workplace – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

November 3, 2016 By David Terrar

Microsoft Teams and Slack point to the future of collaboration

Yesterday Microsoft responded to the incredible rise of Slack, the cool “new kid on the block” inter office chat app, with Teams. I watched the live stream of the announcement and was surprised. I expected a Slack alternative, a “Slack killer” even, but what they’ve announced is much more significant. Teams and Slack together signpost the future of collaboration and the evolution of the digital workplace. The collaboration and enterprise social network software providers need to take notice.

Over on Hewlett Packard Enterprise Insights, their enterprise.nxt guide to digital transformation, they published my post “5 things Slack and Microsoft Teams tell us about workplace collaboration”. This is a companion piece, amplifying those conclusions having had a chance to think through the implications of what I saw streamed from yesterday’s Microsoft NYC Office event.

Earlier in the year it had been rumoured that Microsoft might buy Slack for $8Bn, but they’ve done their own thing instead. Yesterday’s announcement was an open secret for a while, and Slack took the rather interesting step of publishing a full page advert in the New York Times, simultaneously publishing the text on Medium. They say they are excited at the competition, but that’s more in the context of the purported Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”.

First let’s run through what Slack have achieved, which is pretty incredible really! They’ve only been around since August 2013. You probably didn’t know that the name is an acronym, “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge”. Slack has $540m in funding and a valuation of around $3.8 billion at their last funding round in March, and then we had those Microsoft rumours. Back in May this year Slack passed 3m daily active users, but that was 3.5 times growth in both free and paid for users over the previous year, and the rate isn’t slowing down (so even with Microsoft’s announcement, Slack won’t be going away). As I explained in the HPE article, Slack is used by 77 of the Fortune100. There are teams inside eBay, Ogilvy, Salesforce, Samsung, and Urban Outfitters. IBM themselves have 30,000 users, and have even announced a partnership with Slack so Watson’s AI can quickly provide insights from the huge data sets collected by the messaging system. Slack is being used by large enterprises, small enterprises, by groups of developers sharing code snippets, and it’s even gaining traction in the gaming community.

Like so many web based products of recent years that we know and love, such as Twitter or Flickr, it is the result of a company doing a pivot from their original intention. Stewart Butterfield and his team were working on an online game called Glitch. They had developed their own internal messaging system, and when the online game didn’t succeed, they launched their internal collaboration solution instead, to become the cool product platform that it is now. They have the classic freemium business which has made it easy for groups of users, frustrated with whatever collaboration options they have within their enterprise, to set a Slack group, invite people in and provide their own tactical solution to help a particular community, issue or project. There are plenty of other options around like HipChat in the business world, or Discord in the gaming community, but in a very crowded market of overalapping communication tools, Slack have made a big impact inside 3 years.

Let’s look at what Slack actually provides a group of users. The functionality covers three areas:

A message threading alternative to email that is device independent. I can use it on Mac, Windows PC, through a web interface, or with mobile apps for smartphones and tablets. Conversations are synced across all devices so I can join the conversation in one place, and continue on a different device when I’m on the move or back at the office.
It has a more open communication approach – the conversations get organised within channels that are like the hashtags I’m used to on public social media platforms, and everything is searchable so that I can easily loop in the skills and people I need.
The third key area is Slack’s focus on helping me with menial tasks. They have a growing directory with over 750 apps, chatbots and algorithms that I can deploy to help make my collaboration life that little bit easier. Slack are riding the growing wave of Bots, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation – a mega trend that is changing office work just as much as automation has on the shop floor.

But wait, there’s more. I mentioned sharing code snippets, but those 750 apps include easy integration with developer and agency friendly tools like Trello, IFTTT, Zapier and GitHub. They are also investing in people to help them scale with senior hires from Salesforce and Foursquare this year.

