Build Your Own Garage by Bernd H. Schmitt & Laura Brown

Author:Bernd H. Schmitt & Laura Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE FREE PRESS
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

HOW FACILITIES AND WORKPLACES ARE CHANGING

Our traditional workstyle throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—since the Industrial Revolution and through the period of the administrator, manager, and service worker—has been to leave the house in the morning and to go to a plant or an office. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when many people worked at home—on a family farm or in a small shop attached to the house—the workplace was close at hand. In the age of mass production, the workplace became larger and more complex, housing a host of tangible facilities: both machinery and files, either paper or tape. Industrial Age workers were thus forced to go to the workplace.

Today, the workplace has become largely electronic. There has been a massive shift in hardware—in terms of what we use and where we use it. First, many workers are now able to take their workplace wherever they go. The workplace itself has become mobile because its key hardware and information reside on a laptop, on another mobile device, or perhaps even on a Web site. Now the workplace is everywhere, and we can always get what we need to get our work done. We no longer have to go to work—we take work with us.

This new mobility will have a major impact not just in terms of where employees work but also in terms of how they work—both alone and with others. The new technology has enabled a myriad of creative options in the way people may work together, and crucial choice for the productivity of an organization. However, these creative options are available only if everyone knows how to use the technology. In The Garage, everyone must achieve a certain standard of technological versatility. There is no excuse for not knowing how to process e-mails, find information online, or work with networked resources. Whether they know it or not, executives who delegate this knowledge to their assistants and ignore it themselves are slowly but surely rendering themselves obsolete. No one is “too senior” or “too strategically focused” to get their hands dirty with technology.

With these ideas in mind, let’s examine what developments are likely to come in the years ahead and how they can increase the productivity of organizations that can use them creatively.

First, efficient communication and data transfer across devices will become the norm. Right now, you are likely to have different software on different devices (mobile phones, portable devices, the laptop and desktop), and these different software products cannot communicate with each other, or at least not efficiently. This will change when XML (extensible mark-up language) becomes standard. Through XML, any smart device can communicate with any other easily. The organization must be ready to embrace this opportunity to streamline business and the worklives of its employees.

Second, integration across programs and across functions will increase dramatically. When you work now, you have to move in and out of programs, and to share information across various programs you engage in lots of duplication. This situation is going to

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