Quarterly Journal on Management
From the publishers of THE HINDU BUSINESS LINE
Vol. 2 :: Iss. 3 :: February 1999
Is IT it?
People are changing the way they work the world over. is IT it?
Simon Buckingham
The way business is conducted in the 21st century will be very different to that of the 20th century. The same ends of commerce and prosperity will be pursued by very different means. Instead of all work activities being carried out in an integrated manner and all employees going to offices and factories, work will be much more flexible and dynamic and distributed. Some people will go to the office and sometimes the same people will work on the same tasks in different places. Work patterns will be more personalised and flexible. The emphasis will be on outcomes and results, not location and membership. People will work from wherever they are - it might be at home, an office or on the move. Companies will focus on their core business and outsource non-strategic tasks.
They will simultaneously deploy their expertise in as many ways as possible by forming business partnerships with external, independent companies. Information, knowledge and communication will drive the company and act as its lifeblood; customer service will be the key outcome. Business will be about deploying knowledge and sharing information in a way that meets customer requirements. The very communication that goes on between internal and external stakeholders in the business will be the very structure of the company itself. And all this transformation is facilitated by new communications technologies.
Information Technology tools such as the World Wide Web in its various forms such as Internet, intranet and extranet; mobile phones and electronic agents are making these new, more flexible and humane business practices possible.
Technologies are becoming easier to use and cheaper and more useful. Take for instance, mobile phones, a great technology for keeping in touch whilst on the move. Three generations of mobile phones have emerged so far, each successive generation more reliable and flexible than the last:
- Analogue: You could only easily use analogue cellular to make voice calls, and typically only in any one country.
- Digital mobile phone systems added fax, data and messaging capabilities as well as voice telephone service in many countries such as the GSM networks in India
- Satellite services such as Iridium and Globalstar will supplement the digital offerings and coverage and offer new services such as position location and available to 98% of the worlds landmass- town and country alike.
With each new generation of technology, the services which can be deployed on them become more and more wide ranging and truly limited only by imagination.
In the past, the cheapest and preferred way to carry out business was between employees in the same firm working under one roof. Only when people could see and be seen and hear and be heard could the various business tasks and processes be integrated into products or services. In the future, this business won't necessarily be carried out in-house, because communication technologies let people easily keep in touch wherever they are. These IT tools can be used by managers to unorganize their companies and thereby maximise the amount of business that they do whilst minimising the amount of busyness.
Lets now take a closer look at teleworking - one of the new business practices that IT enables.
Teleworking is working from home, whereas mobile working is working from anywhere - be it fixed or mobile locations. Getting to the office or factory every day is usually time consuming and inefficient. Teleworking tries to eliminate that stress. Teleworking is facilitated by the recent rapid advances in the power of enabling technologies coupled with a significant reduction in their prices. Technologies that were once too expensive to have at home, such as colour printers, are now much more affordable. These technologies mean that the generation and communication of work content is location independent. It is not dependent upon any particular physical, geographical environment.
The simple fact is that not everyone works best in the same environment; some people work better in the morning, some late at night, some work better in supervised environments, some create better autonomously. People should be able to work wherever they can best produce their agreed output. Employees should not be expected in a certain place day in and day out when location does not affect the quality of output. Teleworking considers and meets this requirement for diversity.
In the future, we will see a gradual change in the working model from overwhelmingly office-based work patterns to flexible working arrangements at the discretion of employees and their colleagues. We may even see a return to more home-based assembly of products (so called piecework). This is enabled because the information flow necessary to coordinate the supply and demand of production is available remotely such that it is not necessary to have everyone under one roof. Teleworking will increase because it is beneficial to both the employer and the employee- it helps improve productivity, reduce office costs, attract and retain the best staff, encourage an entrepreneurial culture and teaches employees how to deploy technologies effectively. Teleworking rightly puts the focus on people rather than procedures.
It is essential when trying to put technologies to good use to realise that it is not sufficient to simply deploy new technologies and continue with the old management practices. Micro-management is not possible with teleworkers.
Management and organisation need to be aligned, just as environment and organisation do. As someone rightly said, you have to combine high tech with high touch. Many companies in the West found that technologies slowed things down rather than sped them up, because they persisted with the same outmoded processes. Attitude far lags technology - human change is far harder than technology deployment.
Technology is only a means to an end. Its ultimate impact depends on how it is used. After all, there is little point in everyone having a telephone if no one ever calls anyone else and when they do, they say the wrong things.
At the end of the day, whatever type of business is being carried out and however it is being carried out, communication is essential. If people don't talk to each other to coordinate activities and don't share ideas and let people know about progress and problems, then the business will not get done in the most efficient manner.
Where technology does matter is that it can and does help to make that communication more easy and convenient and quick. People eat chips and not microchips. But the microchips do help the chip makers to coordinate production more easily. And users of microchips can use them to earn money that lets them buy more chips. Technologies do facilitate the pursuit by individuals of the many economic opportunities that can earn them income.
Such wealth creation is the most effective way of improving access to food, shelter and education. Look at the Grameen Phone mobile phone network in Bangladesh. In the same way as local people took a micro loan and bought a cow which they milked and sold for income, they now use their micro loans to buy a mobile phone which they rent out to other people.
It is easy to get carried away with the latest piece of top kit and cool toy. And those devices are getting smarter and friendlier and cheaper. But at the end of the day, communications technologies are only as good as the communication they facilitate. So, in answer to the question Is IT it?, the answer seems to be both yes and no.
Simon Buckingham is the creator of the unorganisation lifestyle for the twenty first century. His five unorganisation handbooks can be accessed free of charge on the internet at http://www.unorg.com.