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Anytime, anyplace.WORK HAS CHANGED. PEOPLE USED TO GO TO THE OFFICE, SIT
AT A DESK AND DO ALL THEIR WORK THERE. NOT ANYMORE:
DIGITIZ ATION HAS ADDED A NEW DIMENSION TO HOW WE WORK .
“EVERY DAY” HAS BECOME “ANY TIME”. “HERE” HAS BECOME
“ANYPL ACE”. WE ALREADY VIEW MOBILIZ ATION AS THE COMPLETE
DIGITIZ ATION OF WORK . BUT WHEN TIME AND PL ACE CONVERGE
IN THE REAL AND VIRTUAL WORLDS, WE NEED FIRM RULES
TO MANAGE THIS NEW FREEDOM PROPERLY.
Mobility
Work 4.0
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ASSIGNED DESKS DIED SURPRISINGLY QUICKLY. First, the lap-top arrived – now you can work anywhere! Their fate was fi nally sealed when cell phones morphed into smartphones.
And now? Do you still make your own phone calls or do you let your jacket handle it? – Wait, what?
These innocent questions may still throw you off today, but you won’t even hear them tomorrow. It’s all a matter of looking ahead. As Claudia Nemat, Member of the Deutsche Telekom AG Board of Management, Europe and Technology, put it, “There’s no law re-quiring you to use smartphones for all your telecommunications. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a wonderful invention, just as the rotary phone was in its day. But one day, they will both end up in a museum for our grandchildren to admire.”
One company that’s looking ahead is Levi Strauss, the jeans manufacturer. It is already developing fabrics that integrate touch interactivity into trousers and jackets. They can send commands to smartphones or other devices so that users can make calls or send text messages. That means, according to Nemat, “telecommunica-tions will increasingly become a feature of our clothing”. The trend will even extend beyond clothing, driven by augmented reality, 3D printing and other technological innovations, and include virtual reality headsets, smart headphones, bracelets and rings.
Initiatives like Fashion Fusion, which Deutsche Telekom has incorporated into its long-term innovation strategy, are anything but playthings, as Jan Mantel will attest. “People and things – from machines to smart clothing – will form a relationship at home and work that will change the way organizations think, operate and act in every industry.” The Crisp Research analyst recommends “driving the use of mobile devices and wearables across the enterprise”. And there are excellent reasons to do so.
Germany quietly crossed a big threshold recently. According to a study conducted by HTW Berlin, a research university, 54 per-cent of productive employees in Germany were mainly or exclu-sively mobile workers at the start of the year. This marked the fi rst time that people who worked “solely or primarily at a particular sta-tionary workstation” were in the minority.
FROM WORKPLACE TO WORKSPACEThis change would be impossible without digital workstations pow-ered by a combination of artifi cial intelligence, software-defi ned products and increasingly sophisticated voice control on the one hand, and IT applications such as the cloud, big data and predic-tive analytics on the other. For Experton advisor Wolfgang Schwab, the terms “digital workplace”, “Workplace 4.0” or “future work-place” are misnomers. Instead, he talks about a “digital workspace where virtually all areas of our conventional desktop world and the modern mobile domain come together”. It sounds like a gradual process, but the infrastructural requirements would make many a CIO break out in a cold sweat. The truth about virtual desktop infra-structure and application streaming, management, security and mobility solutions is this: quite a few organizations believe they can handle the growing integration requirements themselves, without any outside help. They’re mistaken, unfortunately.
54% of productive employees in
Germany are mainly or
exclusively mobile workers.
25megatrends have been identifi ed by the
University of St. Gallen that will massively change how we work in the next 30 years.
You can see all the megatrends at:www.t-systems.com/survey/work-4-0
<Copy> Thomas van Zütphen
“THERE’S NO LAW REQUIRING YOU TO
USE SMARTPHONES FOR ALL YOUR
TELECOMMUNICATIONS. INSTEAD,
OUR CLOTHES WILL INCREASINGLY
TAKE OVER THIS FUNCTION.”
Claudia Nemat, Member of the Deutsche Telekom AG Board of Management,
Europe and Technology
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most importantly, meet its own rigorous security standards for mobility management. The same “full mobility, maximum secu-rity” philosophy was behind the solution’s implementation at CORPUS SIREO, one of the top real estate asset managers in Germany and Europe. “Being an innovative mobile-fi rst company, we saw a signifi cant improvement in security, performance, IT in-tegration and end-user support when we combined Mobilelron’s EMM suite with Deutsche Telekom’s deployment model,” con-cluded Jens Gruse, Director IT at CORPUS SIREO.
