Why, in our ultra-connected, digitally-enabled, virtual-reality-loving world, is it that London and New York are still centers of finance, Silicon Valley is still the high-tech hotbed, and San Francisco is ground zero for new media and the Web?
A recent article in the New York Times (Location, Location – It Still Pays to Be Near – NYTimes.com) gives some insight into why this might be so.
Advances in technology “were supposed to make place unimportant, but in fact, the opposite has happened,” said Richard Florida, author of “Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.”
Today, Mr. Florida said, “a relatively small number of locations still produce the lion’s share of innovation.” These places continue to attract the most talented people from around the world, who then “combine and recombine in new and innovative ways that increase the odds that something great will emerge,” he said.
We believe the same dynamics apply when you take it from the metropolitan level down to the project team level. Web design and the kind of custom Web development projects we take on have significant creative aspects to them.
As such, they benefit enormously from the innovative thinking and free-flowing communication that come from tight-knit teams. Amidst the crush of attention on attempting to cut costs by going offshore or the model that some others in our space follow of assembling “expert teams” of independent contractors on an ad hoc basis, this serves as important validation that our model wins the race in the end: teams with consistent, long-term experience working together and working closely with clients.
There was an interesting study done by a Dartmouth and UPenn economist at Google which addresses communication in groups of people. Specifically, they studied information flow among employees at Google. Google ran a prediction market and the researchers then studied the degree of alignment of the opinions of the various people that participated:
According to the report, “Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google,” …the strongest correlation in betting was found among people who sat very close to one another, trumping even friendship or other close social ties [emphasis added].
This is tangible evidence, the authors argue, that information is shared most easily and effectively among office neighbors, even at an Internet company where instant messaging and e-mail are generally preferred to face-to-face discussion.
This is the untold story of the virtual workplace movement. To put it negatively, despite the illusion of “always-on, always-available” created by our omnipresent communication tools, information simply does not flow as freely when instant messaging, e-mail and phone calls are the primary modes of communication within a project team.
And this has serious implications for the best approach to high quality application development and Web design. Web projects generally require a) innovative thinking and b) a great deal of communication—making tight-knit project teams co-located in one office and working closely with client teams the best route to successful projects.
