There is growing contention that the next industrial revolution will have knowledge work at its core, with a Wall Street Journal article today proclaiming that “the growth in the smartphone and cloud economy has bought automation to [this] sector that has traditionally been shielded from its effect”. There exists solid facts that in order to prepare knowledge workers for the rapid rise of the Network Economy and Social Enterprise 2.0. Whilst the previous industrial revolutions were easy to measure with clear signals on outputs (such as steel produced, number of automobiles on the road, proportion of homes with a PC and so forth); the emergent properties of the knowledge and network economy will mean that measuring progress itself will be dynamic, multi-variate and sophisticated. We will need to nurture the ability to sift through large amounts of data and become experts at leveraging tools such as predictive analysis, machine learning, neural networks and genetic algorithms. In essence, all of these will lead to the emergence of Augmented Intelligence: – and trust me, this notion will nullify any dystopian conceptions you would have of the future of AI itself!
What supports the dire need to harness strategies that will enable us to exist in this mutual zone of two concentric circles (one being technology, and the other being people process) is the acceptance of the fact that we can measure and prophesize the rise of smart machines and e-commerce.
The charts below reveal the omnipresence of mobile and web technologies and you can see their trajectories:
Altogether, we are going to see a rise in information networks, knowledge communities (communities of practice, task forces, agile distributed work forces and distributed organisations), new enterprise structures and digital business ecosystems. These will proliferate rapidly as nations adopt and nurture these as catalysts to economic development. We will also appreciate the growing importance of collaboration with like minded partners to develop next generation supply chains which come together for the purpose of creating markets (where the market cannot and does not exist in the absence of working together. Furthermore, we will need to understand that in today’s world, you need to adopt and also equally sanctify new mental modes of working. One of my favourites are below (adopted from Ken Thompson’s book: The Networked Enterprise (Competing For The Future Through Virtual Enterprise Networks)
