Your Workplace in 2020: Gartner's Predictions
How will people work 10 years from now? Take a peek at Gartner's thoughts on big trends emerging in the office: Get ready for "work swarms" and "hyperconnectedness."
CIO — How will people work 10 years from now? Gartner thinks it has a pretty good idea, predicting 10 major changes that will occur during the next 10 years.
"Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more," said Tom Austin, a Gartner fellow, in a media announcement.
In just five years, the report notes, 40 percent or more of an organization's work will be "non-routine," which is up from 25 percent in 2010.
"People will swarm more often and work solo less. They'll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization," Austin stated. "In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills." (Yes, he said "yottabytes.")
[ For more on Gartner, read Gartner's "Hype Cycle" Due Soon, But Mine's Better and Top 10 Ways CIOs Shouldn't Prepare for Gartner's Recession No. 2 ]
While Gartner offers 10 key changes in the nature of work in the report, here are five of the most interesting trends that Gartner predicts.
1. De-routinization of Work. "The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning," states the report. "Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process."
2. Work Swarms. Gartner says that "swarming" is a work style characterized by a "flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value."
"Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating," the report notes. "Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations."
3. Attention to Patterns. Previous Gartner research has centered on "pattern-based strategy." Basically, as the global economic environment has become more volatile, businesses have struggled to strategize for the future—since so much has been unpredictable.
In turn, Gartner predicts "growth in the number of organizations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive."