Slack’s success highlights a key problem for our existing collaboration software options. They are more difficult to use than they should be. On top of that, the digital workplace is a mess. Alongside whatever we use for team collaboration, we access a whole host of disparate corporate systems with differing interfaces to get the job done. Slack has the ease of use and frictionless set up of the consumer apps we all used to on our smartphones and tablets. On top of the user experience there are two more factors. First, team chat functionality which allows me to find, connect and communicate with the right experts helps me get the job done. It’s a core component of all the administration and knowledge work we do. Second, and the masterstroke, is the open platform which provides the store of bots and integrations to third party apps. It means Slack (or Teams) provides me with a place where work happens. Where I can connect to these disparate app silos that my company uses, but in one place where the useful conversations are already happening. This is the starting point for a proper digital workplace, or what Dion Hinchcliffe called a digital workplace hub in his post on ZDNet a few days ago.

More than anything with this team chat based digital workplace approach, I’m looking forward to the demise of email, and products like Slack and Teams bring that a little closer. Having discussed the incredible rise of Slack, the functionality it provides, and some of the reasons why it’s been successful, what did Microsoft give us in response?

Yesterday, CEO Satya Nadella and Office Corporate VP Kirk Koenigsbauer, with a little help from their friends, laid out the new strategy and provided an impressive demo of Microsoft Teams. From my initial take it has many of the good characteristics of Slack, certainly has a similar look and feel, but offers the potential of more through tight integration with the Office365 family of products that it sits in, and becomes the front end to. Satya opened the announcement talking about how the new product needs to accomodate how different teams work differently, using the example of jazz ensembles, crew races, and even cricket teams, and that sets up the fact that the product allows you to customise the experience on a team by team basis.

Getting in to the demo helps explain what Teams does. Over on the left of the screen there are tabs for activity, chat, teams, meetings and files. This bar moves to the bottom in the mobile experience. When you set up a private team, a Sharepoint is automatically provisioned “behind” it to support it, and so any files are put there or created there. The team space showed normal multithreaded conversations, and I rather liked the way messages to you were highlighted with a red tab/tag over on the right of the message. You can open files or notes within the stream, and have conversations around them. Of course (the rather excellent) OneNote has all the characteristics of a wiki for co-creation. When you go in to a team space, you can pin things on to the tabs across the top of the space. Things like the budget for this project (an Excel spreadsheet), a planner for this project team, or even third party tools like Zendesk, accessed right there. This access to, and seamless integration with, the whole of the Office365 suite, or things like Microsoft Power BI, and on top of that a set of third party apps too, is crucial. Teams acts like your inbox, or maybe it’s a workbox, or maybe it’s your digital workplace hub.

When it comes to typing your messages you can add emojis, stickers, or attach files. A ‘Fun Picker’ lets you find and add Giphy GIFs, or memes. The next thing to say is that you can interact with bots just like in Slack. T-Bot sits on top of Teams’ help system, so you can ask questions like “how do I create a channel?”. WhoBot links in to the directories, and more importantly the conversations and meta data associated with that person, so you can ask “who knows about ticket sales?”. You can jump in to video chat with the team right there, using Skype.

Microsoft Teams is available now as a customer preview in 181 countries and 18 languages. General Availability is planned for Q1 2017, when it will have 85 Bots, 70 connectors, and integrations with 150 partners including Zendesk and HootSuite. In terms of licensing it is available to any user on an O365 Enterprise or Small Business plan. One key point that Satya emphasised is that Microsoft already have 85million active users of O365, and this is the market they are addressing.

Microsoft Teams looks like a very good team chat option, but it has important advantages if you are already following an Office 365 strategy. Both Slack and Teams bring you to a place where you can connect and collaborate with overlapping teams to get things done. They both plug in to the rising trend of bots and AI to automate tasks, find answers quickly and easily, and save time. They both offer an array of integrations with other business apps and so begin to provide a practical answer to Dion’s digital workplace hub. They definitely point the way for the next stage of collaboration solutions, and the major social software players need to take note.

