In a recent press release, "Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years", Gartner predicts 10 fundamental shifts to occur in the "World of Work". Over the next 2 weeks, I'll be taking a point to expand upon each day (mainly from a SNA, or Social Network Analysis, standpoint). For starters however, here is the original press release below. Pay particular attention to Gartner VP and Fellow, Tom Austin, in the 2nd paragraph as he speaks to some pretty interesting points about how work will change (highlighted for quick identification below):
Egham, UK, ,
August 4,
2010
—
The world of today is dramatically
different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work
already badly frayed, Gartner, Inc. predicts that the nature of work
will witness 10 key changes through 2020. Organizations will need to
plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their
direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the
trends.
“Work will become less routine, characterized by
increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom
Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more
of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in
2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work
with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people
outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition,
simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across
yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual
skills.”
Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the
nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically
different technology governance models will be required.
1. De-routinization of Work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be
automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or
interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery,
innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills
are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the
process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we
can use automation tools to augment the selling process.
2. Work Swarms
Swarming is a work style characterized by a flurry of collective
activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add
value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity;
Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more
and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls
swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is
emerging. Teams have historically consisted of people who have worked
together before and who know each other reasonably well, often working
in the same organization and for the same manager. Swarms form quickly,
attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating.
Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action
requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured,
bureaucratic situations.
3. Weak Links
In swarms, if individuals know each other at all, it may be just
barely, via weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from
people who know the people they have to work with. They are indirect
indicators and rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their
knowledge of people. Navigating one's own personal, professional and
social networks helps people develop and exploit both strong and weak
links and that, in turn, will be crucial to surviving and exploiting
swarms for business benefit.
4. Working With the Collective
There are informal groups of people, outside the direct control of
the organization, who can impact the success or failure of the
organization. These informal groups are bound together by a common
interest, a fad or a historical accident, as described by Gartner as
“the collective.” Smart business executives discern how to live in a
business ecosystem they cannot control; one they can only influence. The
influence process requires understanding the collectives that
potentially influence their organization, as well as the key people in
those external groups. Gathering market intelligence via the collective
is crucial. Equally important is figuring out how to use the collective
to define segments, markets, products and various business strategies.
5. Work Sketch-Ups
Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It is very
important that organizations try to capture the criteria used in making
decisions but, at least for now, Gartner does not expect most
non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns. Over time,
we believe that work patterns for more non-routine work will emerge,
justifying a light-handed approach to collecting activity information,
but it will take years before a real return on investment for this
effort is visible. In the meantime, the process models for most
non-routine processes will remain simple "sketch-ups," created on the
fly.
6. Spontaneous Work
This property is also implied in Gartner’s description of work
swarms. Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to
the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as
seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
7. Simulation and Experimentation
Active engagement with simulated environments (virtual
environments), which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority
Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets.
This suggests the use of n-dimensional virtual representations of all
different sorts of data. The contents of the simulated environment will
be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go
together based on watching people work with this content. People will
interact with the data and actively manipulate various parameters
reshaping the world they’re looking at.
8. Pattern Sensitivity
Gartner has published a major line of research on Pattern-Based
Strategy. The business world is becoming more volatile, affording people
working off of linear models based on past performance far less
visibility into the future than ever before. Gartner expects to see a
significant growth in the number of organizations that create groups
specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns,
evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the
disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of
exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes to which
they are now more sensitive.
9. Hyperconnected
Hyperconnectedness is a property of most organizations, existing
within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them.
While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract,"
there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply
chain is in-house. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work
to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise
boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT
supports or augments that work.
10. My Place
The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings
occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who
barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging
problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work.
Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk,
and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a
week. In this work environment, the lines between personal,
professional, social and family matters, along with organization
subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the
complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of
work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot
manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer
performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in
an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.
Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Watchlist:
Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020." The report is
available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1331623.
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