The nature of work is absolutely changing and evolving due to the web. A study by McKinsey & Company found that:
“The Internet's impact on global growth is rising rapidly. The Internet accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth over the last five years among the developed countries MGI studied, a sharp acceleration from the 10 percent contribution over 15 years. Most of the economic value created by the Internet falls outside of the technology sector, with 75 percent of the benefits captured by companies in more traditional industries. The Internet is also a catalyst for job creation. Among 4,800 small and medium-size enterprises surveyed, the Internet created 2.6 jobs for each lost to technology-related efficiencies.”
In fact, if I think about my own job, it is in academic technology which didn't really exist even a decade ago; but as we go into the future, more and more; my job would not exist at all without the internet. In my position, I am responsible for all of the institutional websites, capturing lectures and streaming them out to students, managing courses and course materials a host of other duties and projects that are dependent on the web to fully function.
The impact of the internet is huge in my workplace and it became very apparent during a network outage how dependent we are on it to do our day-to-day jobs. So much of our work has been transitioned from our physical brick and mortar offices to the web – for example using cloud based document archives to sharing and collaborating via Dropbox, to having conferences and meetings via Skype, AdobeConnect and WebEx. When the network went down; we literally had to send our teams home to work from home where they had access to the internet.
It was interesting for me to see how much of my team’s work could be accomplished via the internet and I have always been an advocate for telecommuting. In fact, we probably work harder, longer and more efficiently – and communicate more often amongst ourselves when we are not in the same suite and relying on the internet to work.
One of our big projects this year has been to implement a medical school curriculum management tool called One45. Everything about this implementation has been via the internet and 100% web-based.
For me and my team, using web-based tools such as Dropbox, WebEx, Skype allows us to work from anywhere. While I do try to discourage my team from working on holiday; we all seem to do so and we’ve had times where one of us was in Japan, another in South Africa and the rest scattered between their homes and over six campuses all working together synchronously on a project.
This would have been IMPOSSIBLE without the internet and the various web-based tools that we rely on regularly to do our work.
In his talk, Shirky focuses on the power of community rather than technology, exploring the capabilities of open-source communities and as I define open source code or content as code or content that is typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers or collaborators improve upon the code or content and share the changes within the community.
In my leadership role, I try to be as transparent and as open as I can, especially if something will directly affect my team – and I get a lot of flak from my senior leadership because of my attempts to be transparent and open.
There are times though, that being open and transparent with my team could result in a lot of discord and so even I pick and choose what I decide to share with them and that makes me selectively open and transparent despite my own best intentions.
While I think that Shirky is presenting a great twist on the idea of utopia, I don’t believe that any government – even the most democratic – is anywhere close to being transparent or ‘open’. I don’t think leadership as we know it in our governments and corporations is not optimized to be ‘open’ and I’m not sure that leadership and open is possible. But it is a great goal to strive towards.
The world, both physical and virtual are in a state of change and in many ways is being re-mapped. Whether we like it or not, Pandora's virtual box has been opened and there is no going back...
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The world, both physical and virtual are in a state of change and in many ways is being re-mapped. Whether we like it or not, Pandora's virtual box has been opened and there is no going back...