Note: this is a synthesis of several previous posts.

The death of middle class jobs (Associated Press):

As software becomes even more sophisticated, victims are expected to include those who juggle tasks, such as supervisors and managers — workers who thought they were protected by a college degree.

At the beginning of the 20th century, about 50% of of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Today it is less than 10%. Yet there is still food for consumption and export, notwithstanding the major issues with some industrial agricultural practices. A similar shift is happening now. Jobs in manufacturing, information processing, or other types of routine work are quickly disappearing.

Today, we are seeing that routine producing work keeps getting automated while technical improving work, for which standardized processes can be developed, usually gets outsourced to the lowest cost of labour. This type of work can be supported by formal learning, namely instruction, based on explicit processes and procedures, for which good and best practices can be developed. However, the value of this work is diminishing, because of its fungibility, which is defined as the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution (wikipedia). “Jobs” are based on the inherent premise that one worker can be substituted by another. Software and global digital communications are making this type of tangible work a commodity, where over time, price tends to zero. Anything that can be codified and digitized, will be.

There is still valued work to be done, though. Complex work, like craft & building, can provide unique business advantages, is difficult for competitors to replicate, and cannot easily be digitized. Innovative & thinking work can identify new business opportunities and create real competitive advantage. But craft work takes time to develop, and innovative thinking has to continuously evolve and adapt to the changing environment. However, it is obvious that the valued work in any enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. Valued work, in an economy increasingly based on intangible value, is moving to the right, as shown in the figure below.

Supporting informal learning and helping connect implicit knowledge amongst workers are becoming business imperatives. These will also drive the creation of intangible value. But intangible value cannot be easily measured even though it produces most of our economic value today. For instance, the Standard & Poors stock index is comprised of more than 80% intangible value.

Craft & building work combined with innovative & thinking work (not jobs), is where long-term business value lies. Therefore, learning amongst ourselves and sharing implicit knowledge to create intangible value, is the real work in organizations today. This is social learning, and it is an essential part of work in a creative economy. It is a major shift away from most of our industrial practices, especially HR.

The challenge for organizations, institutions and governments is to help as many people as as possible make this shift, and to support those who cannot. The New York Times (May 2010) reported: “For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.” But jettisoning workers is not a viable long-term strategy. As Andy McAfee remarked when United Technologies laid off workers, even though its stock was at an all time high and sales had increased by 35% – “I simply want to point out that if this example is part of any larger trend, then we cannot rely on economic growth to fix our current problems of unemployment or underemployment.”

As early as 2003, a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, showed that we are moving to an economy that values emotional intelligence, imagination and creativity. How we get there will depend on what we do now in preparing people for an economy of intangibles. It could be a future described by TechCrunch – “America is well on the way towards having a small, highly skilled and/or highly fortunate elite, with lucrative jobs; a vast underclass with casual, occasional, minimum-wage service work, if they’re lucky; and very little in between.”

But it can be a much better future if organizations, institutions, governments, and especially individuals start to focus on thinking and building skills, as well as being innovative and honing their craft skills. This means helping all people develop their talents to do work based on initiative, creativity, and passion. Our work structures need to support informal learning so people can share implicit knowledge while creating intangible value.

Realizing that the era of “jobs” is over, would be a good start.

Acknowledging that our existing education and training institutions are mostly ill-suited for this challenge would be another step.

Finally, we have to create better mechanisms to account for value and redistribute wealth in an intangible economy.

* This post is sponsored by Microsoft Office 365 *

This is my second post on productivity tools for the networked workplace. First, I want to elaborate a bit on collaboration and cooperation. Two types of behaviours are necessary in the networked workplace: collaboration and cooperation. Cooperation differs from collaboration in that it is sharing freely without any expectation of reciprocation or reward. Collaboration is just getting things done. Cooperation is what drives the extended enterprise — customers, suppliers, partners and anyone else touched by the business.

In my previous post I discussed how Microsoft tools differed in supporting either collaborative or cooperative behaviours, or both. These facets align with the digital competencies required in the networked workplace.

Cooperative competencies of 1) sharing openly; 2) communicating effectively in communities & networks; and 3) contributing to knowledge networks; are often given less attention by management than the more job-focused collaborative competencies. But yesterday’s soft skills are today’s critical skills. New tools for cooperation, like activity stream platforms can support open sharing. Yammer is one such platform, and Jared Spataro, at the Microsoft Office Division, has this to say about Yammer’s place in their business model:

What should I do?  In my customer meetings over the last few months, people have often asked, “What should I use for social?  Yammer or the SharePoint newsfeed?”  My answer has been clear: Go Yammer!  Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products.  It will power the social experiences in SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics, and more.   Yammer’s unique adoption model appeals directly to end users and makes it easy to start enjoying the benefits of social immediately.  And because it’s an online service, Yammer gives us the ability to innovate rapidly-updating the service quickly as the market evolves.  So whether you’re an Office 365 customer or running SharePoint on-premises, Yammer will provide the latest innovations and best user experience.

The above image is a continuation of a review of Office 365 I posted to Slideshare. In Yammer’s case, it is clearly a platform focused on cooperation. Like other activity stream, or micro-blogging, platforms, Yammer enables serendipitous connections by making work more transparent. As Ross Dawson says, Yes you can ‘engineer’ serendipity. Yammer would be one tool to help with that engineering.

As I mentioned in my last post, a tool like Lync can greatly enhance workplace collaboration as well as support internal cooperation. Yammer can extend that cooperation, with the real potential for business innovation resulting from connecting with people outside the department or enterprise.

