The Future of Work

Work is on the verge of becoming hyper-networked and decentralized. This "fundamental and predictable change," noted back in 2004 by Thomas Malone, founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, has been a slow train coming over the past 20+ years. But a set of companies are now in position to fundamentally change how organizations are structured, how teams form, and, ultimately, how work gets done.

This change is obvious and predictable (even back in 2004) for two reasons. First, analogues exist showing that entities tend to evolve toward networked, decentralized structures when possible (e.g. societies evolved from distinct bands, to kingdoms, to democracies; software architectures from monolithic architectures, to modular (SOA), to microservices; and currency from bartering, to fiat currency, to cryptocurrency). Secondly, the catalyst of the internet (i.e network infrastructure) has been in place for more than 30 years now.

While we've known this change is coming, it has taken nearly 20 years to reach this inflection point because both the necessary infrastructure and broader ecosystem needed to mature.

Infrastructure and operations (2006 - ~2015)
The public cloud, which Amazon launched in 2006 with AWS, was the most significant technological development required to catalyze change. AWS decentralized and commoditized compute, allowing any developer to build and scale applications. The touch interface amplified its value around 2008 and triggered a "mobile first" app development explosion. Almost instantly, any developer, not just those working for well funded technology companies, had both the compute and user platforms to develop and deploy applications at scale. This mobile revolution brought apps to the cloud and exploded tool choice.

Within the enterprise, the early 2010s saw the decentralization of previously large, monolithic application suites. The transformation of the IT Operations space provides a great example of this. This market was previously dominated by the likes of IBM and BMC but quickly became dominated by a set of small, specialized, and cloud-native vendors that provided solutions for logging, alerting, monitoring, among others.

The shift to the cloud and explosion of apps forced organizations to change how they operated. With a key barrier of entry (i.e. compute) effectively removed, organizations faced competition from everywhere and they needed to keep pace. This is why in 2014 DevOps and Agile emerged as the predominant operations and development methodologies within technology organizations.

DevOps and Agile allowed businesses to continuously integrate and deliver applications while doing so with pace. As a result, traditional command-and-control hierarchical structures eroded, giving way to matrixed orgs. Work efforts were also broken down to small efforts that could be managed and delivered over the course of short "sprints".

Jira, Github, Slack, Trello, and Jenkins are all examples of tools that made this shift possible. And while software development teams first adopted them, nearly every part of an org adopted them over time, transforming org-wide work into team based, open/transparent, and collaborative efforts.

Platform business model - the dominance of networked application ecosystems (2014-2021)
The platform business model became the ubiquitous way for cloud based firms to capture value. This model is predicated on developing a platform that facilitates interactions largely between producers and consumers, triggering a reinforcing value dynamic. Executed right, it is a tremendously profitable and defensible business model, which is why it wasn't surprising that in 2016 Accenture published a survey noting that "81% of executives say platform-based business models will be core to their growth strategy within three years."

From a user's perspective, application platforms expose them to a rich and dynamic ecosystem of integrations they can use to optimize their workflows. Great platforms made integrating tools as easy as flipping a switch, e.g. add the Slack/Trello integration and get Trello updates right in Slack).

Application platforms have a critical downside though. The more tools you adopt, the more fragmented data becomes. A key reason for this is that platforms aren't incentivized to be integration hubs, at least not until recently. Rather, their focus is on building the best core foundation that will attract users and developers. This means content (e.g. Word Docs or PowerPoint files) is fragmented across all the tools it can be shared with, such as email, Slack, Box, WebEx, etc.. Anyone working with modern cloud tools has felt the pain of not knowing where something was shared.

"The popularity of apps means more knowledge is being siloed and fragmented. Imagine how powerful it would be — not just from a risk and compliance standpoint, but from an insights and efficiency standpoint — if CIOs and employees were able to bring that knowledge together."
- Salim Elkhou, CEO Onna

The post platform era - the emergence of hyper-networked organizations (2021-)
We're entering a post-platform era. In the platform era, cloud infrastructure, source code development, and the platform business model resulted in a networked ecosystem of applications that made work more customizable, open, and collaborative. The post platform era will be defined by a dense network of knowledge and people, not applications, agnostic of the tools / platforms teams use. In this way, optimizing connections, not source code development, will define it.

The post platform era will turn those serendipitous water-cooler moments where organizations cross-pollinate into digital connections provided in the context of your work.

The impacts of this change will be massive:

• Org structures will be blown apart and rendered all but irrelevant as organizations evolve towards a dynamic, decentralized structure.
• Knowledge will go from being fragmented and "hidden" to being ambient and available on-demand. Relevant documents and people will be recommended, not based on your limited personal network, but by proactive recommendations provided in the context of your work.
• Teams will independently and dynamically form. When every individual knows the knowledge and capabilities of an organization, management connecting these dots isn't needed. Successful orgs will dynamically form, disband, and reform as needed.
• Professional development will be predicated on individual initiative and motivation, not top-down development plans or defined career paths. Workers will be able to discover people with common interests and form guilds around topics. This first will happen inside an org and then guilds will reach across orgs.

"Imagine organizations where bosses give employees huge freedom to decide what to do and when to do it. Imagine electing your own bosses and voting directly on important company decisions. Imagine organizations where most workers aren’t employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life—money, interesting work, helping other people, or time with their families." - Thomas Malone, 2004

A set of start-ups and established firms are laying the foundation for this new era.

Onna, "the world’s first Knowledge Integration Platform," is a prime example of a firm unifying knowledge. Onna solves a foundational need for organizations around cross-platform regulatory and compliance controls for eDiscovery and Data Loss Prevention. Solving this problem allows organizations to choose, operate, and scale the tools that work best for them without incurring the extra cost and effort of managing this work independently for each. In the future, Onna will undoubtedly expand to provide cross-platform content based insights to teams.

Mio is a prime example of a start-up providing cross-tool communications interoperability, thus connecting people across organizations (e.g. among Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex Teams).

Finally, Slack is positioning itself to be the dominant communications platform in the post platform era. With its Slack Connect product and their recent acquisition of Rimeto, Slack will move beyond being an app integration communications platform that replaces email to a platform that connects people and knowledge relevant to a given team effort. In the future, Slack will be able to identify who experts are on a given topic, or who has a certain skill set, or who has experience in a certain area. The subsequent connections that will be made both within and org and outside of it will form a dense networked fabric of connections, profoundly impacting how work gets done.

It's taken nearly two decades but the the future of work is finally upon us. These companies, and others, are leading the change. In this new era, the platforms that formed over the last decade will be unified by firms such as Onna. AI will be harnessed to provide an ambient intelligence for every team, making knowledge and human connections feel like they're right at your fingertips. And individuals will have more agency than ever before. This is the future we know is coming and one we must prepare for.