Socio-technical Trends and Drivers for the Future Workplace:
Findings from Expert Interviews
Andrea Denger, Alexander Stocker and Michael Schmeja
Virtual Vehicle Research Center, Inffeldgasse 21a, Graz, Austria
Keywords: Future Work, Future Workplace, Social Workplace, Social Media, Collaboration, Knowledge Work.
Abstract: There is an ongoing discussion in the industry in particularin the complex and dynamic automotive domain
on how the workplace can be arranged in the future to best possible support knowledge work. This
discussion understands the concept of the ‘future workplace’ in a holistic way, i.e. including new forms of
web based technology as well as new ways of working together. Respective scientific literature has already
discussed social media to play a major role for the workplace, as social collaboration, social workplace and
social business are already ubiquitously used terms. But what are major trends and drivers of the future
workplace? This position paper presents results of recently conducted study on the future workplace, where
16 experts from academia and industry have been interviewed, to launch the discussion on a research
agenda for holistic future workplace research. The interviewed experts mentioned most notably the
relevance of social media, mobility and cloud services to facilitate knowledge work.
1 INTRODUCTION
Current advances in the development of information
and communication technologies including most
notably web based information systems have
changed the way, how work is done. Against this
background, scientists often speak of a
transformation of the information society towards a
knowledge (oriented) society. Currently, the support
of knowledge work, knowledge sharing and
collaboration at the workplace has become a hot
topic once again. And knowledge management has
already stimulated a lot of interest in the industry
during the last two decades.
Since 1997 the Fraunhofer-Institute for industrial
engineering (IAO) is dedicated to explore the future
of work in its research project ‘Office21‘
(office21.de). Every year experts from industry are
surveyed on potential future scenarios of their
working environment. For the report ‘Information
Work 2009’ (Spath et al, 2009) about 1000 decision
makers generated data on the potential impact of
information and communication technology (ICT) in
office and knowledge work. However, at this time
nobody has yet spoken of social media and social
software as an emerging trend in any scenario. But
numerous tools supporting communication and
collaboration have already been mentioned by the
participants, including groupware, document sharing
and instant messaging. And these are all functions,
which are currently taken over by Web 2.0
applications and social media (Stocker et al, 2012).
Moreover the Fraunhofer study provides a very
valuable differentiation of the term ‘knowledge
work’ making it more graspable. Knowledge work
usually includes very complex and less determined
tasks, which are hard to standardize into workflows.
Knowledge work constantly generates new
knowledge and builds upon the experiences of
others. Hence knowledge work generates new
requirements for organizational structures,
controlling systems and the design of the workplace
(Spath et al, 2009). Knowledge work may be
illustrated along the three dimensions
complexity (multifaceted and difficult tasks, high
amount of coordination, challenging requirements
on communication and cooperation),
autonomy (spatial and temporal mobility,
flexibility of working time, self-determined
structuring of work), and
novelty (continuously changing work tasks, need to
extend one’s knowledge, dynamic working
environment).
These three dimensions are also discussed along
with the emergence of social media, because
implementing social media in organizations can act
617
Denger A., Stocker A. and Schmeja M..
Socio-technical Trends and Drivers for the Future Workplace: Findings from Expert Interviews.
DOI: 10.5220/0004494106170620
In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (FWP-2013), pages 617-620
ISBN: 978-989-8565-54-9
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
as a catalytic converter for collaboration, production
and innovation (Richter et al, 2011).
At respective industry events including for
example the Enterprise 2.0 Summit (e20summit.de),
practitioners discuss, how the adoption of social
media can facilitate knowledge work in
organizations. But not all decision makers are really
open to the voice of preaching social media
evangelists and early adopters. They often link
social media to Facebook, only. As a result they are
limited to thinking of private Facebook phenomena
including waste of time by employees using social
media during their working (Stocker et al., 2012).
In contrast, talks with responsible project
managers from the automotive industry have shown
that decision makers value the optimal design of the
workplace of the future as a whole much more, than
isolated ambiguous concepts including Enterprise
2.0, Web 2.0 and Social Media. Though the impact
of ‘2.0’ and ‘social” becomes visible in almost all
organizational departments, decision makers and
consultants prefer terms including social
collaboration, social intranet or social workplace, to
avoid social media (Stocker et al. 2012).
