As we discuss technology in the classroom, one of the most interesting and inspiring places I keep running into good ideas is in the office. Not my office, I'm a pastry baker, but in business articles and models. Fast Company Magazine is always full of cutting-edge applications of the latest technology within the business community. And since the business world is faster, more competitive, and better funded than the education world, it makes great sense to me to keep an eye on what they're up to and glean the most useful bits.

This article by Ellen McGirt, in the latest December '08 issue, is on Cisco's new de-centralized organizational structure, rooted in excellent communication via technology. Here is a clip:

"Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet from Chambers's office, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone with customers. Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the company's rank and file to adopt new technology, is undistracted. "We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know," he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. "Everybody is an author now," he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes -- all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program.

The goal is not just tech for tech's sake. For Mitchell and his bosses, vice president of IT, communications, and collaboration technology Sheila Jordan and chief information officer Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco has become a laboratory of connectedness and productivity. They are teaching people to use the stuff that Cisco sells -- the routers, switches, IP telephony, data centers, mobile devices -- by starting with their own people. As chief marketing officer Sue Bostrom puts it, the first wave of the Internet was an exercise in installation: "Really, it was all about just getting people online." In the second wave, the job is to show people how to best use the tools, she says: "Now that I'm on, what can I do?" So that Facebook-style directory at Cisco serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or find a second baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily find the answer to a question, a product demo, or precisely the right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a conference -- in any language, anywhere around the globe."

As the company has experimented with these digital communities, all sorts of great collaborations have come about. Even the CEO blogs in video format, because he's dyslexic. However, as Cisco has innovated their inner-company communications through the latest networking tech, the company has also restructured itself as a much more decentralized, Web 2.0, the author even posits: socialist organization. Could all of this great technology work in a classroom with the same traditional structure? The CEO of Cisco says, "Without changing the structure of your organization, I would argue that [innovation] will not work." How might the structure of a high school classroom have to change in order for collaborative technology to really be integrated into the experience, rather than a superimposed prop?

Here is the link to the Fast Company Cisco article.