Find out more about this year’s Enterprise Digital Summit London:

October 10, 2016 By David Terrar

Barclays doing Digital differently

Back at our first, November 2014 version of the Enterprise Digital Summit London, Dave Shepherd, Director of Eagle Labs & Digital Eagles for Barclays Bank, came to speak about their Digital Eagles programme. Barclays decided to create a team of front line staff who are on hand in branches across the UK, actively encouraging and educating customers and non-customers to acquire digital skills, so they feel confident to explore technology – a team of over 12,000 has been created so far. Dave invited me down to Brighton to visit their latest initiative – a network of business incubators and fully equipped maker spaces called Eagle Labs. Barclays are an excellent example of a well known, established brand with a long history that is approaching Digital in a new way.

They are re-using under utilised branch offices or other spaces to create this network of Eagle Labs. They piloted the idea in Bournemouth and then Cambridge – Brighton was the third. They’ve got 6 now, Notting Hill in London opens shortly, with Jersey, Norwich, Salford on the cards. Barclays are taking a “fail fast” approach, trying things out in each new Lab, and learning as they go. The initiative itself feels more like a start-up than something run by a big corporate entity, and I’m sure that difference in cultural approach is key to making this a success.
The space I visited is a perfect example of what they are trying to achieve. The building started life as the Brighton Union Bank back in 1870. It had been a Barclays branch for decades, but had closed, laying derelict and empty. The lease runs to 2018. Barclays have smartened up the outside, reclaimed and refurbished the space, finding ways to convert the old branch infrastructure for its new use as cost effectively as possible. The old branch manager’s office has become their maker lab with a laser cutter, 3D printer and all of the tools you would need to build a prototype for your business idea. One of the old bank vaults downstairs, with it’s very impressive steel door has become a photographic studio. Rather than take the corporate approach of laying expensive new flooring and a typical office refit, they’ve sanded down the old parquet flooring, renovated the old doors and are trying to retain as much of the character of the building’s history as they can, much as you would with a house renovation project. The old bank “front of house” has become shared office space for the incubator start-ups and small business. An office upstairs where cheques and local accounts would have been processed has become a presentation and meeting room for hire, with more of the feel of the kind of space you would find at Google, with bean bags and a coffee table made from a big old reel for industrial cable – not what you would expect from one of the oldest retail banks in the country.

Barclays aren’t taking a traditional venture capital style incubator approach. They don’t take a stake in the businesses, although they do pay rent to the Lab, and of course Barclays would like to bring them on board as business banking customers. However, a key part of what they are trying to do is connect to the local business community and build relationships in the way that a local branch manager would have done in the past, before retail banks started to centralise everything in the quest for cost savings and efficiency. They want to build an ecosystem of coaching, support and partners who work from the Lab to help the members and connect with the local area. While I was there I met two locals who had left corporate jobs to freelance in marketing and training – something that’s happening a lot around the UK. They’d popped in to use the photographic studio for half an hour to take better quality head shots for their LinkedIn profile. I saw the laser cutter demonstrated to some people with a product idea. I met Ryk, a user experience expert who runs TeamPro, a great looking start-up that works from the shared office space that provides free websites for sports teams. I heard about open days for local businesses that the Lab runs to show what they do. I saw that they run “Mend it Mondays” – for £5 they have an open session where their on-site technicians will help fix your broken stuff, or use the workshop to build new things.
I was introduced to Dave’s boss Steven Roberts, Strategic Transformation Director at the Bank. He told me:

“Bankers have traditionally been at the heart of their community, helping people with their finances, and supporting local business. The Eagle Labs initiative aims to strengthen that connection with direct help in new ways of working and emerging technology for start-ups and local businesses. After Digital Eagles it’s the logical, next step for us to be building digital skills in the business community.”

The Brighton Lab provides a home for business advisors, brokers, web site designers, and businesses creating new apps and digital services. It hosts 2 permanent offices with 4 staff in each, has 2 meeting spaces for hire or use by the members, a maker space, and the main area supports 25 co-workers. They’ve linked to the local maker community and provide a hub for emerging technology in the local community. Compared to their peers, Barclays are thinking differently, and doing digital differently.

