Yahoo! Zimbra was selling an email seat for $28/mailbox/year for 50+ seats. We'll be interested to see how the pricing changes.

3. The company was working with the community on adding instant messaging, expanding widgets, and building an offline email client. We also saw some interesting mashup and document viewing features.

4. Back in April, the company had 130 employees, 600+ .edu customers, 44M mailboxes, and 60,000 customers.

So why hasn't Zimbra been bigger on the national stage selling its hosted (80% of seats) and on-premises (20% of seats) email and calendaring solution? Two reasons.

First, Yahoo! did not build a direct sales force that way Google and every other enterprise email provider did.

Second, because a lot of these seats are sold through service providers. Comcast and NTT Communications have been selling Zimbra seats. You may be running Zimbra and not even know it.

So now it becomes clearer why VMWare bought this massively successful email provider. 

1. The cloud email market gains a high-quality competitor. A high-quality email solution hits its stride and provides yet another alternative to LotusLive.com, Exchange Online, Google Apps, and Cisco WebEx Mail. IBM has been making hay with service providers white labeling LotusLive.com. Google's reseller channel is almost 1 year old (see last year's post). Cisco WebEx Mail is about to kick in. And Microsoft has dropped the cost of an online email seat in half in the past year. Let the competition begin!

2. VMWare expands its stack to include SaaS, a move to help service providers and the channel sell seats and win accounts. VMWare now as an application to go help service provides and channel partners win business. With the future of cloud computing wrapped up in the business models of service providers, VMWare has raised the bar for every other cloud technology supplier. Let the cloud channel wars begin!

3. IT shops get another reason to develop their internal clouds. Remember, Zimbra can also run on-premises. With VMWare's virtual machine running Zimbra, IT pros can build out their virtual data centers with a real application: email. And they have only one throat to choke if something bombs: VMWare's. How much better is that for mastering an internal cloud than having to piece together the entire stack carte blanche? Let the internal cloud build out begin!

Love to hear from you on this.

Cloud-Hosted Collaboration: Multi-Tenant Or Dedicated?

  by Ted Schadler

We just had another of our regular cloud research meetings at Forrester. In these meetings, we cut across our research organization to examine cloud computing from every angle.

Compared with even just a year ago, it's amazing how important and pervasive cloud computing analysis (as opposed to cloud computing guesswork) has become in our research calendar.

You can see the existing cloud/*aaS research here and our planned research here. As the meeting host, I mostly listen, probe, and take notes, but ocassionally I get to jump in with a thought.

To wit: We are often asked about whether cloud-based collaboration (email, team sites, instant messaging, Web conferencing, social computing, etc.) works best on multi-tenant, dedicated solutions, or both. The answer is both, but trending towards multi-tenant. Our clients are interested in both multi-tenant and single-tenant or dedicated cloud solutions -- as long as the price is right.

The future of cloud-based collaboration is clearly multi-tenant for two economic reasons:

1. Multi-tenant enables the fundamental economic benefits of a shared resource. We can see this in the price war going on in email right now -- a 50% price cut in the last 12 months with multi-tenant cloud email. The floor on email cost keeps dropping, fueled by the better economics of multi-tenant solutions and high capacity utilization.

2. Multi-tenant is a much faster way to deploy improvements. With multi-tenant, Gmail can add features overnight; Exchange only once every three years. Multi-tenant Cisco WebEx gets a quarterly update; IBM Lotus Sametime can't (though LotusLive.com can). Because there is a single instance of the code in a multi-tenant cloud solution, the innovation is continuous, incremental, and globally available.

Multi-tenant is also the path that every major cloud collaboration vendor is on. Microsoft, for example, is running Exchange Online for $5/mailbox/month in a multi-tenant solution that now scales past 25,000 seats. Salesforce.com and Google have always been multi-tenant. And Cisco WebEx Mail and IBM LotusLive.com are also multi-tenant from their core.

So when does a dedicated (single-tenant; servers dedicated to you) solution make sense?

1. If you aren't yet comfortable with the security assurances of a multi-tenant solution. This is what keeps most companies away from the cloud at all. It's the number one concern in our surveys of IT decision-makers around the world.

It's also what led Google to build a dedicated data center for government workloads. At least there, the government data won't mix with the data of the hoi pollois. But this is mostly about getting the security assurances nailed down. I view it as a short-term limitation.

2. If your content & collaboration application must be highly customized and integrated tightly with other applications. This doesn't apply to most collaboration solutions today. But for SharePoint or Notes applications it does. And while it has kept SharePoint off of Microsoft's solution so far, even SharePoint will go multi-tenant in 2010 with a sandbox to keep your custom application walled off from other apps. We also expect some Lotus Notes and Connections features to show up on the multi-tenant LotusLive.com in 2010.

