Thanks to Parallax View, one of the blogs on CIOInsight.com, we found a summary of a new report on The McKinsey Quarterly’s web site that describes eight-technology-enabled business trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These eight trends fit in perfectly with the concepts underlying Project Workforce Management.
The full article on The McKinsey Quarterly is here:
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=2080&l2=13&l3=11&srid=27
(free registration required)
The blog post on CIO Insight, which we quote below, is here:
http://blogs.cioinsight.com/parallax_view/content/emerging_technology/
eight_businesstech_trends_to_watch.html
McKinsey groups these trends into three categories, around relationships, capital and assets, and information. My comments follow in italics.
Managing Relationships
1. Distributing co-creation that furnishes companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries.
The report makes note that while software and editorial content are easily co-created today, this trend will expand to physical goods. In my opinion, this will continue to "flatten" the world so that even more types of work are managed by globally dispersed teams.
2. Using consumers as innovators by exploiting Web 2.0 technologies to tap a new mood among consumers to engage online with organizations of all kinds.
In this sense, a business’ customers are becoming its innovation partners, and the lines defining a "corporation" are becoming even more blurred. Business organizations are less and less defined by the buildings where they are headquartered or by a well defined group of full-time employees.
3. Tapping into a world of talent that allows companies to outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work—such as finance, marketing, IT and operations—while still maintaining organizational coherence.
4. Extracting more value from interactions through tools that promote tacit collaboration, including wikis, virtual team environments and videoconferencing.
These two trends have "Project Workforce Management" written all over them: using technology to enable a truly project-based workforce, consisting of the best available talent wherever it may be found. The McKinsey article goes into some detail about how creativity and motivation–and therefore productivity–are enhanced as a result.
Managing Capital and Assets
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation by interconnecting existing automated systems through common standards. This information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, such as inventory management and customer service.
This trend is all about breaking down the information silos: a major objective–and a critical prerequisite–to enablement of the project workforce. According to McKinsey, " Companies still have substantial headroom to automate … and to interlink “islands of automation” and in so doing give managers and customers the ability to collaborate and communicate better than ever before." In other words, there is a lot of opportunity for technologies including Project Workforce Management to improve the ways in which we work.
6. Unbundling production from delivery by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring the use of each and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments.
The delivery of services is becoming uncoupled from the infrastructures, as we see with wireless services and some other utilities, and with Amazon.com’s offering of its ecommerce platform. Just as organizations are breaking down into more flexible and usable project teams, monolithic systems are breaking down into usable and reusable parts.
Leveraging Information In New Ways
7. Putting more science into management to help managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop insights that create competitive advantage and new business models. Ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.
McKinsey’s article cites several examples of fascinating ways that companies are using technology to generate more useful and actionable business information. The authors state: "… it’s hard to believe that we are only at an early stage in this trend. Yet we are." Given the vast amounts of data that businesses can now generate, the next imperative is to put it to use.
8. Making business from information by capturing accumulated pools of data in numerous systems to serve as the raw materials for new, information-based business opportunities.
This trend is where #5 meets #7: breaking down the barriers between large silos of data and generating new business as a result.