After this brief introduction on knowledge work
and social media, the paper provides a reflection of
the handling of ICT in the automotive industry,
which is a highly complex and dynamic environment
highlighting the relevance of principles coming
along with the adoption of social media. Next to this,
the main findings of the future workplace study will
be discussed. The paper closes with an outlook on a
future research agenda.
2 AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY
An effective use of information and knowledge at
work is the primary key to be more successful in the
future, especially for the extremely knowledge-
intensive automotive industry. The European market
for cars is widely saturated, but there is a high
demand in new markets. Privately owned cars begin
to lose their value as status symbols. Nevertheless
mobility is still important for all and especially for
young people. There is a huge growth in car models,
derivates and embedded functionality. OEMs have
defined strict requirements to among others reduce
CO2 emission and enhance total vehicle safety.
(KPMG International Cooperative 2010) Electro
mobility, alternative drive concepts, assistants
systems, and embedded communication facilities
make the engineering of future cars much more
complex. These factors afford methods and tools for
more cross disciplinary collaboration.
In this regard the management of all product
information throughout the entire life cycle is one of
the main challenges of the automotive industry.
Thereby ‘Product Lifecycle Management’ (PLM) is
considered as a comprehensive strategic approach to
the management of a product throughout the whole
product lifecycle. PLM covers various types of
product related information from product design and
manufacturing all the way to the end of use, after
sales and service phases, as well as to the end of the
lifecycle, to the scrapping of the product. The idea of
PLM is to extend the concept of information and
knowledge management to cover the whole life
cycle of products to the extended enterprise
(Lampela et al. 2011).
People in the automotive industry cooperate in
very complex socio-technical systems and have to
work with a plethora of different tools, standards,
and sources of information. PLM includes
configured elements of an enterprise such as
processes, organizational structures, methods and
related IT systems. However, recent research has
shown that for a successful implementation of PLM
additionally the human factor has to be well
considered. Thinking outside the box, an optimal
knowledge work support requires the form of new
concepts at the workplace (Denger et al. 2011). To
value the human factor in PLM has become a huge
paradigm shift in automotive industry. This results
in some initial points of contact on Social Media.
The selective use of social media within PLM will
have a particularly high relevance especially with
regard to link communication and collaboration to
product related information (Denger et al. 2011).
3 ELEMENTS OF THE FUTURE
WORKPLACE
The authors assume knowledge workers to need the
best possible support by their environment - a well
balanced system of human factors, organization and
technology. During a study conducted by the Virtual
Vehicle Research and Test Center in 2012 (Denger
et al. 2012), 16 experts from academia and industry
have been questioned on how information and
communication technology will impact and
influence the workspace of the future. Study results
have shown that academia and industry are still far
away from any common understanding on how the
workplace of the future will be designed.
However, there was a common understanding
WEBIST2013-9thInternationalConferenceonWebInformationSystemsandTechnologies
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that the workplace of the future hast to be much
more than purely implementing modern information
and communication technologies at the workplace.
The future workplace will depend on many aspects,
including role of employees, corporate culture and
practices and affinity to technology. It will have to
offer more variants, including office design,
furniture, ICT and organizational factors to cope
with the increasing demands for innovation and
creativity.
The blur of work and life and the increasing
flexibility and mobilization of knowledge work were
mentioned by some experts. Major trends and
drivers for change are globalization, the increasing
knowledge intensity of work and therefore the
constant need for timely, location-independent and
company-wide access to corporate knowledge,
knowledge workers and problem solving skills.
Some experts even predict a dehierarchization of
organizations to survive the global dynamics and
complexity of economy. In future there will be a
shift away from regular and rigid work demands and
processes to more flexibility and self-determination
of work.
Currently the essential drivers of workplace of
the future are becoming visible: These is an
increasing popularity of mobile devices and the
desire to use private devices for business purposes, a
growing awareness of social media due to its
usefulness in the private domain stimulating the
need of such new ways for communication in
business settings. A change in mentality towards
mobile working and the increasing availability of
cloud services for private purposes also count to
drivers.
