Convergence of socio-economic and technology factors in creating opportunities for a new workforce model

Abstract

The "information age" has finally produced tools capable of supporting a variety of employment and business models that previously were infeasible. The convergence of socio-economic factors, workforce composition, accelerating product obsolescence and technological advances has created an unparalleled need and fertile opportunity to redefine the workforce model. These new technological capabilities alone are insufficient to reinvent the business models. Management must, through vision and solid commitment at all hierarchical levels, migrate its values, reinvent precepts, coalesce processes, and redefine its workforce models to remain financially viable in the emerging compressed timelines. The tools are at hand; economic realities make corporate change a financial requirement; and the changing values, goals and social composition of the workforce apply pressure to create a new, network centric workforce model. These converging pressures make rethinking the corporation viable and necessary. How rapidly these changes occur will be determined now by old-fashioned rates of human I corporate acceptance of change. Compression of the market timeline may force significant, perhaps unrecoverable fallout among those companies that are slow to take up this challenge.