All photographs by Rhys Terrar

Extras:

30 photographs from our visit to the Brighton Eagle Lab

Steam Co’s video of the Brighton Eagle Lab Launch (with Steven Roberts and Dave Shepherd):

Find out more about this year’s Enterprise Digital Summit London:

December 9, 2015 By David Terrar

Future of Work – a Blockchain primer

A few weeks back on 19 November I attended a Blockchain event – one of the Future of Work sequence of sessions sponsored and hosted by Truphone, organised by Lloyd Davis of the Tuttle Club and Helen Keegan of Heroes of Mobile. These sessions explore different technologies and their potential impact on the business landscape, and the workplace. It was an interesting event, with singer Imogen Heap talking new approaches and business models oriented towards the working musician within the music industry, but it wasn’t quite the topic primer on Blockchain I was looking for. A good event nevertheless, and the second part of this post covers my notes on Imogen’s session. But first I want to relate the subsequent homework I did to figure out how to explain why Blockchain is so important.

Part of the problem with talking Blockchain is that commentary on it is often strongly tied to the digital currency that it supports – Bitcoin. That single implementation overwhelms most explanations of the underlying technology. I’ve looked at a lot of explanations generated over the last year and come away puzzled, but the best I’ve found is from Mike Gault on re/code on July 5. He starts by saying:

“Imagine that you’re walking down a crowded city street, and a piano falls from the sky. As dozens of people turn to watch, the piano crashes down right in the middle of the street.

Then, without a second to lose, every person who witnessed the event is strapped to a lie detector and recounts exactly what they saw. They all tell precisely the same story, down to the letter.

Is there any doubt that the piano fell from the sky?”

This is the innovative and disruptive concept behind blockchain technology – a distributed consensus model for recording digital events of any kind. A way of simply and easily creating a digital ledger of events that is automatically duplicated across many nodes and could be recording anything from an exchange of currency, to a contract, to any step in a process that needs to be certified and verified. Wikipedia tells me that blockchain is a permissionless distributed database, derived from the bitcoin protocol, that maintains a continuously growing list of transactional data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by operators of the data store’s nodes. Each blockchain record is enforced cryptographically and hosted on machines working as data store nodes. The cryptography combines with the fact that the records are duplicated across many nodes in the network so that tampering with a record would be so astronomically “expensive” as to be impossible in practical terms.

Think of what that could change in business. At the moment so many processes rely on some trusted intermediary and a multi-stage process of exchange. Whether that’s a bank, or an accountant in practice, or a law firm, or some legislative body with a compliance procedure to follow or a combination of several of these things. Suddenly, one or more layers of process complexity could be taken away and replaced by a single ultra secure transaction in a ledger. If we are talking money, then we are used to a system of promisary notes, bank notes, bank cards, online banking systems and phone apps that access our money, controlled by the institutions which print the notes, record the amounts, exchange them with our customer and supplier bank accounts, trade them in to other currencies for exchange, or hold them in secure vaults. These can be replaced by a digital ledger and much simpler processes without the need for all of that administration and physical infrastructure. The same digital concept can be applied to simplify the processes around agreeing and verifying a contract, a person, ownership of a thing, or any sort of event, in the broadest sense, that needs to be trusted. Take a look around the audience at the next Blockchain event you are at, and you will see that banks, law firms and accounting practices are taking note and getting educated. New markets and new ways of working are going to be created alongside legacy infrastructure, similar to the way basic mobile phone message technology has been so disruptive in Third World markets in recent times (but on steroids). A lot of what we now consider as normal business practice will change over the next 10 years because of the Blockchain.

