The Thanksgiving Holiday brings out the Charlie Brown holiday specials, and “Pig Pen” makes his annual cameo in the cartoons. Pig Pen has the cloud of dirt and dust that follows him wherever he goes, but what if that cloud was information, instead?

Look no further than someone carrying a Blackberry or Treo and see a whole new generation of high-tech Pig Pens followed by a cloud of e-mails, contacts, documents and more. The new mobile workforce is no longer restricted by their own memory or brain power since they have access to tremendous information resources at the push of a button. Handheld computing and wireless technologies have untethered knowledge from bulky reference items like PCs, dictionaries, file cabinets, etc. Now add GPS, RSS feeds and web services like Del.icio.us or Google Notebook, and information is at the fingertips of anyone with a smartphone.

For example, Del.icio.us bookmarks can be an RSS feed, subscribed to through Google Reader, that has a mobile version accessible through any smartphone’s web browser. On the other hand, one SAGE employee visited a museum over the weekend where he ran into a person using his smartphone’s camera to photograph the plaque so they “could read them later.” With cameras on cell phone’s reaching 3 megapixels, each cell phone becomes a handheld scanner.

The challenge to IT in facilitating making all our workers like Pig Pen is thinking beyond secure VPN and Citrix, but how to use RSS and services to not only feed information, but also store and share with co-workers from practically anywhere.