The history of social networking

Are our companies prepared for the new world of work?

I want to recommend you the research note of Tom Austin, from Gartner (www.gartner.com), published on 30 march 2010, “Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work: 2010- 2020”, that is available at http://www.sourcingprofessional.nl/share/files/45_209935/watchlist_continuing_changes_1746021.pdf

I will not reproduce the content of this interesting article, of course, but I want to highlight 5 of 10 changes in the nature of work that Gartner predicts will occur in our enterprises:

1. De-routinization of work
2. Working with the collective
3. Work Sketch-Ups
4. Hyperconnected
5. My Place

And  the last message of the document: “The challenge for IT professionals concerned with supporting (or enhancing the performance of) high-value work is going to be in moving from the metaphors of the 1980s (Office Automation), 1990s (Groupware), 2000s (Enterprise 2.0) into a brave new world characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, swarming and more.”

Now, the question we have to answer is “has yet our company evolved from the office automation to groupware and enterprise 2.0 in order to be prepared for this new challenge?”

Characterization of Digital Economy (Information Society)

How do we can define the digital economy (or information society)?

Looking for material for my PhD thesis, I found a very interesting reference from Tapscott D. (“Growing Up Digital. The Rise of the Net Generation” – McGraw-Hill, 1998) who singles out the twelve themes of the digital economy:

• Orientation to knowledge, so that the new society is actually a society of knowledge
• Digitization, the new society is a digital society
• Virtualization, physical things can become virtual things, from virtual ballot boxes to virtual jobs, the “Message Maestro” business center, corporations, mininet companies, government bodies, offices, shops, populations, or beer
• Molecularization, the concept of “mass” is replaced by the concept of “molecularized”
• Internet work, the new society is operating through cluster networks
• Disintermediation, between consumers and producers
• Convergence, computing, communications, and content industries are converging to become the leading economic sector
• Innovative nature, thriving creativity
• “Presumption”, via customization combining production and consumption
• Immediacy, this becomes a key factor, timeliness is everything for businesses and success
• Globalization, the economy of the new society has a global scale
• Dissonance, discordance issues are rising due to unprecedented social conflicts

Of course you can find several more definitions of Information Society (I invite you to review “The nature of the modern Information Society”, a work of A.D. Elyakov) but I considered that proposed by Tapscott was interesting.

I hope you will agree.