The Futurist: What's on your wall

I started my professional career as a schoolteacher. Honestly, that means that I have chalk in my blood. When troubleshooting a problem in my first classroom, I had four chalkboards. I would fill those chalkboards with the problem I was experiencing in the different ways I thought about potentially solving the problem. If I screwed up or made a mistake, I get a race that section and start over. When I moved into IT consulting, chalkboards began to pass away. Here's the reality: chalkboards were never big and were not an enterprise world. But dry-erase boards became all the rage.

Then came the concept of the various systems that connected a dry-erase board to an application on your computer. The connected whiteboard allowed you to interact with meetings and a group of people. But the drawing you did on the whiteboard could be shared with everyone. That became the concept of the smart monitor in the conference room. You could go up to the smart monitor and interact with it, and everyone in the meeting could see you via the camera and what you were working on on the electronic whiteboard. Again, I started my career as a schoolteacher, and the best way for me to troubleshoot is to be able to write things down on a chalkboard or whiteboard. Being able to do that digitally makes it even more valuable.

The concept of that connected whiteboard, which became the smart monitor in the conference room, has become one step further. There are several products in this space. Microsoft makes a conference room computer system, and Cisco and several other manufacturers do. The vibe board is the one I use and have had the most success with. It is a connected board that I can connect to a meeting, I can connect to my PC, I can connect to my phone, and I can interact with the whiteboard on my phone.

The reality of a connected whiteboard that is fully digital; in other words, there are no pens. The cool thing is that this is the office or classroom of the future available today. I use mine currently to interact with people in meetings where we are working through a specific problem. I also use mining meetings where we brainstorm, and sometimes, I use mine in meetings where I want to have an opportunity to see the presentation better. The beauty of a connected whiteboard or a digital whiteboard system is that you tend to get a 50 55- or larger-inch screen. A bigger screen makes it much easier to see the meeting itself. But it also allows you to interact with that screen.

As we head down this path of conductivity and digital transformation, all of it leads to a centralized concept of what you are trying to do. I am not projecting a world where everyone carries their digital dry-erase board pens everywhere, taking them out to leave them on the screen when they are done. The Mark of Zorro, as it were. Rather, the concept is going to continue to evolve. As I said, it started as a chalkboard. If you've ever used a chalkboard all day to solve a mathematics problem, you know you generate a lot of dust. If you've ever used a whiteboard, you'll know that the number one problem with whiteboards and conference rooms all around America is due to any of the pen's work. With the digital whiteboard, you never worry about pens running out of ink, you never run out of ink, you worry about chalk filling the air around you with chalk dust, and in the end, you can be creative!

?