How, or rather, where we will work in 10 years
Making predictions - especially for the long term - is a thankless task. If it is still damned difficult to reliably predict the weather for the next week, then what about the technologies that will come to power in 10 years? In an age of accelerating time and accelerating change in all areas of human life, it is extremely difficult to imagine how and where we will work on the threshold of the 1930s. However, the general trends and good imagination allow us to dare to look into the future and at least in general terms to present the coming changes.
Start thinking about the future is with data from the main digital fortune-teller, a hydrotechnology center in the field of technology - forecasts from Gartner. The leading analyst of the digital world annually publishes a forecast report on promising technologies that are either in the idea stage, or are gaining momentum in the form of start-ups, or have survived to the “plateau of productivity” and are being successfully implemented.
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For clarity, we take the schedule for 2016, where the nearest digital perspectives of mankind are located at various stages. According to Gartner, each technology experiences its life cycle (appearance, promotion, implementation) and only those who have successfully passed through the birth, euphoria and high expectations survive to the last stage, tempered with criticism and skepticism and found the path to realization.
There are many interesting points on this graph of the maturity cycle of technologies, each of which is worthy of a separate discussion, but now we are interested in the Smart Workspace line, which has already overcome half the way to the “peak of high expectations” and has good chances to become reality.
Obviously, in the future, the concept of a “smart” workplace goes beyond improving the desktop or personal computer. The concept of SMART WorkSpace includes a set of changes that significantly increase employee productivity, reduce costs, make business more flexible and serve the interests of the environment. This is a cardinal approach to the outdated in every sense of the concept of “office”, when new workflows are performed on cloud platforms, and the workplace arises where the employee is, and not fixed where he “goes to work”. If the office is always at hand, then the workflow is not tied to the time zone, location of the employee or the day of the week, and people are always connected and more productive.
It seems to me that Smart Workspace formulated the ideas of Intel and Sogeti (another major consulting firm) best of all, suggesting that the future office is based on 4 principles:
We will give the first item to the designers, the last one to the marketers, and we will focus on the second and third.
So, accessibility at any time, anywhere, means full or partial mobility of an employee and the ability to connect him to work anywhere in the world. First of all, this will have an impact (and in many leading companies already affects it now) on the design of office space. The concepts of “Vasya Ivanov’s desktop” and “work schedule from 9 to 18-00” gradually die off, because no one else has time to wait for Vasya to reach his desk and coordinate his working hours with other employees. We all know how to work in Google, lying in hammocks and independently setting the mode of stay in the office. Or a good example of Lego - the company recently introduced an office zoning system at its offices in London and Singapore and employees constantly choose comfortable working spaces for themselves: traditional desktops, a quiet library or open space where people communicate with each other and the background music plays .
This and the title picture is from another study from CBRE, the largest commercial real estate agency, dedicated to a hypothetical office 2040. In addition to the pictures, there is a funny sign of differences between the offices of 1990, 2015 and 2040, and even one day in the life of such a future employee with a very interesting family scheme.
One of the long-term trends that are gradually gaining popularity now is the creation of universal work sites located in each residential area, such as “Coworking 2.0”. The idea of ​​such sites is that the most different specialists of one district will work in one place, moving to work on foot and reducing resources for daily trips to other parts of the city.
Funny fact: some companies have to work this way, despite the fact that remote work is 100% not effective. I like the example of San Jose Sharks Sports & Entertainment, where hockey team recruiters have to wander around amateur teams across the country, constantly share information with coaches and download large amounts of video data. These guys just physically can not have an office, while they are at work every day and connected to their main systems via the virtual desktop Citrix Xendesktop. All they need is a chair and fast internet. And on the side of the headquarters, the admin simply combines the necessary resources to agents in a virtual machine on the hypervisor and does not spend resources on maintaining the zoo of technology.
