What lessons should tech be learning from COVID-19? Not the personal lessons that employees and employers learn about contagion and how to prevent it; we know most of them by now. Not the supply-chain lessons, which in the end could be resolved only if everyone made everything themselves. Not even lessons relating to statistical analysis and AI in understanding the virus itself; others are far more qualified than I in those areas. Instead, I want to think about lessons related to how we use technology. Specifically, we need to learn some lessons about remote/home work.
We don’t gather government data on the specific number of workers who aren’t tied to a workplace, or even the job categories that permit some flexibility. There’s a temptation to use data on mobile workers to project how many workers might really be able to work well from anywhere—including home—but my surveys and modeling says that doesn’t work. For example, the largest percentage of mobile workers of all the occupation classes is in the healthcare field, and while these workers are not tied to desks, they are tied to places. In contrast, office workers have among the lowest mobility factor of all worker types, yet they seem to be the category that could most easily be “unplugged” to work from home or anywhere else.
Many have now recognized that unplugging workers in the face of a dangerous and contagious disease would be very wise. Any social gatherings that involve close personal contact pose a risk to spread of the disease, and if there’s no alternative to sending workers home to avoid contact, a lack of support for unplugged work means that the business is effectively shut down.
Some measures to support unplugged work have been applied for some time. Website support for sales and service not only allows self-help measures, but contact initiated from these websites is easily directed to people with little regard for where they’re located. Call center support of distributed pools of agents is similarly an old concept, and widely used.
One thing these initiatives have demonstrated is that it’s not enough to have an agent answer a call; you need to supply the agent with access to the information and applications that are needed to respond to the caller in an effective way. This has resulted in coordinated information/application access for agents, based on entry of an account number or other identifying information. It works.
The problem is that most workers are not agents handling support or sales calls. Their roles in their business are highly variable, and the information they need to do their jobs is likewise variable. In many cases, their work practices include meetings and face-to-face discussions with others. Getting these kinds of workers unplugged is a lot more complicated. If you take the worker out of the workplace, can they work at all? Most today say they can, but that their productivity will be reduced, but that might not have to be the case.
I was the head of an “Unplugged” conference decades ago, a conference dedicated to exploiting technology to reduce or eliminate the implicit connection between work and the workplace. We say “I’m going to work” because we are going, meaning we’re not there already. Work is something we do, and at the same time the place we do it, a central collecting point for workers. The most important question, perhaps, for business today is whether that conflation of activity and place is necessary, and where it isn’t, what technology could do to disconnect the two.
The big mistake in approaching this is to assume that we’re looking for a kind of back-up strategy for working at home. Hey, there’s a contagious disease or a natural disaster, so we “work from home”. Home isn’t where we’re used to working, and transplanting information and application access to another place, or providing a nice printer at home, isn’t going to change that. Instead, we should be looking for a new model of working that doesn’t care whether we’re “home” or “at work”. As long as we view remote work as requiring different procedures, processes, and tools than “at-work” work does, we’re in trouble.
We have software aimed at supporting remote work, but it’s really focused more on remote communications, collaboration, and project management. It doesn’t alter the fundamental assumption that what we do at work is what we need to be doing at home, and that’s simply not possible. You cannot duplicate a work environment at home, even where physical interaction isn’t an explicit part of the process. What you need to do is to change how we work while “at-work” to be more portable.
A big part of the challenge in doing that is that we don’t have a model for portable work, and that is in part due to the fact that we don’t know much about the workers who might be candidates. I saw recently that someone had said that over 70% of workers were now working at home, which is patently ridiculous. How many workers could work at home, or in an arbitrary remote location, and what industry are they in? How can we approach this?
My own attempt at modeling the unplugged potential for worker categories suggests that about a third of the workforce of a typical industrial economy would be theoretical candidates for unplugged status, if properly supported by technology tools. That doesn’t address every worker or every job category, but if we could create a “virtual workplace” that could be “hosted” in our usual offices or anywhere else, equally, we could make it a lot easier to respond to the kind of emergency we’re now in. If every industry and every job classification had to justify its own toolkit, we’d never get anywhere. We need a baseline approach to the problem, one that can then be customized to fit the specific needs of an industry and job class.
IMHO, the simplest approach we could take here is to assume that an unplugged worker still had a workplace, but that the workplace was virtual rather than real. A virtual workplace could be constructed to suit conditions, which among other things means it could be made to initially resemble the real workplace as much as possible, and then transform over time to an optimized model as workers became comfortable with the approach.
