Future of Work

An interesting article in last weeks business week, "Future of work", will try to cover this during the coming week.

The first of the series is a question that is being asked " which way to the future", though the questions being asked are with perspective to the US economy, but i believe that they could be similar question that we could be asking in India soon.

The twin effects of globalization and technology have created an unseeming impact on Global and local economies and impacting the way we look at work and jobs. Offshoring as a concept has been possible because work could be broken down into smaller tasks ( disintegration and re-integration) so that it can be carried out by teams across the globe to accomplish the dual task of doing it within low cost or with the best available resource. Also the virtual, global work place is transforming the concept of the office desk, work hours and work/home balance.

To quote from the article
" Despite the technological and organizational progress, its not clear whether we should look ahead to the future of work with enthusiasm or fear. Are American's jobs going to become more interesting or complex as rote tasks are moved offshore or eliminated by technology ? Or will managers and workers be ground down by competitive pressures that leave little time or room for creativity or innovation?
Truth is, the trends prevailaing in today's work place provide ammunition for optimists and pessimists alike"

There are multiple interesting insights from this piece

a) You can replace the work American with Indians' as we might be facing the same issues in some time, with the known issue of the quality of resources ( only 25 % of Indian engineers are employable as quoted by Narayanan Murthy and Karnik). The world is growing flat and we are seeing the cost advantages tinier and tinier.
b) Is India getting only rote task which will be not be carried out in the other regions of the world
c) And if managers and workers are ground down by competitive pressures what will happen to creativity and innovations, also the key questions is Indian IT SI's are already under so much pressure for performance that innovation and creativity is already in the waste basket, so I wonder where it will be when the pressures increase ( I am not worried about growth and increase in revenues, as they are not related to creativity in the organization).

More to come in the coming days...........