If you don’t think you need to increase cooperation for your enterprise, then perhaps it fits into one of the two categories of companies that IDG’s Bill Laberis identifies in a short, but pointed, video. Fostering distributed work may not be suitable for 1) financially troubled companies, or 2) companies who don’t trust their own employees. For these companies, no networked productivity tool suite will help.

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Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Office 365 but I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

On 21 April 2003, jarche.com went online. It started as a single web page, later upgraded to a Drupal powered site and then changed over to its current WordPress configuration. About 2,350 posts have been published so far, with over 6,500 comments [+1 million comment spam have been blocked]. Many thanks to Chris at tantramar.ca for keeping this site running for so long.

So what has changed and what have I learned over the past decade?

It is easier and more acceptable to work from home, live in a different time zone, and work with people you may have never met face to face. When I started, the mainstream media were making fun of blogs. Now every media outlet has one, if not many. This blog has helped me connect with people all over the world. Without it, I doubt I would have lasted 10 years as a freelancer.

My early Blogger site is still online. I moved my blogging here in February 2004. In 2003 social media were primarily blogs. While blogs now face a lot of competition, I have noticed that the influence of a single blog post can be much greater today, as it gets re-posted on various other platforms. I would still strongly recommend blogging, especially for freelancers. What I’ve learned about blogging is that you have to do it for yourself. Most of my posts are just thoughts that I want to capture.

One advantage (?) of living in a remote and rural part of the country is that I need to have a wide focus. There are not enough potential clients around here, so there is no local market. Because of this, I saw the world as my market from the onset, and the past 10 years have shown that it’s possible (though sometimes difficult) to do international work and not live in a major metropolitan area. Sackville boasts a population of around 5,000 people and the nearest major cities are Boston (900 KM) and Montréal (1,000 KM).

One of my guiding principles is accepting life in perpetual Beta, meaning that things keep changing and I have to keep learning. In 2003 Twitter did not exist and WordPress was only released in May of that year. Twitter is now the main source of referrals to this blog, surpassing Google, while WordPress is the number one blogging platform in the world. This month I tried two new RSS readers, as the social media landscape keeps changing.

Probably the most significant change in my work came with the formation of the Internet Time Alliance, in 2009, with my partners Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, and Clark Quinn. Not only has this international think-tank exposed me to new networks, but it’s a wonderful support group, where I can bounce around my half-baked ideas.

Thanks to everyone who has connected here over the past 10 years and especially those who have shared their knowledge and experiences. I look forward to the next decade.

* This post is sponsored by Microsoft Office 365 *

I have noticed that the Microsoft Office suite is used by pretty well every one of my clients. All of the larger organizations have and use Sharepoint. These tools are ubiquitous in business and government, so I have agreed to write a few articles on how they can be used to improve work productivity. Since these are the tools that are already in place in many organizations, it might make sense to understand how best to use them.

One of the gaps between enterprise work and more open and serendipitous cooperation is a lack of ways to quickly connect to others in the organization. Email and telephone are often the only choice. Instant messaging may be available, but is not used intensely, like email is. A Forrester research report - The Total Economic Impact Of Microsoft Office 365 Midsize Customers – describes these collaboration needs of mid-size companies:

“Everyone being able to work in a collaborative environment is essential. We can work smarter and fewer hours.”
“We are a knowledge company. IT has to make us more productive, smarter.”
“Without Lync we have no mechanism for communicating across the company – except phones and shouting. Lync will be a huge improvement in terms of time savings.”

The addition of Lync has made a significant improvement to the Microsoft suite, according to several of my clients. I developed my enterprise social network tool analytical framework at the request of a client who wanted to know what mix of platforms and tools was optimal for collaboration and knowledge sharing. From their perspective, Lync was a game-changer.

I continued to refine this analytical framework with two more clients over the past year and all have found it useful. The slide presentation below looks at Microsoft’s Office 365 suite from that perspective. Please note that I do not use any of these tools myself. The analytical framework is my creation but the perspective on each tool were based on client user feedback and other third-party sources. I would suggest doing your own analysis of all your enterprise collaboration and productivity tools, based on the framework.

In the slide presentation, one conclusion offered is that content creation is a way to capture knowledge, even though we know that we can only “capture” a small part of our implicit knowledge by making it more explicit. Conversations and the ongoing narration of work must still be supported. This again shows the gap that Lync is filling; it provides opportunities for impromptu knowledge sharing. As the content creation tools of the Microsoft Office suite become more networked, it will be easier to connect cooperative and collaborative behaviours.

For those who are interested, here is the background of the framework. Ian McCarthy’s honeycomb of social media was an initial inspiration, showing how one could quickly and graphically portray differences between social media platforms. The Altimeter Group’s 2012 report on making the business case for enterprise social networks provided more detail on what happens inside organizations. Finally, Oscar Berg’s digital workplace concretized gave a good picture of what people-centric, service-oriented businesses should look like.

The seven facets identified by Oscar Berg align with some general digital competencies that are necessary for connected knowledge workers everywhere. These also align with the PKM framework that can support the flow of cooperative and collaborative work in a coherent organization.

In my next post in this series, later this month, I will discuss the digital competencies described in Slide #6.

• Sharing openly
• Communicating effectively in communities & networks
• Contributing to knowledge networks
• Creating content to share inside & outside the organization
• Coordinating tasks with minimal time & effort
• Conducting & participating in meetings to maximize impact & minimize wasted effort
• Quickly finding people best suited to solve a given problem

Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Office 365 but I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.