Does The Future of Work Point To A Quantified Enterprise ?

A lire sur: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140105114844-2143418-does-the-future-of-work-point-to-a-quantified-enterprise

January 05, 2014

Big Data, Internet of Things, Enterprise Social, the Quantified Self. They all have implications for organizations in 2014 but what's the link ?

Last year I wrote an article about The Enterprise Social Equation. In it I explained how trust and transparency will likely be the new currency in this connected age as consumers and corporates engage with each other on deeper levels than before.

Living in a cynical world you’ll begin to question just why businesses are being friendly and socializing with you. It’s at that critical point that the transparency of the connection and engagement is perhaps the most important factor in the equation.

Data-Darwinism

Om Malik at GigaOM wrote about Data Darwinism and the Future of Work where he explained his thoughts about the future of a quantified society as we move to consume and generate more personal data than ever before, where services and employment become more ‘on-demand’ and those with reputation as a measure of that quantification will become king.

In the industrial era, labor unrest came when the workers felt that the owners were profiting wrongfully from them. I wonder if in the connected age, we are going to see labor unrest when folks are unceremoniously dropped from the on-demand labor pool.

What are the labor laws in a world where workforce is on demand? And an even bigger question is how are we as a society going to create rules, when data, feedback and, most importantly, reputation are part an always-shifting equation ?

A Quantified Enterprise

There’s a lot of talk of reputation, quantification, transparency and trust. But this is all been from a consumer generated perspective and it got me thinking. Where we are now moving towards a hypothesized 'Quantified Society' will we also see a 'Quantified Enterprise' ? A organization built on all of those concepts but both consumer and employee has access to that transparency and reputation ?

• Would it mean an organization is only as good as the sum of its collective employee reputation ?
• Would it mean that consumers could very well choose who they deal with on the inside based on individual employee quantification ?
• And vice-versa, will companies choose just who they want as a customer based on their transparency and reputation ?

To a certain extent some of this already happens, life insurance companies rate new business based on personal risk factors but what if they took into account a lot more quantified data ? Or vice-versa, rejected applications based on the lack of ? Om’s vision of data-darwinism may very well come true.

From the outside to inside

But this also translates from the inside. Should you open your internal network to the consumer, the idea that using the knowledge capital built up from using enterprise social networks and letting consumers and clients have access. What better way to promote the intellectual capital you have than exposing that to the client to get access to directly ?

This would add credence to the second point I made above but there are ramifications too numerous to go into detail here.

Transparency, reputation and fair play

It could go either way, and each point has its own impact on society and the future of work itself. As Om asks, “Does human decency and sense of fair play shift to the online realm as well ?” but the sticking point I have with this is that as we are all becoming hyper-connected coupled with the emergence of the Internet of Everything, the sense of fair play diminishes as we relinquish the human side of business and personal lives to generated data.

Only time will tell whether the age of quantification will lead us down a better future or a more divided one.

Posted by:

Theo Priestley