We all try to keep at least 2 balls in the air: to satisfy workplace responsibilities while keeping our personal career on track. With this in mind, it is interesting what the Canadian government report "Making Career Sense of Labour Market Information" has to say about the impact of technology on the workplace:

"While globalization and other trends ... have a huge impact on workers and the labour market, the changes are small compared to the radical changes brought about by the incremental innovations in technology. Job forecasters believe those who can figure out how the revolution in technology affects hiring practices in their field will be in a position to take advantage of many opportunities."

Is grasp of technology really the key factor when it comes to personal success? I feel this may be only part of the true situation.

In 1995, the management thinker Charles Handy coined an interesting term in his book "Beyond Certainty" (of which you can find a summary here). Handy described the worker of the future as a "portfolio person". A portfolio person does not have a job, as such. Rather, they have various skills, gained through experience, for which they seek customers on an independent basis. Their customers may come from one or many organizations.

Handy sees the key personal abilities needed to survive such a lifestyle as being self-learning and self-management. One might think risk-tolerance would also be vital for a portfolio person. However, these days there is so little job security in any organization that in some ways you can have a more secure and stable working life as a portfolio person, who has a well-stocked CV and knows how to use it.

For many years I have seen myself as a portfolio person (you can find my career history here). Yet now, when I look back, I feel the description to be misleading.

Yes, the various different things I have done, particular over the last decade, have contributed to my personal skill base. And while I do have a job (as CTO of Role Modellers, "The Human Interaction Management Company", responsible for the free HumanEdj collaboration software) I also engage in a fairly diverse set of other work activities. These include, for example:

• Writing books, articles, and so on
• Speaking on various topics, not all of which are related to HumanEdj
• Academic research
• Peer review
• Teaching
• Consultancy
• Mentoring
• Joint ventures
• Writing music
• Performing, conducting and recording music

You would think that this range of activity makes me an archetypal portfolio person. Yet the description doesn't feel right. I did not get involved in most of the things I have done - lets call them all projects, for want of a better classifier - because of my skill set. Rather, it was usually because these projects intersected in some way with things I had already done. Often, some of the people had also been involved in previous projects - if not, there was usually some other, less direct, connection such as having the same corporate sponsor.

With this in mind, it is easy to see that my portfolio of skills is not what determines my future activities. There are lots of people who do a number of the same activities as me. However, the network of connections I have established over the years is more unique. The connections are not just with people and organizations. Some connections are with fields - for instance, someone interested generally in the field of project management might end up knocking on my door because they make a connection between agile project management and Human Interaction Management, and a Google search for the combined terms turns up my personal Web page.

Lets follow this train of thought a bit further. Returning to Handy, he proposed that the organization of the future would be a "corporate community", an "existential corporation" that employed some of its staff and engaged with others as necessary on a short-term basis. This is now common practice in large organizations, that has become institutionalized in recent years with the rise of offshore outsourcing. However, while this works fine in the short-term, there are medium- and long-term problems with offshore outsourcing that are now starting to come to light. Vendor lock-in is one - when the only source of expertise in a critical system, or set of administrative practices, has gone outside the organization. Business agility is another problem. Outsourcing is now such a competitive market that vendors routinely make loss-leading bids. Hence it is an unattractive option for the vendor to invest much time and effort in providing innovative enhancements as time goes on - rather, they need to spend as long as possible doing routinized work, in order to make up for the losses they sustained in the first years of the contract.

Hence, I suspect that the next step in organizational structure is for a more complex engagement between organizational service consumers and individual service vendors. In such an engagement, services are supplied via a mediating organization, but this is not a faceless corporation that bodyshops to the client anyone it can find with suitable skills. Rather, the mediating organization is an evolution of Handy's existential corporation, in which the staff may not be full-time employed, but nevertheless have an ongoing relationship that includes long-term obligations on both sides. A typical example of such a modern organization might be the Eclipse Gang, a product development partner that Role Modellers has used for Eclipse plugin development. The Eclipse Gang is a virtual organization:

"The Eclipse Gang are UK-based software developers, all highly skilled and experienced in the Eclipse platform and associated technologies. We work as a virtual team to develop leading-edge products with Eclipse."
[Eclipse Gang]

With such a service supplier, one gains the advantages of outsourcing (economies of scale, no need for training, alleviation of management responsibility, and so on) without sacrificing the personal engagement you get from permanent staff - since the mediating organization provides this engagement for you, and makes it clearly visible.

TAKE AWAY

As we move forwards into a new world of work, there are challenges both for service consumers and for service suppliers.

For organizational service consumers, the offshore outsourcing model is starting to show signs of deep strain. People are now experimenting with "homeshoring", but in the end the problems will remain - that you need commitment on both sides, structured via business processes that implement a mutually supportive relationship. Human Interaction Management can help here, but you cannot remove real-world complexity by any means.

For individual service suppliers, it is not enough to keep up with technology changes. Although this in itself is hard work, more is necessary - in particular, to ensure that you have a stable personal web of connections. These connections are more than names in a LinkedIn directory - they are ongoing working relationships, into which both sides must invest time and effort if they are to stay useful.

It is not simple to maintain the relationships described above. Hence, as time goes on, I expect that more and more "virtual organizations" will spring up in order to make it easier, such as the Eclipse Gang. Such suppliers may well be the future, not only for your organization, but for you personally. If so, technology will change to meet the demands of this new way of working, beyond LinkedIn and Groove to tools such as HumanEdj, which help deal with collaborative business processes that may loosely span organizations, but tightly connect individuals.

Posted by keithhb in Career | Permalink | Comments (0)