So let’s head back to Imogen Heap the Grammy Award winning composer, performer, recording engineer, technologist, and inventor talking about the music business. She explained her Mycelia project, taking it’s name from fungal colonies of mycelium forming the largest organism in the World, relating that idea to the music business. The music content are the nutrients underground and above ground you access them with Spotify or iTunes or YouTube but using Blockchain technology. The model would change from the current centralised model where the record companies are the intermediary gateway controlling everything, to a distributed network where the creator of the content, the musician, would have the power. Imogen would know every time one of her pieces was downloaded or played, and she would control the cost and decide if and when it might be free. Mycelia would have open and shared data so that fans could find out about the bands they were interested in. There would be tools to help, curation provided, and choices available so you wouldn’t just have access to a small compressed music file, you could choose the high resolution version to get the full sound experience that was created in the studio. The approach would make the revenue splits between the musician and other parties involved transparent. There would be Blockchain based smart contracts as an integral part of this new solution. Imogen has been interviewed by Forbes magazine around this topic. She worries that the music industry has boxed itself in to a corner where their model is based on producing a few big hits a year and so the industry is too top heavy. Actually, like any market, we need healthy competition but coming back to her mushroom analogy, we need to nourish the base layer of the industry. Her belief is that the key to that is to make the whole process easy, in the way Napster was when it first started to subvert the industry.

At least part of the problem is the cost of production, and how the music companies manage the capital involved and act like banks towards new acts, funding an album with advances that then need to be paid back with interest. Some musicians are getting around that problem with technology like Kickstarter. For example, I’m a fan of the American-Irish band Solas. I’m one of 726 backers who have pledged $46,199 to fund the studio recording of their next album, celebrating their 20th anniversary, called All These Years. That’s a good work-around, but Heap would like that concept to become part of the new structure and approach.

So Blockchain could definitely change the music business, but there are plenty of applications where it will be changing industry and the world of work before 2020 and 2025.

October 27, 2015 By David Terrar

Enterprise Digital Summit London 2015 – #EntDigi impressions and key messages

Here’s a Storify summary of impressions, tweetable slides and key messages from the 22 Oct 2015, Enterprise Digital Summit London event, selected from the #EntDigi tweet stream and flickr photos.

We’ll be publishing more posts, impressions and write ups here soon. Please contact us if you want to find out more.

June 16, 2015 By David Terrar

TEDx style Social Business Salon – evening 1 July in London

Our friends at BroadVision asked us to collaborate with them on an event on the afternoon of 1 July when their founder and CEO, Dr Pehong Chen is over from the USA to speak and visit customers. We decided that was a great opportunity for him, as one of the social business pioneers, to also be the main speaker at our regular, evening “first Wednesday” Social Business Session London Meetup group. BroadVision would then sponsor the event so we can hold it at one of our favourite venues – the British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace – and because of that we would put on a special, more structured, TEDx style agenda. Things have come together to make, what we hope, will be a really great evening.

Start time for the event will be 18:15. For anyone that can arrive a little early, there will be a pre-event drinks reception sponsored by BroadVision at the ICA (which is actually physically underneath the British Academy, although the entrance is on The Mall) from 17:30 to which everyone is welcome, then we’ll move on “around the corner” to the British Academy at 18.15 for networking. Formal presentations will start soon after.

The theme for the evening will be future of social business and the digital enterprise. We have a great line up of speakers and topics as follows:

Dr Pehong Chen, CEO of BroadVision: Reclaiming control of your business communication
Jon Mell, Digital Leader IBM: Watson and the future of cognitive computing
Dr Kerstin Sailer, Lecturer in Compex Buildings at UCL: Designing spaces for people
Matt Partovi, Founding Member of responsive.org: Creating a fundamental shift in the way we work and organise in the 21st Century
Philip Sheldrake, Managing Partner Euler Partners: Organised Self
Anne McCrossan, Managing Partner, Visceral Business: Emergent Code Chronicles – making sense of what our future might be as digital humans
Bjoern Negelmann, Kongress Media: European perspectives of Social Business and Enterprise Digital Summit update
Benjamin Ellis, CEO Socialoptic: Organising chaos – techniques for leading this future enterprise

Rather than our usual panel of volunteers, all the speakers will join the Q&A session to discuss the future of the digital enterprise and what we should be focusing on to help organisations tackle the technology revolution. Our goal is to get everyone present involved, to merge ideas and minds and create a great evening of debate and discussions. Please come along, and tell your friends. Full details and to book a free space, register on the Meetup page as usual.

We would like to thank our sponsors BroadVision and Kongress Media for making this event possible, and we look forward to seeing you for some lively debate.

November 5, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Social Onslaught at Workplace Trends Conference – London

A few weeks ago I was invited to take part in Workstock’s first pop-up event which formed part of the Workplace Trends 2014 conference in London. The challenge was quite simple – create a Pecha Kucha of 20 slides with a preset 20 seconds to deliver each – and shake up the staid world of workplace. No problem…

Nervous was an understatement but the energy and creativity which Workstock and its participants created was worth every second. Thanks to Neil Usher for Workstock’s creation and also to Cara Long who wrote short introduction stories for everyone. Here’s my poem:

Over the past 7 years or so we have witnessed the explosion and ubiquitous use of social tools which have for most of us changed both the way we handle our social lives and increasingly our working lives too. The traditional natural and easy divide between work and home has now become blurred as we often find ourselves constantly switched on and accessible to all – permanently. Switching off isn’t easy.

Yet there is increasing evidence that switching off is critical to our health and multitasking which is a result of being constantly accessible damages both our brains and work. As a recent article in Forbes notes:

“Research conducted at Stanford University found that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers also found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time…

…Researchers at the University of Sussex compared the amount of time people spend on multiple devices (such as texting while watching TV) to MRI scans of their brains. They found that high multitaskers had less brain density in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control.”

October 29, 2014 By David Terrar

The Agile Elephant Unconference – 27 November at Metro Bank HQ, Holborn

We are delighted to announce The Agile Elephant Unconference on digital transformation, social business, the future of work and the digital workplace – an all day event on 27 November 2014, hosted at Metro Bank’s London HQ, One Southampton Row, London WC1B 5HA – opposite Holborn Tube Station.

The Agile Elephant team, hosted at a Central London location, are facilitating a self-organised conference designed to bring together specialists, consultants, practitioners and change agents to discuss:

digital transformation
social business
next generation enterprise
the future of work
how to do more, and do it better

The Agile Elephant Unconference will be a full day from 9:00 to 17:30 at a Central London location close to the Underground and other transport links. The Unconference follows, and is connected to, the Enterprise 2.0 Summit London on November 25 and 26 at The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace. The Summit is a practical, “how-to” style of event for a corporate audience. The Unconference is aimed at specialists, consultants and change agents advising those companies who want to share ideas, best practice, and debate where the world of work, the digital landscape and emerging technologies are moving next.

The mantra for the day – what works, what doesn’t, what’s next?

Go here to sign up for the Unconference. The ingredients are:

A curated unconference using Open Space Technology
As a group – the Morning and Afternoon will each start with 5 x 5 – five 5 minute lightning sessions to get your brain cells moving – the clock is ticking, when the time is up the speaker may have to finish mid-sentence – no exceptions!
We’ll split the room in to 3 unconference streams with timeslots across the day
4 time slots per unconference stream – a choice of 12 topics discussed in depth during the day
Bringing it all together – as a group we’ll come back together at the end to discuss what we learned, how we capture the content and make some plans for what next?
Plenty of time for networking in and around the sessions in coffee and lunch breaks – the agenda framework for the day is here
Elephant volunteers will help facilitate the day and make things run smoothly

We’ll use social media to capture and share our energy and ideas from the day.

If you want to sign up to present one of the ten 5×5 sessions, go to this post and add your session title and explanation in the comments. If we have more than 10 volunteers we’ll convene a panel of judges to pick the best 10. For the 12 unconference sessions, we hope delegates bring along some great ideas and material to share and discuss.

We’d like to give a big thank you to our partner providing the venue, but that will have to wait a few days for a formal announcement. We’d also like to thank our sponsor Sei Mani for the lunch, coffee, tea and soft drinks – their support is helping us make the Unconference free for attendees.

