The following article contains excerpts from “Inescapable
Data – Harnessing the Power of Convergence” by John Webster and Chris Stakutis
The Matrix Worker
Here’s an increasingly common scenario. Imagine that you’re
a manager in a Boston office of a mega size systems and services company. A job
requisition opens up and allows you to fill a position you’ve had vacant for
months. However, since the company is trying to maintain a level head count,
you must first attempt to fill the job from within before looking outside. With
100,000 employees there is a good chance that one of them has the right
skills-matrix you desire. However, most of them are located somewhere among the
hundreds of other office locations your
company maintains around the globe. And so you look for, find, and hire Dick, a
well qualified candidate out of San Jose because he’s the right match for the
job. No matter that Dick is three time zones and 3,000 miles away. You’re
comfortable because you both have high speed internet, instant and text
messaging in addition to good ol’ email, perhaps a groupware package, and cell
phones to keep you in constant touch.
Here’s another increasingly common scenario: Another of your
employees quietly mentions she’s having trouble getting her youngest son off to
school in the morning. Similarly being home to help care for her husband’s
aging parents later in the day is also becoming increasingly important (a theme
excruciatingly familiar to a growing number of people). She states that she
actually has plenty of hours in the day to do everything, including her
demanding job, but she’s having a hard time working around these family issues
and keeping up with “normal” office hours at the same time. Her stress level is
elevated. When in the office, she spends a significant amount of time merely
checking-in with everyone at home to be sure things are under control.
Finally, she pops the question: “Since Dick is working
productively out on the West Coast and we only ever see him ‘virtually’ through
conference calls and E-meetings, do you think I can work from home too? I’ll be
sure to put in even more hours saved by no commute and I’ll be more efficient
balancing my home and work life. I have DSL at home and with the VPN I can
access every server as if I were here, in the same way Dick can. Can I
telecommute?”
And so the dominos fall. As a manager, it is incredibly hard
to justify how one employee can be remote and part of the same group doing the
same work and not allow others to exploit the same flexibility. So you make a
decision to embrace the opportunity and learn how to properly manage these
increasingly common situations – occurrences that will become all the more
inevitable now that the price of a gallon of gas has climbed past the
$3.00/gallon mark. Work@home can also reduce stress – a serious concern for
young families trying to raise children and maintain two income streams at the
same time. Perhaps you’re already a believer even before you’re forced to make
a decision.
According to JALLA, there are 80 million “information
workers” in the US (people who work in typical office settings primarily using
computers to perform their jobs). Typically only 20 to 30% of those people are “location
dependent”—that is, they physically need
to be within an office building to perform their jobs. Doing the math, there
could be as many as 60 million of these information workers who currently have
“cubes” in some undifferentiated office building, but that could actually be
happier, more productive, and spending less time (and way less money) waiting
in traffic to get to and from the office every day and happier working from
“anywhere.”
Now, let’s push the work@home phenomenon a step further. It
should by now be abundantly clear that the convergence of wired and wireless forms
of computing and communications has enabled the portable office environment.
That statement should come as no surprise to readers here. However, let’s
combine this well-known phenomenon with another one that is still emerging –
the online skills database.
We are all subject-matter experts in at least one particular
area. Skills databases now exist within a number of large companies that allow them
to run even more successfully with fewer full-time employees by matching
available skills to specific project requirements. The amount of detail put
into these databases is stunning. In the engineering world, for example, every
skill and realm of knowledge that an engineer develops while working on a
project is summarized within the database. It could be a new computer language
such as C# or mastery of a new Java library or a new computer platform or even
use of some end-user application such as an accounting package. Similar
independent databases are now emerging outside of large corporations. These
databases tend to be limited to specific industry segments or particular
geographies, they are nonetheless an emerging, low-cost, high value source
human capital.
As a result, a growing number of information workers will
realize the power now available to them by combining work@home with the
emerging online skills databases. They can create their own high-value work
environments - they no longer need a company to do that for them. In fact, the
IRS has traditionally incented workers to create home office environments via
yearly income tax deductions. And, using the emerging online skills databases,
they can make themselves visible to a growing market. They will prefer to work
independently because they will manage time more efficiently, add skills over
time that will enhance their value in the marketplace, and in the end, make
more money.
As more and more people allow their skills to be better
published and exploited, a new form of professional – the Matrix Worker - will
emerge.
