Jim Stikleather, Chief Innovation Officer, Dell Services, explains how the different macro trends affect the workplace and how businesses need to align their innovation strategies to these changes.

“The most profound impact of the 20th century enterprise was in the way we moved workers to where the work was. The most profound impact of the 21st century enterprise will be in the way we move work to where the workers are.” Let’s zoom in from Tom Koulopoulos’ quipping view, floating at 100,000 feet above the Earth, and look at some of the current macro trends already affecting the workplace at ground zero, including work mobility, IT consumerisation, the new normal, and cloud computing,.

Work Mobility

Work Mobility is a reflection of socio‐economic changes in the workforce, globalization, and profound demographic changes occurring in the workplace. The Millennial generation are technologically savvy, hyper‐connected and mobile. They communicate by using blogs, social networks, wikis and video sharing. Their family, friends, and co-workers are constantly in touch, and straddle the fence of “Weisure Time,” the blurred line between work and fun. They bring a different perspective to work and expect businesses to provide work mobility.

The enabling technologies behind work mobility include the Cloud, social networks and, ubiquitous bandwidth. The impact on traditional organisations is huge, affecting corporate culture and hiring practices. There’s no going back and no place to hide: the only tenable recommendation is to accept the wave of change that is coming and assess control structures that exploit how the millennial generation expect to work.

With proper governance in place, smart companies will expand the use of social networks. They will deepen their understanding of the implications of online persona behaviour and its interaction with employees, customers and suppliers. Central to going forward is the need to address business process management and organisational structures to meet the expectations of the millennial generation and balance individual choice with information security.

The New Normal: IT Consumerisation

If we look at the macro‐trend of IT Consumerisation, we’ll see that the introduction of new technologies has shifted from the workplace directly to consumers. This has been facilitated by the ease of use of Web 2.0 technologies, economies of scale and lower hardware costs. Another facet of IT Consumerisation is the increase in employee‐owned assets at work, Smartphones, Netbooks, and Tablets. This trend offers organisations many advantages including increased productivity, lower capital and support costs as these costs are shifted to employees. On the other hand, there are many barriers for business and government organisations, such as security, Digital Rights Management, and supporting diverse employee owned assets

The book, The New Normal by Hinssen and Fingar describes a concept that states we are now halfway to somewhere known as the digital revolution. Digital is no longer special, it’s now just normal! This will have an enormous impact on the way companies organise and communicate with customers—and the way they have to be organised internally. Organisations are increasingly faced with customers and consumers who no longer tolerate limitations in terms of pricing, timing, patience, depth, privacy, convenience and intelligence.

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is not a technological breakthrough as much as it is a new way to architect how IT delivers value. It merely provides an innovative computing platform to transform the way IT delivers value to the business.

So what exactly is the Cloud? In one sense, there’s no such thing as cloud computing. It’s not a new architecture; it’s not a new technology; it’s not a new methodology. It is however, a radically new delivery model. In short, the Cloud is the computer.

Projects, ideas, dreams and world‐changing thoughts can all be launched using cloud computing. It truly makes for a flat, resource un‐constrained world. The only limit is your imagination, so think of cloud computing not as a stand‐alone skill or feature but as an integral part of the workplace that workers of the future are going to encounter. As cloud computing gets more mainstream, the barrier to conceiving new ideas and bringing them to the customer will go down dramatically. This is the sweet spot that innovative application developers should be targeting. CIOs are extremely eager to see if the potential of the Cloud can be transformed into tangible business value that will help them deal with three extremely pressing issues: moving faster, reducing the cost of infrastructure and increasing the amount spent on innovation as a result of reducing IT maintenance spending. Many CIOs say they are still spending upwards of 70 percent or 80 percent of their IT budgets on maintenance. As a result, very little money is left in the IT budget to fund new and vital customer‐facing projects because it all gets sucked up in keeping the lights on. But the real value in the Cloud is the levels of innovation it will enable.

Cloud computing is a big game changer for businesses; they will only need to make minimal hardware and software investments to achieve a new level of IT cost savings as the entire spectrum of business technologies and services becomes accessible in the Cloud. But it won’t be just cost savings. After all, a company cannot save its way to market dominance. In this sense, IT doesn’t matter, but innovative business processes do. Cloud Computing makes it possible to create new “business operations platforms” that will allow companies to change their business models and collaborate in powerful new ways with their customers, suppliers and trading partners—stuff that simply wasn’t practical before.

Over time, as more and more Cloud services are developed, companies can avoid the total re‐writing of existing applications to fit the Cloud. But even more critical for companies is the pressing need to choreograph and then manage complete end‐to‐end business processes in multi-company Business Networks. They want to manage “situational business processes” for rapid, innovation that spans multi‐company value chains.

Business Process Management (BPM) is what sets “enterprise cloud computing” apart from “consumer cloud computing.” Because the average end‐to‐end business process involves over 20 companies in any given value chain, multi‐company BPM is essential to business innovation and maintaining competitive advantage. Bringing BPM capabilities to the Cloud enables multiple companies to share a common BPM environment and fully participate in an overall end‐to‐end business process.

Putting the Macro Trends All Together

Taken together, the macro trends we’ve discussed represent an exponential change curve that has just taken off like a rocket. As we have no prior framework, we must begin anew to build up the tacit information we need to apply to each component, and to the whole.

Each decade or so it seems there is a seismic shift in information technology. Such shifts change not only the impact on business capabilities, but also which technology companies become the leaders.