Other solutions that support real and virtual employee mobil-ity include the electronic land register or Teamwire, a social col-laboration solution adopted by health insurer BARMER. Electronic land registers, which are already being used by land registry offi ces in the States of Schleswig-Holstein and Baden-Württemberg, provide mobile access to land register data so offi ce staff can process requests – and customers can look up information – faster and more responsively while maintaining
23% of people worldwide say that virtual
interactions can be “just as good” as
being there in person. *
88% of organizations will invest as much or more in digitizing their business processes in 2016 as they did in previous years.
What will Work 4.0 change at organizations?Digitization will signifi cantly change our work processes and the way we work. Change is coming; the only question is what will change, and how quickly. First, what we actually do at work will evolve as intelligent systems replace many human ac-tivities. Second, we will see the emergence of new forms of col-laboration that are more digital, mobile, effi cient and connected. Deutsche Telekom and the University of St. Gallen looked at all the advances brought about by Work 4.0 and then projected how they will aff ect the way we work in the future. Exponential change is a feature of digitization, so organiza-tions have to address trends and harbingers of change as early as possible. Technical change happens at an ever-accelerating pace, but behavioral shifts take much more time. If organiza-tions want to seize the opportunities presented by digital trans-formation, they have to devote at least as much attention to the employee side of digitization as they do to technology. That doesn’t mean, however, that they can neglect the bigger techno-logical picture or its main technological themes: connectivity, platforms and data security.
What are the key capabilities of a digital organization? I would describe networked collaboration as one, if not the, key capability of a digital organization. “You and me”, our in-house answer to Facebook, plays a major role. But so does fl exible, mobile working – which brings us to the Future Work program. Here, the focus is on technology: unifi ed communications, mobile device management and security as a service. These are all good things, but they represent only part of Future Work. We also need supporting offi ce concepts: open plan offi ces, desk sharing, mobile and activ-
ity-based working. Mobile working, after all, is about enabling me to collaborate with diff erent people in diff erent roles wherever and whenever I need. There’s another aspect to Future Work that is at least equally important: the neces-sary, accompanying change in leadership. In Future Work, fl exible work hours and workplace rules will soon be the norm. Trust-based self-management by and for employees will replace conventional top-down, control-based manage-ment. So we have several aspects coming together – and that’s what makes it really exciting. I am convinced that or-ganizations that can reconcile all three aspects will succeed in signifi cantly improving employee satisfaction and productivity.
How can human resource departments support this development? I believe that HR can make three main contributions. First, it can put workforce transformation on the agenda. A business transformation will only succeed if I can qualitatively and quantitatively change the workforce to support transforma-tion. That’s something that has to be developed strategically, just like technology. Second, HR can develop expertise in advising managers on what they do and how they do it. Third, it can strategically improve the leadership and corporate culture and drive necessary systemic changes in employee behavior. You see, Work 4.0 is not an end in itself. It is supposed to make organizations and employees more productive and successful. But I believe that you can only achieve and maintain this balancing act if you build on four equally stable pillars: trust-based management, fl exible work environments and secure and highly available co-working.
Interview
“ADDING MORE TO NEW EMPLOYEE SKILLS.”
Georg Pepping, Director of Human Resources, T-Systems
“Devising a DIY solution,” warns Experton in its fi rst-ever Digital Workspace Vendor Benchmark 2016, “is probably economically inferior to managed services or wholesale outsourcing in the vast majority of cases.” The increasing demands of the digital transfor-mation process and the simultaneous decrease in staffi ng levels will put even more pressure on business.
MEGATRENDS HIT THE JOB MARKETBut that’s not all: futurologists at the University of St. Gallen have identifi ed no fewer than 25 emerging megatrends that will shape the next generation of work. Megatrends, we may recall, are devel-opments that take up to 30 years to completely unfold, but that im-mediately start to affect every area of our lives and jobs and cannot be stopped by anyone or anything.
The researchers’ theses sound like a nightmare for managers at various departments – from production to sales to HR (see inter-view with Georg Pepping, p. 17):Thesis 1: Tomorrow’s jobs have no clear organizational allocation. Thesis 2: Machines learn to think, become intelligent and essen-tially omnipresent through networking. Thesis 3: Permanent employees lose importance while globally available skills of specialized experts gain importance.
So who within the organization will be responsible for structuring, moderating and implementing everything? Who will organize the work amid constantly changing teams, managers, work sites and work hours? Who will integrate all the important IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes for physical, virtual, mobile and cloud-based workspaces? These are remarkable examples – and they cover only three of the 25 theses that the Swiss univer-sity has proposed together with Shareground, Deutsche Telekom’s innovation unit.
