Time warp yourself to 1870. You are working in an office, maybe an insurance company. There are no computers obviously, but also no telephones. Even a typewriter is not available, because it has barely gone into commercial production at the time. So imagine your workplace to be something like this.
All information is on paper and all information processing needs to be done on paper as well. The paper is at the office so you need to be there in order to do some work. Also you need to meet face-to-face in order to work together. Why not do this at the office as well? So lets make an agreement that we work and work together each working day between, say, 9 and 5. And so it happened!
Now get back to April 2011. All information can be digitized and we have computer technology to assist us in the processing of that information. Thanks to broadband internet and a plethora of devices we can access and process that information anywhere and at anytime. Also we have numerous devices and applications that enable us to communicate and collaborate with each other wherever and whenever we are, be it email, chat, phone, video conferencing or what have you.
So IT technically liberates us from the 'prison' of the office place and the office hours. We can work anytime and anywhere. But most of us still show up at the office around 9AM and leave around 5PM. I have called this 'mental drag'. Although technology has liberated us, most of us are still prisoners of our traditional mindset.
To make this work right and into our advantage, we do not just need technology. We also need different ways of organizing our work, a different and more productive office environment and a different mindset towards work. Changing a single dimension of the environment - in this case IT - is not enough. We need a holistic view and a holistic approach to create a better and more productive work environment.
And precisely that is what NWoW tries to accomplish!
No comments:
Post a Comment