Working in a flat world

Consultants of Cognizant have been working on the future of work. The next video gives a goog overview on the future of work, the role technology will play…together with some good reading, this video is almost mandatory as introduction.

After this good overview on the future of work, it’s time to take a more in dept look on how the future working organisation will develop. Gartner research analysts made a study on how future work organisation can look like. There analysts came up with 10 key changes for the next decade, and I added an 11th one, which is the result of the first.

1.   “De-routinization” of work. “Non-routine” activities that cannot be automated, such as innovation, leadership and sales, will dominate employment: By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010.
2. Work swarms. Rather than traditional teams of people familiar with each other, ad-hoc groups or “work swarms,” with no previous experience of working with each other, will become a commonplace team structure. Gartner’s “work swarms” concept sounds similar to the Noded philosophy, which describes how groups of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, come together to form temporary or recurring project teams.
3. Weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. Exploiting our own networks will help us to develop the ties that are required for participating in wider “work swarm” opportunities.
4. Working with the collective. Being able to influence the complex ecosystem of suppliers, partners, clients and customers will increasingly become a core competence.
5. Work sketch-ups. Informality will define most “non-routine” work activities; the process models for these activities will be simple “sketch-ups,” created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous work. Seeking new opportunities and creating projects around them is likely to be an opportunistic, rather than strategic, activity.
7. Simulation and experimentation. The culture of Google’s “perpetual beta” is likely to spread to other industries, with rapid prototyping taking place in very public environments.
8. Pattern sensitivity. Extrapolating from history and experience will become less reliable; the ability to detect and parse patterns and trends in society will provide better insights.
9. Hyperconnected. With formal and informal work diffused across organizational boundaries,  the support mechanisms for workers (healthcare, HR, IT) will need to evolve to support fuzzier, ad-hoc relationships between people and departments.
10. My place. The boundaries between home and work life are already blurred. Balancing almost 24/7 availability against burning out will become a critical skill.
11. Social. all these changes will take place in a social environment!

After reading those 11 key changes….the next video gives a good insight on work in the future incorporating these 11 changes:

Sources:
Gartner – Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020 (Tom Austin, March 2010)
Gartner – Blog of Tom Austin – http://blogs.gartner.com/tom_austin
GigaOm – http://gigaom.com/collaboration/the-future-of-work-10-ways-that-the-world-of-work-will-change-in-the-2010s/
Welcome to the real (IT) world – http://isismjpucher.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/the-future-of-work/
UpsideLearing – http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2010/11/08/the-future-of-work-as-gartner-sees-it/
ReadWriteWeb – http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/08/workplace-of-the-future.php
Microsoft – http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/officelabs/gallery.mspx
Cognizant – http://www.cognizant.com/futureofwork/