To understand this in terms of IT, I want to recall my “jobspace” concept. The sum of information a worker needs to perform the work assigned is the worker’s “jobspace”. A virtual workspace is then a composable model of information presentation that supports that jobspace. What might this look like, at least at the high level?
I propose that a jobspace is made up of a series of what I’ll call “taskspaces”. The tasks are the specific assignments that make up a worker’s job, and it’s these tasks that create specific information or application dependencies. A task is then a set of information/application interactions that relate to a real-world business activity. To prepare a report is a task, and so is to get approval for something or contact someone to make a sales pitch.
It’s convenient to think of a task as being rooted, technically, in a series of screens the worker would access on whatever device or devices were available and suitable. I’m going to call this series of screens a panel. The virtual workplace of an unplugged worker consists of a number of panels, through which the taskspaces the worker needs are supported and presented, and these add up to the jobspace. Got it?
Workers who are managed would be given assignments in this approach by having a taskspace panel sent to them. My implementation theory is that these panels would be in blockchain form, and that they would store information input and output, so they’d be an enduring record of actions taken. They’d also convey access rights where such rights weren’t permanently assigned to the worker involved. An assigned task could be the responsibility of several workers, in which case the panel would not only present the screens of the primary worker, but also those of any cooperative workers. It would also define their collaboration.
Some of this may sound familiar to some people; it’s not too far from what Google proposed with Google Wave. I actually suggested an approach like this to the Google moderator of the developer forum I was a member of while Wave was still active. Wave, as most of you know, didn’t get off the ground because Google relied almost entirely on outside contributions rather than doing something on their own.
Another aspect of the panels approach is that you could consider a panel to be “fractal”, meaning that it’s composed of information-, application-, and mission-specific elements. Some of these could be contributed by vendors or service providers, and some reusable within an enterprise or even an industry, mediated in the latter case perhaps by industry groups. Collectively, panels represent business activity, but they’re framed in IT-virtual terms rather than as a set of business policies or job procedures.
It’s now time to get to the second reason why creating a rigid work-to-workplace connection is bad. Injecting information empowerment into a manual process, or making the coupling between information and work more intimate, changes the optimum model of worker behavior. If the worker is immersed in the same old place, same old desk, with the same old coffee-machine companions, the revolutionary nature of empowerment can get buried in sameness. We’ve seen that happen before.
The modeling theory behind all of this is that it’s possible to track the progression of IT, and in particular the progression in productivity and productivity-targeted spending, by analyzing the extent to which IT is integrated with work. In the earliest days, IT was applied almost retrospectively; we captured transactions by “keypunching” commercial paper. That evolved to online transaction processing and the substitution of electronic data interchange (EDI) for commercial paper exchanges. As this transformation evolved, work became more defined by the tools than the other way around, but at each step in the evolution, there was a delay in uptake because of the inertia of the past.
We’re overdue for a productivity empowerment revolution, and we don’t want to stifle it by failing to account for its needs as we try to unplug workers. The panel approach, because it would allow the information window onto the taskspaces and jobspaces, would be agile enough to accommodate a different model of worker-to-information relationship coupling. The virtual workplace matches well with the virtual-world model of IoT and productivity empowerment, for example. It’s possible that if we did our homework (no pun intended) we could end up making work away from the workplace as productive, or even more productive than traditional in-the-office work practices.
We’ve had coronaviruses before (SARS and MERS), and we’ve had pandemics (H1A1). With more humans on the planet, and more interconnected supply chains and tourism, we’ve shrunk the world while its population exploded. Epidemiologists would say we’re simply too close for comfort, and so it’s naïve to think we’re not going to see this same kind of thing happen again. Indeed, COVID-19 may recur this fall, even if it does ease for the summer. Until we have a good vaccine and treatment strategy for a contagious disease, we’re constrained to handle it through social isolation. It would be nice if technology could help us deal with less socially intensive work practices.
The traditional home-work tools I’ve reviewed don’t do what I think is essential, which is create that virtual, portable, work environment. It may be difficult to get something like I’ve described in time to address COVID-19, but just as the virus has been a warning signal to public health, it should be one to employers. Disease thrives on proximity, and where productivity depends on proximity as well, we have an obvious and perhaps unacceptable level of risk. That can be fixed, and the fix might also launch us into a new era of productivity-driven IT investment.