Santa Fe firm wants to bridge digital divide
Ideal State designs “human-centered” approaches to technology
Today’s online workplace offers revolutionary tools for connectivity and efficiency, but often, employees are more isolated than connected when tapping into those systems, according to a new Santa Fe company.
To attack the problem, Ideal State LLC, is designing “humancentered” approaches to technology that can bring employees, management, customers and others together in strategically integrated online communities.
“As our work becomes increasingly more remote with people working across vast geographic spaces, there’s a broad-based need to organize the virtual workplace like we would the physical one,” said Ideal State staff consultant and spokesman Rob Morlino. “We’re creating new, effective ways to make the digital workplace more efficient.”
That means building software systems that allow workers to flock together rapidly online for sharing critical information and ideas, said Sara Teitelman, who launched Ideal State in early 2015 with her husband, Jeremy Nurse.
To do that, the company assesses an organization’s unique challenges and then creates virtual internal and external networks that link people according to their needs, interests and expertise.
“It’s a human-centered approach to design digital tools that enhance the worker experience,” Teitelman said. “We create strategies, or road maps, to improve the organization, select the right technologies to meet their goals and then oversee implementation.”
For Catholic Relief Services, which has about 5,000 employees scattered around the world, that meant building an intranet to create online employee communities that link people in similar fields of work.
For the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, it meant creating an extranet to connect Kellogg’s thousands of grantees in the U.S. and other countries with each other and with the organization’s staff to improve collaboration.
“There are so many people engaged in similar work supported by Kellogg all over the world and they don’t even know each other,” Teitelman said. “We created an online community for them to find one another based on the work they’re engaged in.”
Ideal State moved in September into a 1,500-square-foot office in the Lena Street Lofts in Santa Fe. It now employs seven people, and expects to hire another four or five full-time employees early next year.