Saturday 21 April 2012

Collaboration spaces - a new way of working, office design of the future


Collaboration and innovation are popular catch cries in many organisations these days, but how many organisations actually take the time to do more than just talk about it?

In our industrialised economy there is almost 200 years of managerial processes dedicated to exploiting workers as a ‘pair of hands’, indeed Henry Ford famously remarked "Why when I only want to hire a pair of hands, do I get a whole person?“. The ‘scientific management’ movement that pervades our management thinking and practices today never considered employees as a source of innovation or that employee collaboration should be encouraged.

While many organisations give lip service to innovation and collaboration very few seem to be making the broad range of changes necessary to make it a reality. As McKinsey’s 7’S model shows organisational change requires a wide a range factors all of which need to be addressed to achieve change. Setting a vision or goal for collaboration is only one part of the change process. Another area that needs to be addressed are the structural changes to where and how employees work, as offices, cubicles and assembly lines were designed for productivity and control over employees not collaboration or independent thought. In recent weeks I have been privileged to view a few examples of how some companies are restructuring the way people work.

Microsoft Australia has removed many of its offices, cubicles, desks and allocated parking spaces and replaced them with ‘first in’ open working spaces nobody owns, each employee has a locker/trolley for specific documents, devises. To work they choose a seat and plug in. Microsoft claim this has reduced office space needs by 20%, what is of more interest to this blog is that Microsoft found that staff from different departments are sitting together and interacting in ways they never would have before. In considering this observation Microsoft concluded that humans are creatures of habit and that staff in traditional office environments made ‘tracks’ from the car park, though a specific pathway to their desk, kitchen, bathroom and rarely ventured beyond that. The outcome was that staff rarely intermixed beyond their particular department. The changes are quite new but the feedback from Microsoft management is very positive.

I also visited Google’s Sydney offices, along with the legendary free canteens, play areas and chill out rooms are a host of collaboration spaces. These vary from ‘traditional’ meeting rooms (often with quirks such as the upside-down room where chairs and tables are suspended off the ceiling to provide fun to those video conferencing into the room) to a whole host of informal meeting rooms and meeting spaces resembling a plush bar or cafe. While traditional meeting rooms are ‘booked’ in the usual way, the informal meeting rooms and all other meeting spaces are on a ‘first come basis’. Every meeting room and most meeting spaces come with video conferencing and all have power for device connectivity. There are also groovy single person spaces (with video conferencing of course). The dedication and collaboration of Google staffers is the envy of all other companies, maybe the environment they have created plays its part.

The Wall Street journal also ran an article this week on the trend of unassigned working spaces, while they note companies have been motivated by cost factors they too are discovering the collaboration benefits of these arrangements.

Paradoxically one of the last bastions of personal cubicles and private spaces seem to be our universities, the very places where innovation and collaboration are supposed to endemic. In the faculty I where I teach part time, each permanent staffer gets their own little lockable office (swinging a cat inside could be a challenge for lower ranking academics), there is a kitchen area and breakout area but it is sterile and uninviting and I never see anyone using it, let alone lounging near-by to chance bumping into others. To add to the sense of isolation the departments of the faculty are spread out across the campus, not only is the opportunity for mixing ‘accidentally’ with other departments in the same faculty limited, the likelihood of informal contact with other faculties is almost non-existent. Of course there are research groups and plenty of meetings but it could be so much more. This could be acceptable if it was not for the call for more cross-discipline research that is considered essential if academia is going to help solve societies biggest dilemmas and contribute positively to human well being. Perhaps re-modelling the university and redefining the meaning of ‘faculty’ would create the environment for true collaboration.

If collaboration is essential to your business, what are you doing to ensure the environment you create truly supports human interaction?

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

Saturday 14 April 2012

The commoditisation of scale and other technology disruptions


In a recent Harvard Business Review blog Maxwell Wessel wrote a thought provoking piece on the commoditization of ‘scale’. Wessel argues that a major bastion of industrial revolution competitive advantage the ‘economy of scale’, where very large organisations gain advantages in the market due to their large size (scale), effectively creating a barrier to new entrants and smaller players in the market is becoming commoditized and therefore no longer confers competitive advantage due to advances in technology which enable any size of company to access the advantages of scale. He asserts “in today's world, you don't need to have scale to enjoy scale”. For example even micro companies operating out of a residential garage can access the global market over the internet for very small outlay, compared historically with the need for expensive distribution channels a physical presence in each country and expensive advertising to reach the same market. This will radically change the nature of competition in the economy and lead to hyper-specialisation. Wessel’s blog is well worth reading.

The commoditisation of scale is just one of many ways emerging technologies are revolutionising businesses and economies, it also illustrates just how disruptive these changes will ultimately be. Technology has already enabled the ‘global supply chain’ with outsourcing to the lowest cost market, the internet has radically changed digital distribution especially audio, print and visual media and  3D printing is set to revolutionise many areas of production to name just a few. It is indeed an exciting time.

This is leading to many commentators to call for fundamentally new ways of organising and managing businesses, one Australian forum ‘Building the Organisation of Tomorrow” on linked-in provides a fascinating forum on the changing nature of organisations. It is well worth monitoring for the latest thinking on organisational change.


Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au