The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

The current issue of BusinessWeek features a multi-article cover story on the future of work that includes an online-only interview with MIT management professor Thomas Malone who authored The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life in 2004. In that book, Malone anticipated many of the people-powered Web 2.0 trends that are now transforming the way we work and live.

To get Malone’s updated take on where things may be headed next, BusinessWeeks’ Robert D Hof interviewed the professor as part of the reporting for the cover story and published excerpts on the website that are well worth reading. Here is one excerpt from the interview:

What’s coming next?
Collective intelligence. Suppose you could have any number of people and computers connected in any way you imagine to do some task, like designing cars or caring for patients in a hospital or running a bank, how would you do it? If you could do that, I think you’d end up with organizations very different from the kinds you have today. You may have organizations with thousands of people spending a few minutes each to do some tasks. Or you may have organizations where many of the things that today are done by people can be done by computers on the other side of the world with oversight from a few people in various places.

So, based on Malone’s observations, collective intelligence, enabled by the internet and web-based software (webware) will likely give rise to the next phase in online collaboration, which we at Octopz call cocreation. More on that in a future post.

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