The Changing Nature of Work

Back in 2011, I gave a keynote at a BPM conference entitled “The Changing Nature of Work”. As long as I’ve been designing and building systems to automate business processes, I’ve been interested in how the technology changes how people work; at that time, I was focused on the impact of unstructured knowledge work and social collaboration on more traditional pre-defined processes.

My “spectrum of structure” diagram was widely circulated (and imitated), and resulted in the most commented-on blog post that I’ve ever written. Since that time, I’ve remained interested in trends on how work is changing due to (or enabled by) technology, plus the impacts of globalization and regulatory trends.

Over the last several weeks, work has changed radically for many organizations and their employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The biggest visible change is the switch to distributed work, where employees work from their homes: a change that many organizations claimed was not possible until they were forced to do it. There are many other changes, such as supply chain disruptions and the restriction on people’s movements, that are stalling some organizations while overloading others.

For organizations that don’t create tangible goods, such as government and financial services, technology is making it possible for them to offer services to customers even though their offices are closed. There is an opportunity now to take on business automation initiatives that will not just allow organizations to adjust to the “new normal” but can increase competitive differentiation: an important consideration when many organizations are just hunkering down and trying to keep the lights on. The list of things to be addressed is not radically different than any automation project in the past, but may have a pandemic twist to them: