A recent report from a non-profit economic consulting group is raising a few eyebrows in Silicon Valley and other high-tech centers. Buried Treasure: New York City’s Hidden Technology Sector makes a bold claim. Prepared by the Industrial and Technology Assistance Corp., the report concludes that New York City supports an estimated 226,000 high-technology workers. If you factor in the NYC metropolitan area, then high-technology employment (over 600,000) exceeds that of tech hubs San Jose, Boston, and Los Angeles.

New York, in the popular imagination a city more associated with Seinfeld and subways than silicon, is a high-tech center? You can quibble over how this study counts technology workers, but at a gut level it makes sense. Internet and software technology are everywhere, and in a service-oriented economy like New York’s, based on finance, law, media, and life sciences, knowledge workers are interacting with hardware and software at a very intimate level— analyzing financial spreadsheets, searching and mining legal databases, crafting catchy digital ads, or simply using their favorite desktop or mobile applications.

In trying to come up with a broader description for this new type of worker, I found my way to the Chandler website. Chandler is an open-source project driven by Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and main author of the PC world’s first killer-app, the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. For Chandler, Kapor’s goal is to create a kind of super information organizer, which can be thought of as a CRM for non-agents. (To get an inside look at the making of Chandler, read journalist Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code. Warning: it ain’t pretty seeing how the sausage is made.)

Regardless of the fate of Chandler, the Kapor gang’s analysis of the information workplace, especially the role of the “program manager” as an information orchestrator, is worth reviewing:

Often called a project manager or product manager or program manager, our Preview Target User however is a special breed of PM. They work closely with every member of their team, acting as a communication hub. They know how to ask the right questions to gather input and feedback. They identify problem areas, figure out when meetings need to happen, who needs to be there, what needs to be discussed, and then they facilitate the discussion …

What’s fascinating about this description of information flow is the close parallel to the agent-customer interaction found in the contact center. In the new information workplace, workers’ skills and expertise can be thought of as part of a larger skills network or community that’s tapped into by other team members, and, I might add with new communications and Web 2.0 technology, by the rest of the enterprise as well.

One technology in particular that is making a difference is called Session Initiation Protocol or SIP. SIP has lowered the cost of the call center model to the point where it can be implemented throughout an organization. I’ll be talking more about this innovative multi-media protocol in future posts.

In the world of call centers and agents, this concept is known as the extended contact center, but it is fundamentally the same idea underpinning the Chandler project and, no doubt, will influence other software to follow.

In the world of call centers and agents, this concept is known as the extended contact center, but it is fundamentally the same idea underpinning the Chandler project and, no doubt, will influence other software to follow.