Tech Populism is a major force that's changing the way we work. Behind the walls of SMBs and enterprises are empowered employees who increasingly make individual choices about the technologies that they use to get their jobs done. With the growing ubiquity of technology in the workplace (smartphones, other mobile devices, and PCs) individual workers are often making decisions for themselves. The opportunity for tech strategists lies in addressing portfolio strategy as well as go-to-market strategy to address this rising tide of new buyers.

To explore Tech Populism, Forrester is currently designing its upcoming Workforce Forrsights Survey to be fielded to 5,000 employees in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and Germany who work at businesses across a range of industries and company sizes. Our target respondents use a smartphone or computer at least 1 hour per day at work.

The Workforce Forrsights Survey will answer questions about how employees:

Last week both Cisco and Microsoft made wide-ranging announcements around their unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) portfolios. On Friday, Cisco added to its barrage of collaboration announcements (Cisco Proclaims Their Collaboration Intentions) with the introduction of:

• Cisco Quad (a user application to enable unified access to content in enterprise repositories).
• Cisco WebEx Connect 6.5 (adding more collaboration-as-a-service by introducing browser based access).
• Cisco Prosumer Video (Launching a new Flip video camera for the enterprise and the software to enable IT and information workers to manage video).

This announcement was on the heels of Microsoft’s TechEd, where cloud-based development platforms and services were a hot topic of conversation; Microsoft used the stage to continue to illuminate its intentions to make Microsoft Office Wave 14 products available in the second half of 2010. In talking with Moz Hussain, Director OCS Technical Product Management at Microsoft, just before TechEd, he stressed two things about Microsoft’s UC solution:

• The full capabilities of UC&C are available based on deployment of Microsoft OCS, SharePoint, and Live Meeting.
• Microsoft solutions are fully interoperable with other leading UC&C vendors.

Moz hinted broadly at the purpose and usefulness of the recently founded Unified Communications Interoperability Forum to deliver independent interoperability testing and/or certification, but the full scope and role of that organization is still being finalized.

In the immortal words of Keanu Reeves in Speed, "Pop quiz, hotshot!" Answer the following questions:

• On average, how long does it take for customers to implement your technology? (Include people using the technology in the definition of "implement.")
• In all phases of a project (building the justification, drafting the requirements, selecting vendors, implementing the technology, reviewing its success), is there anyone in the customer organization who champions the project from start to finish? If not, when and how does the hand-off happen?
• Is there anyone responsible for successful execution in each phase? Again, if not, what does the hand-off look like?
• How does the project team convince people in their organization to use your technology?

Don't worry if you couldn't answer some, or even all, of the previous questions. You're not alone. Most technology vendors don't have anything but the most superficial understanding of how customers adopt their technology. Naming a few stakeholders isn't the same as understanding the adoption process, unless you think there's no reason to read Gone With The Wind if you can identify Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler as the main characters.

Tech vendors have all kinds of reasons to understand adoption better than they do. When projects fail, and adoption doesn't happen, those customers are far less likely to stay customers. That's also a potential success story that you must cross off the list. And that's just the beginning of the problems.

Outside the technology industry, engineers sometimes build multiple prototypes before selecting one particular design. Rather than finding the defects of one proposed design, discarding it, and moving on to the next idea, engineering teams that apply this approach, set-based concurrent design, save themselves a lot of time and headaches by running through as many options as possible simultaneously. As you might have guessed, this technique isn't cheap. You need to staff multiple design teams, and prototyping in many industries, such as automotive manufacturing, is always expensive. Nonetheless, by delaying the design decision for as long as possible, until the team has found the best among multiple ideas, development can take less time, with a greater probability of building a good product, than with sequential design.

So why don't we build software this way? For Microsoft, SAP, and other technology companies, prototyping is orders of magnitude cheaper than it is for Toyota and General Motors. Executives at tech companies would love to reduce the unpredictability of development schedules, often thrown off-track by unexpected design issues. So why hasn't set-based design caught fire in the technology industry?

That question has been plaguing me since hearing an excellent presentation by Jean Tabaka and Bill Wake on this topic at Agile 2009. I'm not sure of the answer ("More research required," says the analyst), but I'd be amazed if it didn't include two factors: (1) the nature of the product being developed; and (2) the unspoken assumptions of the tech industry.