About Metro Bank

Metro Bank are an ideal partner for our Unconference as they are, themselves, a case study in new business models, with an innovative and entrepreneurial approach – they are revolutionising banking by putting customers first. They are Britain’s first new high street bank in over 100 years. Metro Bank aims to provide personal and business customers with unparalleled levels of service and convenience. They’re a unique, customer-focused, retail business reinventing the rules of retail banking by killing all stupid bank rules. You can follow them on Twitter, download this to find out more about their approach, or go to: metrobankonline.co.uk

About Sei Mani

Sei Mani help organisations understand how investments in collaboration technologies can transform business performance. As well guiding companies on the journey from developing a business case and assessing impact on culture and leadership through to the creation of compelling value propositions, their services include: Visual design, information architecture, usability, accessability, application integration, agile software, web and mobile design and development. Find out more: www.sei-mani.com

About Agile Elephant

The new digital and social approach to business can add real value to the bottom line. Agile Elephant is a new kind of consultancy designed to help companies embrace the new digital culture of social collaboration, sharing and openness that is changing business models and the world of work. Contact us to find out more.

About the Unconference

The conference will be free for attendees, but space is going to be limited to only 60 delegates. To find out more or sign up for a conference pass, go to these pages on the Agile Elephant website, go to the Eventbrite page, or contact us.

October 13, 2014 By Alan Patrick

The emerging risk of digital Taylorism

In our reading of the potential evolution of the work transformation, there are some rather compelling but very worrying views on the evolution of knowledge automation, from a variety of sources:

Instead of promoting a more participative and democratic society as hoped for by Castells and others, vertical disintegration and decentralisation allow for what is discussed under the broad term of marketisation. ‘By bringing the competition in product and labour markets to bear on their own internal processes, … [firms] are turning the market into an instrument of control’. [Sauer] therefore sees a ‘market-led decentralisation’. The individual unit although technically more independent is subjected to new and worse constraints through management by objectives including internal and external bidding as well as the application of benchmarks or the imposition of profit targets. Hierarchical control is replaced by sanctions by the ‘market’ and markets are increasingly internalised into business units

In services the ‘opening to the market’ can also take the form of elimination of managerial mediation between workers and customers and the increasingly direct exposure of workers to the changing wishes and requirements of customers. In management literature this is greatly welcomed as ‘advanced customer-orientation’. For workers, advanced customer-orientation can mean even more stress, especially if management at the same time cuts resources in order to save costs.

In essence, the demand for high rates of return on capital drives management to save costs by cutting resources which in turn can undermine the new autonomy workers enjoy in decentralised, digitised workplaces. Rather then dreams of a post-Taylorist workplace emerging, there is increasing evidence that “new forms of bureaucratic control and repetitive tasks have been extended to the information sector”- or Digital Taylorism

Or there is this view – there is a high road and a low road that will be followed:

The high road variant can also be associated with the high-trust, high performance firm. Its main features are: decentralisation, creation of comprehensive tasks, establishment of work groups, promotion of competence development and sharing of knowledge as well as interdepartmental co-operation and integrated product development.

The low road type strive to achieve competitiveness through cost-cutting, which among other things expresses itself in staff reduction or outsourcing. For the internal organisation of work this mode means: organisation of work processes according to value creation aspects, acceleration of the processes through the grouping of individual work tasks and activities into business processes, intensification of work, and a tendency to divide staff into a highly qualified core and a low-qualified periphery that are employed to balance out capacity fluctuations.

In previous cycles, the Low road was usually the preferred option, the high road was the one less taken, and there is no compelling reason to believe anything will be different this time round.

The starkest portrait of Work to Come is this one – that the future of work, for many people, will be them strapped to an automated digital workflow, continuously prodded and monitored while doing the tasks that machines cannot yet do well or cheaply enough.