GERMAN INDUSTRY HALFWAY TO FINISH LINEGerman organizations can take heart from the Digital Offi ce Index (DOI) published by Bitkom, Germany’s leading IT industry associa-tion. The paper, presented at CeBIT 2016, concludes, “The stage has been set for a digitized working world.” The study describes where organizations have already digitized their processes and where they can still improve. The current DOI of Germany’s industry is 50, where 0 is “not digitized at all” and 100 stands for “com-pletely digitized”. While that means Germany is only halfway to a digital offi ce, it also proves that companies have read the writing on the wall. 42 percent of the 1,108 fi rms surveyed intend to keep their investment in digitization high; 46 percent said they planned to invest even more in digitizing their business and administrative processes in 2016. The investment pays off, too, according to orga-nizations that have taken this route.
All told, 74 percent of the companies say that the implementa-tion of new software solutions “has had a positive impact on the performance of internal offi ce and administrative processes”. At the same time, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) state that they “signifi -cantly improved customer satisfaction by optimizing processes”.
One example is Xella, a building materials company. Its nearly 7,000 employees in 20 countries have been using T-Systems’ En-terprise Mobility Management (EMM) services since this summer. The solution builds on suite technology that was developed by Mobilelron, a strategic partner of the Deutsche Telekom subsid-iary, and then deployed in a private cloud. Now, Xella can scale up mobile device management, improve productivity by empow-ering employees to easily manage their devices themselves and,
* GFK, http://www.gfk.com/global-studies/global-study-overview/
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strong security. “An electronic land register adds real value for ordinary citizens, especially when it comes to closings, fi nancing and the entry of security rights and ownership,” said Elmar Stein-bacher, Undersecretary of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Justice and European Affairs.
SECURITY TAKES CENTER STAGEThe growing convergence of real and virtual mobility at the work-place, in employee productivity and in maintaining a work-life bal-ance has put one aspect at center stage: security. “These environments have to be highly secure in order to make ‘anytime, anywhere, any device’ modes of work reliable and securely avail-able,” said Klaus Holzhauser, the Managing Director of Pierre Audoin Consultants in Germany (see interview, p. 20). This is par-ticularly true for health insurance carriers where employees use social collaboration platforms to improve their productivity and drive the internal transfer of knowledge. BARMER, for example, has ensured security by having T-Systems exclusively host and operate its Teamwire solution as a managed service at well-pro-tected, ISO-certifi ed data centers in Germany.
At the same time, collaboration and shared collaboration gen-erally require employees to leave their secure corporate network, according to Klaus Holzhauser. This is a real concern, especially since the researchers at Shareground and the University of St. Gal-len expect collaboration to play a growing role in work processes. The “geographical location of the service provider” will no longer play any role in the future. Instead, work will be as mobile as capital. The “demise of geographically located workplaces” will occur alongside a shift from “a presence to an event culture”. Managers must learn that they need to motivate rather than control workers. The art of management will be to establish and maintain personal ties despite using impersonal technical channels.
Especially for HR managers among others future work mod-els pose big risks: “Flexible forms of work and cooperation lead to employees always having one foot in the labor market,” said Stefanie Kreusel, Chairwoman of Syntra, Deutsche Telekom’s management network. Systematic staff development will be-come much more diffi cult, especially in a market where employ-ability depends less on formal qualifi cations and more on technical ability in robotics, augmented reality or similar fi elds. This skill will not be lost on competitors keen to attract new talent,
either. After all, machines and self-learning processes can’t com-pletely replace human labor and ingenuity.
Luckily, the researchers have some comfort to offer, too: non-linear thinking is and will remain a human domain. According to the experts at the University of St. Gallen, the automation of work is fi nite. Entrepreneurial ability, creativity and the control of machines are “hard-to-replace skills”. So does that mean we can open the creativity fl oodgates? Maybe not.
There’s no question that the ability to meaningfully combine and interpret data from billions of machines, robots and things is an essential, irreplaceable human skill. However, working with big data differs from traditional data analysis in one signifi cant way: hypotheses will disappear as a necessary tool within the next three decades. Because pretty soon, there will be more than enough data on everything and everyone. Scientists refer to this admittedly theoretical sounding prospect as the “end of theory”.
<Contacts> Work 4.0:
Teamwire:
Electronic land register:
Enterprise Mobility Management Services:
<Links> www.t-systems.com/solutions/dynamic-workplace
www.t-systems.com/solutions /mobile-enterprise
50DOI On a scale of 0 to 100, the current Digital Offi ceIndex (DOI) of Germany’s industry is 50.
45% of Cloud work environments are mainly relevant for mobile workers, according to IT decision makers at German companies.
“FLEXIBLE FORMS OF WORK AND
COOPERATION LEAD TO EMPLOYEES
ALWAYS HAVING ONE FOOT IN THE
LABOR MARKET.”
Stefanie Kreusel, Chairwoman of Syntra,
Deutsche Telekom’s management network
