Flexible and Mobile Working

1. Flexible and Mobile Working Darren Strange Office Product Marketing Manager, UK Information Worker Business Group Microsoft Ltd http://www.microsoft.com/office

2. Flexible and mobile working • Attract and retain the best staff • Increasingly a differentiator • Henley Research • “managers are failing to adapt” • Working time directive • Outlook and Exchange

3. Flexible and Mobile Working Dr Carsten Sørensen London School of Economics and Political Science Department of Information Systems mobility@lse http://mobility.lse.ac.uk

4. Outline • Technology • Work • Trust Mobile-

5. Vaio Earthmate iPod Hiptop SPV Nokia 3G xda 2 Blackberry Gameboy Media Center WiFi TabletPC Fossil iPaq Over 24 million laptops were sold in the United States alone in 2003

6. From here to ubiquity Smartphone Laptop PC Mainframe WANs LANs Islands Nodes 52 million business mobile phones in Europe 2003

7. Applications Infrastructure Mobility Take it with you! Convergence Mass Scale PC + TV + Telephone We all have one!

8. Office workers in the wild

9. Field-workers creating offices

10. Declining cost of communication Small & Independent Large & Centralised Large & Decentralised Market Farm Factory What does it take and is UK ready, willing and able?

11. Between Hierarchy & Chaos Networks create need for interaction management Hierarchy manages interaction

13. The future of work • Ever-closer knitting of people and information technology • Declining cost of communication • … but that comes at a price! • Bill Gates receives 4 million emails each day • From command-and-control to collaboration • Innovate, connect, effectivise and outsource

14. Productivity in the service society • Challenge of the industrial society largely solved • Optimising the manufacturing supply chain • Managing factory work • Administration & logistics • Challenge of the service society • Optimising the knowledge supply chain • Managing knowledge work • Services & innovation

15. Set information workers free! • Office • Cubicle • Open-plan • Hot-desking • Field • Clients • Colleagues • Home • Beach?

18. Local and Remote Mobility Mobile Local Working Mobile Working Repair engineers Medical professionals Local Mobility Office Working Remote Working Virtual team / teleworker Call-centre worker Stationary Co-located Remote Remote Mobility

19. Context is king! • Knowledge workers innovate at the point of contact • Services produced and consumed where the clients and collaborators are • Extending the reach of the organisation • Unleash the might of the infrastructure! • Trust is essential bridge between mobile individual and organisation

20. Managing invisible colleagues • 1000 years of socialisation when co-located • Managing people that are always somewhere else doing their job • Working with people looking over your digital shoulder • Trust is accepting vulnerability based on positive expectations of the intentions of others irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other part • Front-stage and back-stage (presenteism) • Build trust through other means than directly observing behaviour

21. Ways we interact Shouting in a meeting or on the telephone Electronic mail with request to urgently reply Obtrusive Discretely leaving a trace, such as a PostIt note Humming, gazing, thinking aloud Unobtrusive Ephemeral Persistent

23. Trust and technology • Efficiency through modelling aspects of work in technology • Alternatively inefficient chaos of emails and conversations • Invisible work made visible • Essential for distributed coordination of work • Establish self-organising communities or practice • Essential for managing work “at arms length” • The danger of codifying knowledge work

24. A new deal • Knowledgeworkers in the field must trust managers • Managers wherever they are (also in the field?) must trust workers • Measure of observation can be circumvented • Mutual trust a necessity for efficiency of technologies representing organisational arrangements and communication inside systems • Everywhere to go and nowhere to hide!