By the time Australia’s fast-broadband network arrives, we’ll already have seen another wave of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” sweep across its industrial landscape.
This will have been fuelled in part by the passing of a recession, which will hopefully be a long way behind us by then. We will also be well into a movement of “accelerated sustainability” initiatives whose public pressures will change the ways in which organisations act in respect of the environment. (As its champion, I write about this at Accelerated Sustainability.)
The more important aspect of this latter movement will be that it is predicated on the widespread use of what are today known as Enterprise 2.0 tools, but which by then will simply be known as tools, whose technologies will change the shape of work itself.
The adjustment to these tools’ use could be as damaging for some organisations as recession itself, as their successful implementation requires new ways of thinking about management.
As in other waves of technological change over the last 20 years or so, organisations will find that getting ahead of the tools themselves is not just a matter of buying them, dropping them on workers’ desks and hoping they will use them appropriately. To date there has been little evidence that user adoption in the workplace works quite like that. We must only witness some of the failures in implementations of enterprise resource planning systems to see this.
Where change is involved and imposed from the top, workplace users tend to stick to the processes and procedures for getting the job done that they know best. But what does work in effecting successful change - and the academic literature of IT, HR and operations management is crammed with evidence to support this assertion - is for users themselves to become part of the design of the change.
Yet, culturally, bringing workers onboard in the early stages of planning change remains anathema in many workplaces. Managers like it that way. But, when markets and customers demand faster change and collaboration is the only way it can be delivered, this is where the change we are likely to see will be most evident.
Waves of creative destruction are propelled by better ways of doing things. They lower costs, introduce new efficiencies, and improve effectiveness and reach to better satisfy customers. They break the mould of what passed before and in so doing reshape and typically reduce the influence of incumbents.
It is sometimes observed that looking backwards the way we perceive the passing of decades and the coming to force of the new one happens sometime after its actual chronological passing. The 1960s, it is said, really began with the arrival of the Beatles in 1962-3, and not at the end of 1959.
Thus, although we are now more than a decade into the new century, only now may be about to begin letting go of 20th century modes of management. Innovation, as United States management academic Gary Hamel contends, aided by collaborative technologies, can at last find its way into management itself. This will be no small task.
The early adopters and winners in the new age won’t be who we expect and by the time fast broadband rolls around, we’ll likely be buying from and working within a whole new generation of innovative and collaboratively driven enterprises whose adoption of the tools of the web will be utterly pervasive.
For organisations not born and bred on this diet, this might be a difficult change to swallow.
This will have been fuelled in part by the passing of a recession, which will hopefully be a long way behind us by then. We will also be well into a movement of “accelerated sustainability” initiatives whose public pressures will change the ways in which organisations act in respect of the environment. (As its champion, I write about this at Accelerated Sustainability.)
The more important aspect of this latter movement will be that it is predicated on the widespread use of what are today known as Enterprise 2.0 tools, but which by then will simply be known as tools, whose technologies will change the shape of work itself.
The adjustment to these tools’ use could be as damaging for some organisations as recession itself, as their successful implementation requires new ways of thinking about management.
As in other waves of technological change over the last 20 years or so, organisations will find that getting ahead of the tools themselves is not just a matter of buying them, dropping them on workers’ desks and hoping they will use them appropriately. To date there has been little evidence that user adoption in the workplace works quite like that. We must only witness some of the failures in implementations of enterprise resource planning systems to see this.
Where change is involved and imposed from the top, workplace users tend to stick to the processes and procedures for getting the job done that they know best. But what does work in effecting successful change - and the academic literature of IT, HR and operations management is crammed with evidence to support this assertion - is for users themselves to become part of the design of the change.
Yet, culturally, bringing workers onboard in the early stages of planning change remains anathema in many workplaces. Managers like it that way. But, when markets and customers demand faster change and collaboration is the only way it can be delivered, this is where the change we are likely to see will be most evident.
Waves of creative destruction are propelled by better ways of doing things. They lower costs, introduce new efficiencies, and improve effectiveness and reach to better satisfy customers. They break the mould of what passed before and in so doing reshape and typically reduce the influence of incumbents.
It is sometimes observed that looking backwards the way we perceive the passing of decades and the coming to force of the new one happens sometime after its actual chronological passing. The 1960s, it is said, really began with the arrival of the Beatles in 1962-3, and not at the end of 1959.
Thus, although we are now more than a decade into the new century, only now may be about to begin letting go of 20th century modes of management. Innovation, as United States management academic Gary Hamel contends, aided by collaborative technologies, can at last find its way into management itself. This will be no small task.
The early adopters and winners in the new age won’t be who we expect and by the time fast broadband rolls around, we’ll likely be buying from and working within a whole new generation of innovative and collaboratively driven enterprises whose adoption of the tools of the web will be utterly pervasive.
For organisations not born and bred on this diet, this might be a difficult change to swallow.
