The Hindu Business Line : The future ain't what it used to be

Trying to predict the future based on current trends and conditions invariably misses the mark. The problem: conditions always change. If, in 1945, you tried to predict the success of a hotel chain like Holiday Inn without considering the creation of a national highway system, you would have thought it a bad idea and been dead wrong. So now we talk about the effect of all the retiring baby boomers, the shortage of talent to replace them in the workforce, and the resistance to technology adoption by senior executives. The data shows that more than 60 million baby boomers will leave the workforce by 2025, while less than 40 million people will enter it.

These facts lead to dire predictionsof scarce skilled workers. Some predict we'll need twice as many experienced IT professionals as will be available in the near future.

At our annual Supply Chain Executive Conference, the former President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, will, no doubt, cite some of these predictions in making the argument for why the US needs to foster immigration. While there are some valid points here, they assume that conditions won't fundamentally change and don't consider how much things have already changed. As a baby boomer, I enjoy the attention and mass concern with how the world is going to live without us, but we're focusing on the wrong generation in this discussion.

The real issue is the current generation of teenagers and twentysomethings entering or soon entering the workforce and the impact they will have.

TAPPING THE INTERNET GENERATION

The next generation of workers is the most technology-savvy generation ever. Rather than worry about how we replace a generation that has struggled to keep up with new technology, we should be examining the potential this younger generation offers:

How will their facility with information tools change the nature of work?

How will the proliferation of mobile technology and their comfort with remote, realtime networking and communication affect productivity rates?

How much faster will technology innovation happen given the ease with which this new group can adopt it?

How will all of the above change the number of people needed in the jobs we're worried about replacing?

TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION IS GOING TO ACCELERATE

If the past is any indication, in a decade we'll look back at the technology we use today and laugh at how primitive it was. Only 15 years ago, if I wanted to expedite a Report to a client, I'd call and ask: "Do you have a fax machine?" When I returned from a business trip in 1993, I had a stack of pink notes on my desk with the names and numbers of people I was to call back. They had no expectation I would return their call until I returned to the office. I didn't have a cell-phone, voicemail, e-mail address, PDA, or laptop ... was I lucky or what?

In 1994, the Web leapt to 12,000 sites from just 700. It cleared 100 million sites in 2006, with more than 500 billion documents available. Ten years ago, Google hadn't yet incorporated, MySpace and Facebook didn't exist, and Apple was a has-been in the PC market.

Technology has already allowed business to do more with fewer. Since 2001, job growth has remained relatively low at 4.4 per cent, while the economy recovered.

While many factors are attributed to this jobless recovery, the role of technology can't be denied. During this same period, productivity, directly attributed to technology advancements and adoption, is set to grow at an unprecedented 2.5 per cent average rate well into the next decade. Simply put, all the investment companies made in technology in the late 1990s is now allowing them to do more with fewer people.

The days of cyclical overstaffing and then understaffing are likely gone, and productivity will only improve, especially as a more technology-savvy user base emerges. We won't need to fill that 20 million worker gap left by the retirement of the baby boomers - at least not with people. Technology and the next generation will take care of much of it for us.

SO WHAT'S NEXT?

Today's trends, driven by this emerging generation of workers, give us a glimpse of what's possible. Well over 200 million people have Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn accounts, and social networking is changing the nature of collaborative interaction. This phenomenon is threatening hierarchical structures and even enterprise boundaries. Alongside this trend, 1.4 billion cellphones were shipped last year, and the market continues to grow in the double digits.

The opening up of cellular networks in the US, the impact of the iPhone, and the introduction of Google's Android platform all suggest that the mobility market will change more in the next year or two than in the last decade. Add the embedding of communications capability in devices of all kinds, and the idea of near-ubiquitous computing and communications is easy to imagine. The implications of all this are staggering.

Yet while these bottom-up trends take form, we're still trying to figure out how to get an ROI on enterprise applications and struggle to build usable business intelligence dashboards for today's executives. This is a huge disconnect. Conditions are going to change, as are the way people are deployed, the way they interact, and the kinds of skills we need when we build tomorrow's workforce.

We will only have a shortage of skilled IT professionals if we think in present terms.

History makes it clear that the nature of work will change so much that our needs will change radically with time: In 1870, half of the US population was employed in agriculture. Today, less than 1 per cent of the population is directly employed in agriculture, yet we grow more food than ever, with agricultural output more than doubling in the past 50 years.

Manufacturing employment peaked in the 1940s at about 35 per cent of the population and has declined ever since. Today, little more than 10 per cent work in manufacturing, but US manufacturing output has actually increased more than tenfold in the past 50 years.

In 2050, when we write about the history we're living now (alas, I probably won't be here to do the writing), it seems clear we won't be writing about how a skills shortage crippled our ability to grow. Instead, we'll be describing how innovation continued to redefine how we work, interact, and live our lives.

To most of us, this future is unimaginable, so I caution you in making too many plans based on the top-down trends and current conditions. AMR Research is dedicating much of our research toward these trends. The future of work and the technologies changing the way we work are core parts of our research agenda, which we've designed to help you navigate this uncertain future. As it is said in Ecclesiastes, "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the Earth abideth forever."

The author is CEO and founder AMR Research (www.amrresearch.com)He can be reached at tfriscia@amrresearch.com.

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