Page 58 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

discovering a new workforce paradigm � 37

Impossible? Rethink those assumptions. They are limiting the
way you think about mobile work. Maybe you’ll be the first in your
industry to construct homes at a distance. Maybe you’ll be the first
chef cooking at restaurants on three continents during the same night.
Maybe your company will be the first to provide a virtual plumber.
Maybe . . . .

paradigm Buster 5: you Are not Alone—everyone Is doing It
Thus far, we’ve given you four great paradigm busters. We’ll try one
more for now, and if that doesn’t cause you to think about the mobile
workforce differently, please go hop in your Ford Pinto, stick an eight-
track tape in your stereo, bop over to the local eatery, and play some
Pong. The world of work is changing—either get on the train or we’ll
teleport you outta here.
Here’s the deal: the train really is leaving, and you don’t want to be
stuck at the station. We’ll now share just a few of the vast amounts of
data—available in industry reports but also, if you don’t trust us and
want to do a little research on your own, is just a few simple clicks of
your browser away. That will, hopefully, convince you that the work
world as we know it is changing irrevocably.
To appreciate the unstoppable emergence of the mobile technolo-
gies and the interest of employees to not be tethered to an office desk,
let’s look at a few important statistics and industry trends. Accord-
ing to the latest industry research conducted by Comstat, IDC, In-
Stat, and the Yankee Group, the consensus seems to be that many
companies must move to a distributed workforce model either to get
competitive or to stay competitive. Today, the enterprise is faced with
higher costs in all areas of business operation, physical offices, global
competition, issues regarding global talent pools, use of Internet tech-
nology and team collaboration challenges, as well as the cost to update
the outdated technology used within most companies.