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Welcome to our annual round of crystal ball
gazing. We've read the runes and the chicken entrails from the
company Christmas dinner, and we came up with a number of
prophecies for the year ahead. Here's our six of the best.
(Neither Flexibility nor any member of
its staff can be held responsible for the accuracy of these
prophecies, nor for the outcome of any speculative investments
that you may make as a result of reading them...)
Prophecy number 1
Flexible working will keep
lawyers in work in the latter part of 2003
Not too much risk in this
prediction. Employment legislation coming into effect in
April gives people at work the right to request flexible work if
their caring responsibilities demand it. Employers are not
required to agree, but to take the request seriously. And it
doesn't apply to all workplaces.
This recipe for confusion,
though a well-intended piece of legislative progress for
flexibility, can do no harm to employment law specialists.
We predict that as no-one on employment tribunals, or appeals
panels, or in the House of Lords, the European Courts or
galactic tribunals etc has a frame of reference for any of this,
then legal precedent will be developed in the time-honoured
British way. By fudge, muddle, incoherence, reference to
existing but irrelevant statutes, and at great expense.
Prophecy number 2
There will be a Bandwidth
Boom. But it won't be enough.
Broadband (see our
glossary)
promises many things. According to BT's latest adverts this
includes rhinos rampaging in the street and superannuated pop
stars hanging from lampposts, as all kinds of possibilities are
let loose.
For the world of flexible
work, bandwidth does make a difference. remote working, for
example, is much more viable with a decent broadband connection
than with a dial-up modem connection. But it needs to be cheaper
than it is, and needs to be more universally available. There
are signs that this is going to happen. We're not going to see
the hoped-for competition driving down prices, but the few major
providers there are will be offering cheaper and better
services. government agencies will also be putting their
weight behind getting broadband out to rural and disadvantaged
areas.
However, the more attractive
and usable the services become, the more we will demand content
that devours the available bandwidth. For organisations
implementing flexible working, the rule is that you'll always
under-estimate the bandwidth you need. As increasing
numbers of staff work flexibly, and as they work with bigger and
more bandwidth-hungry applications, your IT department will be
running to stand still. And there'll be increasing demand in
particular as a result of Prophecy Number 3.
Prophecy number 3
The future is pictures.
Moving ones.
We actually first made this
prophecy for Christmas 1997. You might say we put our head too
far above the parapet. I prefer to say we took the longer
view...that's the beauty of flexible prophecy. Anything that
fails to materialise can be the result of being too far-sighted,
rather than just wrong. And as we have about 30,00 extra readers
now, probably most of you won't have seen this before...
All the signs are there.
Entertainment is booming over broadband connections - movie
trailers, pop videos, interactive gaming. And it's all highly
visual. Quality is increasingly good, but not yet up to TV or
cinema. But where it does score is the degree of control that
the user has over what is seen and when. Outside of the
media industries, the world of work has been very slow to pick
up on the significance of these developments for communicating
both internally and with customers.
And the other key area for
moving pictures is in online conferencing - as you can see in
these articles on
videoconferencing and
webconferencing.
These technologies can give a real edge to flexible location
working, and will become far more standard by the later part of
2003.
But in the short term, we
predict that in most organisations this will be the case: if it
moves, your network manager will block it! (That's Prophecy
Number 3(a).) Many organisations already suffer from
non-strategic IT policies that prevent staff from doing anything
useful online. Lobby and protest, and present the business case
for getting pictorial. If a picture paints a thousand
words....and all that.
Prophecy Number 4
The public sector will make some real rather
than conference-presentation-bullet-points progress in flexible
working
What with e-government projects and work-life
balance initiatives, there are more flexible
working/modernisation working papers, policy papers, steering
groups and roundtables than you can shake a stick at. We
truly take our hats off to the handful of departments, agencies
and authorities who have actually done anything practical.
We expect, however, after several years of
planning and spin that some real progress will be made in 2003.
Here are some indicators of what would be significant
developments:
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A government department announces it has 1000 or
more teleworkers
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A local authority can demonstrate that it's
social workers (or trading standards officers, or educational
welfare officers, etc) are 40% more productive by using mobile
flexible working techniques
-
A politician uses videoconferencing for
something other than publicity
-
An e-government project is understood by over
50% of the staff to be involved in it
-
A police officer records a witness statement.
Voice recognition transcribes the statement into an electronic
record. All evidence is similarly transcribed, or typed in only
once, to a single record set capable of output as required to
all systems in the criminal justice system. All previous cases
and investigations are linked with this record. Prosecution and
defence teams have online secure access to all relevant
information. In a court case, all evidence from the
investigation is in principle available to the judge and the
jury. New statements in the trial are recorded and are similarly
available for judge and jury to refer to, including online video
of the proceedings. The judge can confine his summing up to
points of law, rather than sending the jury into a coma with 16
hours of turgidly repeating everything they've already seen,
heard and read.
But maybe this is an indicator for the year 2300, rather than
2003....
Maybe in these indicators we are over-optimistic
about the possible progress - but we're sure moves in these
directions will be taking place.
Prophecy number 5
New portable devices will
revolutionise mobile flexible working
This all sounds rather
techie, does it not? But the availability of new portable
devices - such as the tablet PC and new forms of wizzy wireless
connection, is only part of the story. The key is using them to
support new business processes and working practices to
eliminate duplication and wasteful practices.
The mobile worker, whether a
sales person or a local government field worker, is frequently
forced to be less productive because they have to keep returning
to the office to gather information and schedules, to maintain
records, access emails etc. Even when supplied with technology
that can make applications on the move operate seamlessly with
office systems, many field workers are constrained by cultural
factors that require them to return frequently to HQ.
Expect this to change in
2003!
Prophecy number 6
The "e-" prefix will lose
favour, and other letters from the alphabet will struggle to
take its place
Unlike the French, who have a pontifical panel
to decide what words should be used, in English anything goes as
long as enough people understand it. We can import words, we can
make them up. We allow bad usage to become standard usage.
In the case of new technologies and new ways of working, there
is endless scope for linguistic innovation.
It's also an area of management and academic
fashion and fad. Favourite words and phrases come and go. We've
had telecommuting and telework and teleservices and telecommerce
and telemedicine (etc) give way over the past 2-3 years to the
concept of e-work, e-services, e-commerce and all the e-
cousins.
It's like ICT (information and communication
technologies), which has enjoyed a kind of standardisation
mainly due to academic, government and inter-governmental policy
documents and research briefs. However, variants such as CIT,
ITC, and IST survive. (And to the French they're TIC or NTIC,
just to be un-English.)
But every dog has it's day, and in 2003 will see
e- words become old hat. What will replace them? Our
betting is on another letter from the alphabet. We've already
seen m- for mobile technologies, as in m-content, etc. And which
letter? How about f- for flexible? We like that. Soon we can all
be f-workers.
But there's another school of thought that says
we'll know when e-work comes of age. It will just be called
"work", and it will be normal.
Too soon for that, we say. Save that one for
2030.
So that's all we'll let you see for now
through our temporal telescope. Hold us to account a year from
now. And in the meantime, we wish all of our readers all the
very best for Christmas and for a fulfilling, happy and
prosperous New Year.
Andy Lake (on keyboard)
Bob Crichton (pictured above on telescope).
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