Global business on the superhighway: Implications for the office of the future

Recent and rapid developments in electronic commerce enabled global trading have raised many questions about future offices and future office work. Will the future office be a place or a space? Are the technologies sufficiently mature to support effective inter-organisational systems and if not, what development work needs to be done, and if so, how best do we diffuse them? How do we manage inter-group synchronous and asynchronous communication? How do we manage multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary teams? How do we change business processes to adapt to, or capitalise on, a global trading environment? These and similar questions were raised at a recent international working conference which focussed on information systems and technology in the ''international Office of the Future'' (IOF). Contributors were asked to submit ''Design Options and Solution Strategies'' to deal with aspects of future offices and future office work. A detailed content analysis of those submissions enabled the many socio and technical aspects to be addressed by designers of future office work and the systems and infrastructure to support it to be identified. The aspects that emerged from the analysis are summarised here. The most striking outcomes of this analysis are the degree of attention seemingly being given to the socio aspects of the IOF over that given to the technical, and the interdependent nature of the issues.