Exploring Microsoft Future of Work Scenarios
Exhibit 7: Freelance Planet
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Freelance Planet emerges from expectations that the current trend toward a connected, dynamic, network-centric workplace dominated by employers seeking resources — including knowledge resources — on a just-in-time basis will continue and perhaps accelerate. In this future, large corporations become holding companies managing relationships between independent contractors and small providers. Governments outsource core functions to entrepreneurial nonprofits and nongovernment organizations. People blend their private lives and work, managing multiple identities and networks and overlapping relationships by using technology that permeates every environment. Rapid innovation and creative thinking are competitive advantages. People and businesses invest continuously in learning. New hotspots of creative thinking flare up unpredictably all around the world, creating a kind of global attention deficit disorder as most people find it hard to sort out what will be important today, let alone tomorrow.
Some additional characteristics of this scenario include:
• Network, speed, and creativity rule. Traditional hierarchies become increasingly ineffectual as emergent systems succeed in surprising new ways, including distributed-intelligence networks that greatly enhance security.
• Previously disenfranchised groups enjoy growing influence; even so, a rapidly changing technological society is challenging to many institutions and people.
• More expertise is available online, allowing people to create just-in-time learning opportunities and further eroding any hope for the few remaining businesses built on proprietary practices or intellectual property.
• There is increased emphasis on relationship management in all aspects of life and across outsourced borders. People maintain massive contact lists that are tagged to help locate the right people for the right problem; contacts become contextual.
• Information security moves off the network and the operating system to the object, completely shifting security expectations as network penetration and operating system hijacking result in interesting experiments but do little to compromise the information encapsulated in content containers, some of which have protective behavior shells that limit access to their contents.
• A general blurring between enterprise and extra-enterprise networks is facilitated by new security software that quickly analyzes objects on a device attached to a network and isolates any threats while allowing the user to connect to authorized data and applications. This development precipitates more open networks and drives closer collaboration among partners and customers.
• Strength and success in open innovation leads to the rapid development of new business models, new businesses, and new products and services.
• The short half-life of success means that many start-ups fail in half the time it took previous waves of innovation to be displaced in the market.
• The experience growing up in the rapid-fire, technology-saturated world of the 1990s serves next-generation workers well as they come to the workforce with strong collaboration skills, entrepreneurial instincts, and expectations of dynamic change and transparency.
• Schools are reinvented as open institutions with physical locations acting as education hubs for multiple generations and the Internet providing just-in-time learning constrained only by the needs of the learner.
• Surveillance is highly distributed and often personal with individual concerns driving how much peripheral vision is employed. Businesses and governments gather terabytes of video and audio data on a daily basis for later analysis should it be required by a law enforcement or regulatory concern.
• Popular spiritual movements help people stay connected to each other in some way other than electronically.
• Viruses are rampant but are not as lethal because they are often used as calling cards and proof points for freelancers looking to be hired.
• Aggregate wealth increases rapidly but is unevenly distributed. Localized boom-bust cycles come and go quickly based on innovation-learning-adoption curves.
• Very little loyalty remains between employees and employers. Many people work for more than one organization, and most organizations negotiate nonbinding agreements with employees. Guilds and associations form around scarce skills to negotiate longer term, more-binding contracts that cover classes of workers (for example, thecompany agrees to employee fifteen graphic designers, specifying what class, which also defines skill requirements and pay).
• Personal prioritization and attention management arehot software categories as people use software to help figure out what is important and maintain balance in their lives.
• People lose their distrust of Internet-basedinformation providers, leading the way to global identification systems and retail reputation systems that span the breadth and depth of theglobal talent pool.