At the workplace of the future access to
information and knowledge will be much more open
and flexible. This will simultaneously increases the
available range of information for employees. In
response, employees will have to cope with
information flows and define their demand for
information and knowledge in self-organized and
self-determined way.
The transparency of knowledge and knowledge
holders will continually rise in companies, making
people transparent as experts in their domain. The
perception towards knowledge sharing will change.
It will become more important to identify the
relevant knowledge holder in organization than the
explicated knowledge. This will result in a
comprehensive generation of digital information,
which can only be tapped by using enterprise-wide
semantic search engines.
Although work is increasingly digitalized and
virtualized, most experts believe that physical
offices will not entirely disappear in the future.
People will always need a place to maintain their
social contacts with colleagues. However, digital
and social media will significantly shape the
workplace of the future and the associated
behavioral changes in the workplace will be
triggered by digital natives. As organizational
progress correlates to the degree of technology
adoption, the enterprises in the ICT domain will
define the roadmap to design the future workplace.
However digital natives will adopt and shape
information technology through their own use and
act as an important driver, too. Experts recommend
that young people should therefore be accepted in
organizations as a driving force for the adoption of
new technologies as they will bring the mind of
modern and network-based thinking and working
into organizations.
The division of work requires people different in
age and discipline to collaborate in an effective way.
In practice this raises a lot of challenges for industry,
ranging from differences in the acceptance of Web-
based technology to differences in communication
patterns. Many experts believe that the use of
modern technologies is fundamentally not a question
of age. A potentially observed ‘conflict’ at the
workplace is therefore not just between old and
young, but rather between employees with a high
drive for innovation and those with low one.
Older employees do not understand new
technologies on principle, but the language chosen
when new technologies are introduced to them as
this does not reflect their needs. Current methods for
introducing new information and communication
technologies into organizations are one-dimensional
and only tailored to fit younger employees. They do
not get older people on board. A feasible approach is
to purposefully bring together young and old
employees at the workplace of the future, to solve
tasks together. This will lead to a permanent,
constructive and productive exchange of knowledge
between the generations as both generations have
their strengths and weaknesses.
4 CONCLUSIONS
AND OUTLOOK
After an introduction into knowledge work, social
media and the rising complexity of work in the
automotive domain, this position paper illustrates
key findings on a study of the future workplace
(Denger et al. 2012) conducted in 2012. The aim of
Socio-technicalTrendsandDriversfortheFutureWorkplace:FindingsfromExpertInterviews
619
this paper is to stimulate a more holistic research on
the future workplace without overrating
technological aspects.
In a nutshell, relevant enablers for the future
workplace are rising adoption of mobile devices,
awareness for social media and its benefits in the
private domain, paradigm shift to mobile computing,
free access to contents and applications on the Web,
and increasing availability of cloud services in the
private domain. As a result, employees become
increasingly mobile and want to perform work from
everywhere and anytime. Hence work will be further
decentralized in time and place.
The feel-good factor known from using social
media in the private context will have to play an
important role for future corporate information
systems, as enterprises strive for more creative ideas.
The respective concept is called ‘joy of use’. Social
media will be used for internal communication and
embedded into process-based information systems
including enterprise resource planning and PLM.
Access to corporate information and explicated
knowledge will be more open, leading to a much
larger supply of information for the individual
knowledge worker. As a result, employees will have
to cope with streams of information generated by
humans, software agents and things. They will
decide what is important for their work assignment
and hence generate their own information supply
through filtering and unified access to decentralized
information repositories. Employees will become
experts based on their content generated and not
based on their formal role or hierarchical position.
To stimulate further research on the future
workplace, the authors aim to propose hypotheses
based on their findings in the study:
Hierarchies will be largely replaced by social
networks.
Social Media will change the way employees
collaborate.
Central ICT approaches will be replaced by
decentralized approaches.
Employees will work in information streams.
Access to corporate information will more open
up.
Mobile devices will overtake desktop devices.
Employees become experts based on content they
generate.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial
support of "COMET K2-Research Centres for
Excellent Technologies Programme" of the Austrian
Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and
Technology (BMVIT), the Austrian Federal
Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth (BMWFJ),
the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), the
Province of Styria and the Styrian Business
Promotion Agency (SFG).
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