The approach to the main resource of any company, man-hours, is also changing. If a conditional Vasya is a universal employee, who, in case of stagnation in one process, can be quickly transferred to another, then his presence in the office every day is justified. But if this is a highly specialized professional, which is required only at certain stages, then there is no sense to waste time either for Vasya or for his leadership - this leads to a mobile work schedule, part-time work from home office or remote work. The need to bind to a stationary office all the more makes no sense if the bosses or colleagues of Vasya are scattered around the world and their main interaction occurs through the network. Already, some companies reduce operating costs by floating schedule, when the conditional thousand people have an office for 500 people, employees go to work in shifts every other day, and work half the time from home.
There is a third kind of ideas combining innovation both in time and in space, for example: office-mobile. In 2015, the creative agency IDEO presented the concept of Automobility.
Such a mobile office will allow you to use time for work, usually spent only on movements, and also allow the employee to join the work process wherever and whenever you want. The authors of the concept also predict that in the future, work processes will increasingly require face-to-face meetings and more will be possible at a distance, and offices will become much more comfortable, more personalized and more economical.
Thus, both the general vector and the trend as a whole, as well as specific ideas, changes and movements push us towards a gradual virtualization of the workflow. This fact is inevitable. It is clear that the employee should conduct business even from an iron, if it is more convenient for him to edit a hypothetical presentation right now, but then the full question arises of security.
Another fun fact: according to a study conducted in 2014, from 22 to 43% of users will be happy to install any application for themselves if they pay in the range from 1 cent to 10 dollars. If you remember how well Petya and WannaCry have walked around the companies, it is clear that companies that value their data will not allow home devices even the most valuable employee to their servers. And here, apparently, thin clients will come to the rescue.
As an example of such a work, you can study at the Faculty of Engineering of Industrial Systems (Industrial Systems Engineering Department) of Texas A & M University. In some cases, students should work with high-performance applications installed only on computers located in the university lab (for example, Matlab with the subsequent launch of calculations on the university cluster). It is clear that in such a case situations are possible when all the machines are occupied and the trip to the laboratory turned out to be unsuccessful.
As a solution, it would be possible to allow students to install applications on their machines and connect to the university server from them (which is not always possible, because a piece of software, for example, used at the SOLIDWORKS institute, which works only under Windows) However, the administration chose a different, more sensible way - provided access to virtual desktops, to which students can connect from any devices.
Gartner forecast from 2016
Start thinking about the future is with data from the main digital fortune-teller, a hydrotechnology center in the field of technology - forecasts from Gartner. The leading analyst of the digital world annually publishes a forecast report on promising technologies that are either in the idea stage, or are gaining momentum in the form of start-ups, or have survived to the “plateau of productivity” and are being successfully implemented.
')
For clarity, we take the schedule for 2016, where the nearest digital perspectives of mankind are located at various stages. According to Gartner, each technology experiences its life cycle (appearance, promotion, implementation) and only those who have successfully passed through the birth, euphoria and high expectations survive to the last stage, tempered with criticism and skepticism and found the path to realization.
There are many interesting points on this graph of the maturity cycle of technologies, each of which is worthy of a separate discussion, but now we are interested in the Smart Workspace line, which has already overcome half the way to the “peak of high expectations” and has good chances to become reality.
What is Smart Workspace
Obviously, in the future, the concept of a “smart” workplace goes beyond improving the desktop or personal computer. The concept of SMART WorkSpace includes a set of changes that significantly increase employee productivity, reduce costs, make business more flexible and serve the interests of the environment. This is a cardinal approach to the outdated in every sense of the concept of “office”, when new workflows are performed on cloud platforms, and the workplace arises where the employee is, and not fixed where he “goes to work”. If the office is always at hand, then the workflow is not tied to the time zone, location of the employee or the day of the week, and people are always connected and more productive.
It seems to me that Smart Workspace formulated the ideas of Intel and Sogeti (another major consulting firm) best of all, suggesting that the future office is based on 4 principles:
- custom design;
- availability anytime, anywhere;
- think globally, execute locally;
- foresight and innovation.
We will give the first item to the designers, the last one to the marketers, and we will focus on the second and third.