3. If you workload won't run in a virtual machine. Okay, so this is a bit down in the technical weeds. But applications do run on silicon. And limitations around memory, buffer space, processing speed, and the like define what kinds of things you can actually run in a virtual machine, hence in a multi-tenant cloud. For more on this, see Frank Gillett's report on scale-out workloads.

Disagree? Agree? Have other thoughts? Please share.

Announcing Forrester's Next Book, "Groundswell Heroes"

  by Ted Schadler

Josh Bernoff and I have begun work on Forrester's next book to be published by Harvard Business Press in the Fall:

Groundswell Heroes: Harnessing The Power Shift In Your Workplace And Marketplace

Customers blog and Twitter and YouTube and Facebook to be smarter than ever about the things they buy. That information makes them powerful. And they’re just getting more powerful because with smartphones they now have the Internet and their friend networks with them everywhere. They can immediately share what they’re experiencing and learning from wherever they are. Social technology, accelerated by smartphones and video, is shifting information power to customers.

Customer-focused firms (which of course includes governments and healthcare providers) have to respond by empowering their employees to solve customer problems, often using the same technologies as customers are: social technology, video, smartphones, and cloud Internet services.

We've talked to dozens of HEROes -- highly empowered and resourceful operatives -- and charted their stories about the impact of these technologies on customer service, marketing, sales, and product development. We've seen the creative and courageous embrace of employee-provisioned tools, including Web 2.0 software in the enterprise, mobile applications, video enablement, and cloud Internet services.

The implications for CIOs and the IT organization are far-reaching. How can IT say yes and support these business-led initiatives using employee-provisioned technology? When must IT say no because of legitimate security or regulatory concerns? What determines which is which?

 

Harnessing the groundswell power shift starts with leadership and culture, but it also requires a different execution model based on shared goals, clear policy, rapid scaling, and managed risk.

 

If you have a story to tell about how your organization supports or blocks the creative and innovative use of social technology, we would like to hear about it.

Consumer Broadband Is The Workforce Technology Of The Decade

  by Ted Schadler

That call may surprise you. You might have put storage or Gigabit ethernet or the Internet itself at the top of the list. But when I think about what's different in the life of your average information worker as the decade comes to a close, it's the instant-on access to just about everything that the adoption of consumer broadband has fueled.

From our Consumer Technographics(r) survey of over 50,000 consumers every year for the last 12 years, between 2000 and 2009, consumer broadband soared from 2% to 63% of US households. For context, home PC adoption grew from 51% to 77%.

But why is consumer broadband the workforce technology of the decade? Three main reasons:

1. Telecommuting has become a way of life for xx million information workers. We have been watching -- and forecasting -- the growth of telecommuting. The impact is immediate and obvious: more hours to work; more location flexibility in hiring and retaining; and more work-life control. Telecommuting in the US is dependent on cheap broadband to the home. Telecommuters will rise to include 43% of the US information workforce by 2016.

2. Broadband-enabled markets have triggered massive IT innovation. Google; Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn; WebEx, ZoHo, and Smartsheets.com; Amazon EC2, Google App Engine; and Windows Azure; open source and Web 2.0. All of these and thousands of other technologies and companies are built on the back of broadband to the home. The network innovation over the last 10 years makes the Internet 1.0 era look like a pre-season warmup game.

3. Consumers master new technologies at home -- and expect the same at work. This is the big one. Technology Populism -- the rise of technology-enabled employees -- is in full swing as empowered employees bring their own smartphones to work; use LinkedIn to prospect their customers; tap PBWorks or Smartsheets.com to collaborate across corporate boundaries; and borrow the YouTube strategy to put training videos into employees' hands. Today, according to our most recent survey of empowered employees, almost half of US employees feel that the technology they have at home is better than what they have at work.

So what does the rise of consumer broadband mean for collaboration professionals?

• What it means (WIM) #1: Expect more and better broadband to the home. This is a duh, but in any workforce techonlogy planning scenario, be sure to factor in more (75% of US homes by 2013) and faster broadband. Fiber to the home, curb, or cable POP will fuel the speed. Be prepared to harness it.
• WIM #2: Plan on a full suite of collaboration tools to support telework. Teleweorkers are twice as likely as desktop-bound employees to use every collaboration tool. Duh. Be sure to deal with the network access issues that home workers will face. Best practice is to treat every employee as if they are coming in over the Internet.
• WIM #3: Make telework the centerpiece of your desktop video conferencing strategy. Desktop video conferencing is a killer application for the next decade. The seeds are planted with Skype, Google Talk, Webcams, and the collaboration toolkit strategies of Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Google. Be sure to put remote access and telework as the center of any solution. In other words, expect faulty networks, open networks, and random quality end points.

My last comment is to ask you to comment on two questios:

1. Why is consumer broadband cheaper in towns with only one broadband provider?
2. Why is business broadband is so much more expensive than consumer broadband?

Comment away. Oh, and happy happy new year!