"So you start out at the top with office productivity suites able to create documents for example, and they now can create documents that are much more collaborative in a workgroup sense, and then they come with tools to in a day-to-day content management sense, act as a full document records management system and they're increasingly integrating back into a formal document and records management system.

"When you start unbundling all of that there is an opportunity here to think more deeply about what this all means and how the knowledge worker platform for public sector workers can be done differently in the future. And the new desktop software solutions are the catalyst for that," Hodgkinson says. "Because when you look around, and read and reports by Auditor Generals and others about public sector document records management disciplines, it's not a good look."

Hodgkinson says it is small wonder this year most jurisdictions are agonizing over their 'desktop strategy' The 'desktop strategy' starts out being an apparently simple renegotiation of an enterprise agreement with Microsoft and/or IBM, and ends up being a fundamental soul search about the nature of knowledge work in the public sector, the processes and practices, the people and their culture and behaviours.

"This is a critical business issue for all agencies, and is one that senior executives should be taking an active interest in," he says. "It is not a technical software procurement issue. Consider this. One of the key determinants of your ability to hire the best and brightest young employees in the near future may well be the quality of your knowledge worker tools and the culture of collaboration that they engender."