So, accessibility at any time, anywhere, means full or partial mobility of an employee and the ability to connect him to work anywhere in the world. First of all, this will have an impact (and in many leading companies already affects it now) on the design of office space. The concepts of “Vasya Ivanov’s desktop” and “work schedule from 9 to 18-00” gradually die off, because no one else has time to wait for Vasya to reach his desk and coordinate his working hours with other employees. We all know how to work in Google, lying in hammocks and independently setting the mode of stay in the office. Or a good example of Lego - the company recently introduced an office zoning system at its offices in London and Singapore and employees constantly choose comfortable working spaces for themselves: traditional desktops, a quiet library or open space where people communicate with each other and the background music plays .
This and the title picture is from another study from CBRE, the largest commercial real estate agency, dedicated to a hypothetical office 2040. In addition to the pictures, there is a funny sign of differences between the offices of 1990, 2015 and 2040, and even one day in the life of such a future employee with a very interesting family scheme.
One of the long-term trends that are gradually gaining popularity now is the creation of universal work sites located in each residential area, such as “Coworking 2.0”. The idea of ​​such sites is that the most different specialists of one district will work in one place, moving to work on foot and reducing resources for daily trips to other parts of the city.
Funny fact: some companies have to work this way, despite the fact that remote work is 100% not effective. I like the example of San Jose Sharks Sports & Entertainment, where hockey team recruiters have to wander around amateur teams across the country, constantly share information with coaches and download large amounts of video data. These guys just physically can not have an office, while they are at work every day and connected to their main systems via the virtual desktop Citrix Xendesktop. All they need is a chair and fast internet. And on the side of the headquarters, the admin simply combines the necessary resources to agents in a virtual machine on the hypervisor and does not spend resources on maintaining the zoo of technology.
The approach to the main resource of any company, man-hours, is also changing. If a conditional Vasya is a universal employee, who, in case of stagnation in one process, can be quickly transferred to another, then his presence in the office every day is justified. But if this is a highly specialized professional, which is required only at certain stages, then there is no sense to waste time either for Vasya or for his leadership - this leads to a mobile work schedule, part-time work from home office or remote work. The need to bind to a stationary office all the more makes no sense if the bosses or colleagues of Vasya are scattered around the world and their main interaction occurs through the network. Already, some companies reduce operating costs by floating schedule, when the conditional thousand people have an office for 500 people, employees go to work in shifts every other day, and work half the time from home.
There is a third kind of ideas combining innovation both in time and in space, for example: office-mobile. In 2015, the creative agency IDEO presented the concept of Automobility.
Such a mobile office will allow you to use time for work, usually spent only on movements, and also allow the employee to join the work process wherever and whenever you want. The authors of the concept also predict that in the future, work processes will increasingly require face-to-face meetings and more will be possible at a distance, and offices will become much more comfortable, more personalized and more economical.
A few words about security
Thus, both the general vector and the trend as a whole, as well as specific ideas, changes and movements push us towards a gradual virtualization of the workflow. This fact is inevitable. It is clear that the employee should conduct business even from an iron, if it is more convenient for him to edit a hypothetical presentation right now, but then the full question arises of security.
Another fun fact: according to a study conducted in 2014, from 22 to 43% of users will be happy to install any application for themselves if they pay in the range from 1 cent to 10 dollars. If you remember how well Petya and WannaCry have walked around the companies, it is clear that companies that value their data will not allow home devices even the most valuable employee to their servers. And here, apparently, thin clients will come to the rescue.
As an example of such a work, you can study at the Faculty of Engineering of Industrial Systems (Industrial Systems Engineering Department) of Texas A & M University. In some cases, students should work with high-performance applications installed only on computers located in the university lab (for example, Matlab with the subsequent launch of calculations on the university cluster). It is clear that in such a case situations are possible when all the machines are occupied and the trip to the laboratory turned out to be unsuccessful.
As a solution, it would be possible to allow students to install applications on their machines and connect to the university server from them (which is not always possible, because a piece of software, for example, used at the SOLIDWORKS institute, which works only under Windows) However, the administration chose a different, more sensible way - provided access to virtual desktops, to which students can connect from any devices.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/337620/
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