And there is nothing in the past that gives one comfort these scenarios above won’t play out, apart from maybe in very high value, high creative workspaces where Taylorism never really took hold – but even there, in law, medicine and other professional white collar areas, work is increasingly overwatched by digital monitoring devices. The only hopes from past experience is that where people have been well integrated with the process, and team work has been allowed to work, it has worked better than pure automation. (Cells, Quality Circles, etc) – but it does need careful design, appropriate use of automation, upskilling of the average worker, and flexible organisation structures above and around it.

These are non trivial requirements, needing non trivial design of new ways of working that are demonstrably more productive than those the neo-Taylorists are dreaming up, too often under the disguise of “smart” tools.

It is our view that if we (humans) do not do it this way, especially in the high cost OECD countries, we shall most certainly get Digitised Taylorism in spades. One our prime items in our Manifesto is that work should be about people. So – for anyone interested in the future workplace transformation, our view is that for it to be sustainable for people, somewhere along the line it will be essential to work out how to take the high road

Incidentally, this is also why we have given our support to the hi: project. hi: stands for Human Interface, i.e. creating the tools and techniques that enable work to take the high road noted above (or is that the hi: road 😉 )

September 29, 2014 By Alan Patrick

Social Business – Europe vs UK

We attended the IoM conference in Cologne last week, at the same time London Social Media Week was happening. (David gave a keynote talk, the slides are over here). It was interesting to juxtapose the core themes of these 2 events (incidentally, it was our Patchwork Elephant Conference held during last year’s Social Media Week London that persuaded us to set up Agile Elephant).

In a nutshell, I noted the following large differences in themes on my twtstreams:

In Europe, a large amount of the case studies are based around improving operations, all over the business.
In the UK, most of the focus is on customer attraction – marketing, lead generation and sales.
Where the UK is looking at operation improvement, it tends to be around customer facing operations, typically serving existing customers.

Now to be fair, IoM is about “social business” whereas “Social Media Week” has a wider remit, but it’s interesting to note that even “Social Business” conferences in the UK are often focussed much more heavily on the sales/marketing arena. (Which is why we are running a more operations & customer related conference in November – see last paragraph of this post)

When we were kicking around the “why” this might be so, we came to the following hypotheses:

The UK has a more mercantile industry structure, but Europe has retained a lot more of its manufacturing industry – so by definition there are more European companies interested in operations improvement.
It is very likely that the CXO power base area is different – UK companies tend more often to be run by ex salesmen or accountants, European by ex operations people – the path to the CEO office usually tells you where the major power in the organisation lies, so its more likely that new projects in these areas are seen as priorities.
It may be cultural as well – in the UK my observation over many years’ consulting is the culture is more “sell it first, we’ll work out how to deliver it then” than European comapnies. As one delegate at IoM told us, to not have its operational side ticking along like a well made clock is painful for for a Germanic or Nordic company.

Whetever the reasoning, it leads to an interesting conclusion – best practice on customer attraction areas is in our observation coming from the UK and US, best practice in operational areas from Europe. Customer service examples seem to be coming from everywhere (it was after all a Swede who invented the concept of Moments of Truth in the customer value chain).

On implementation of social business projects, it seems that the same lessons are being laerned no matter where you are in the world, in that:

Projects should address an area of real business need
Pilot first
Use enthusiasts from the Pilot process to help spread the new system
Nothing will take off easily without CXO involvement
Nothing will scale easily without IT involvement
These projects put pressure on existing organisation structures, so education, and careful and sensitive change management is required.

There is a lot of discusion about what future organisation structures could or should be, in the UK and Europe, but after speaking to Jane McConnell, who has done quite a lot of research on this issue, I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that it’s more the culture than the structure or anything else that make the major difference in an organisation. As one person noted at IoM, “Culture eats Strategy for breakfast” (Peter Drucker).

The speaker roster at our Social Enterprise Summit in November tries to reflect this observation, in that we have invlited some real “best of” practitioners from Europe and the UK to speak. We are also giving a 1 day workshop the day before where we will present a wide array of “best practice” case studies from all over Europe as well as the UK.

Update – interesting article over here by Gloria Lombardi on the Northern European view od Social collaboration

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