Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 1)

Let’s take a look at the future of cloud-based collaboration with Avi Nowogrodski.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some of your background as well as introducing Clarizen to our audience.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: I’m actually a second-timer. The first company I built in 1996 was a company named SmarTeam. It dealt with collaboration for bill of materials. I was the CEO of this company for 10 years. I sold it to Dassault Systems after three years of inception.

Sramana Mitra: I remember that acquisition actually.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Interesting. I worked for six years after the acquisition with Dassault Systems. I was part of their global management in Paris. It was an interesting experience for me as an Israeli to work in a big French company.

Sramana Mitra: Was SmarTeam based in Israel or France?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: It was based in Israel. When I left the company, it was about $50 million a year in revenue. We had about 7,500 customers. Among them, we had customers like Boeing, Ford, GM, Toyota, and many others. In 2006 after I left, I decided to build Clarizen with a clear vision of basically changing the way people work where the whole idea is to lead companies into the future of work.

Sramana Mitra: Since you started to preface that by saying you want to build the future of work, tell me about your vision of the future of work.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: That’s a very good question. I think the future of work is really about the live notion of businesses. It’s about being able to run businesses in real time. To some extent, it’s very similar to the revolution that CNN Live brought into the media where the news from yesterday is not so important than the news today. For businesses, it’s even stronger because people are required to make decisions and build predictions. As a result of this, businesses are able to take actions that are relevant to the current situation that they are in.

I think the biggest challenge in the future of work is to get businesses to act in real time, to be able to respond much better and therefore, make better decisions that are relevant and matter. The biggest challenge right now in order to achieve it is to connect the unstructured conversations that we have or the unstructured type of activities within the company with the structure processes. We have one thread where we are basically collaborating, having conversations, and having meetings. There is another thread. This is the execution thread. This is where the job is getting done. I think that this is where the chaos is coming from – from the fact that those threads are working separately.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen
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