If you want to catch a glimpse of the future of knowledge work in the 21st century, a good place to start is a small family homestead outside Germantown, Ill., 40 miles east of St. Louis. That's where Craig Huegens, director of architecture for networks, data centers, and unified communication services at Cisco Systems, lives and works.

When Huegens moved there from Northern California in December 2000, it was for the most basic of reasons: He wanted his newborn son to grow up around family, who now live just five miles down the road. Nevertheless, it was something of a revolutionary concept: Huegens was Cisco's first full-time IT telecommuter.

	Is it live or video? Cisco CEO Chambers hopes you won't notice the difference. Photo by Eddie Milla

Back then, he got by using e-mail and Internet Relay Chat, a primordial form of instant messaging. It took some accommodation on the part of both Huegens and his colleagues back in San Jose, but they made it work. And over the last seven years Huegens has become the spear point for the philosophy and technology at the center of Cisco's biggest strategic shift since the tech bubble burst in 2001 -- "Cisco 3.0," as CEO and chairman John Chambers likes to call it.

Cisco 1.0 was all about getting people connected by selling truckloads of routers and switches, and it made the company, founded in 1984 by a small group of computer scientists out of Stanford University, one of the fastest-growing in American business history. Cisco 2.0, Chambers says, was cen- tered on business process change--using all that hardware and, of course, a few truckloads of new gear like IP telephones--to drive innovation and productivity gains.

Cisco 3.0 employs even more hardware and software to transform business models, and Chambers, with characteristic evangelical fervor, says it will fundamentally change the nature of work, enabling productivity growth to soar back into the realms last seen in the economic surge of the late 1990s. "We believe that productivity can grow not at 1% or 2%, but 3% to 5% for the sustainable future," says Chambers in an interview in his office in Cisco's San Jose headquarters.

That's an audacious vision, and it will be driven, Chambers maintains, by the type of collaborative, Web 2.0 technology that now keeps Huegens in touch with his team in San Jose: interactive Web forums like wikis and blogs; IM; interactive "teamspaces" mounted on WebEx, which Cisco acquired in March for $3.2 billion; and, above all, videoconferencing and its big brother, telepresence--a life-size, high-def, multiple-screen system for face-to-face meetings among users in multiple locations.

Videoconferencing, of course, has been touted more than a few times over the past decade as the means to transform boring meetings, slash travel budgets, and create a new multibillion-dollar industry. It never quite happened. The question is, is Cisco's latest initiative just Videoconferencing 2.0, or is it really something revolutionary?