The Decentralization of Work

This business of commuting to work has got to stop.

I had conference calls with our European offices all morning this morning, almost solid from 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM. I’ve been having some trouble with the wireless connection on the train, and the first call was fairly important, so I logged into the call from the kitchen table using my home wireless system (almost all of my calls have integrated video and screen sharing).

Rather than interrupt a call to catch the train, I just stayed logged in, eating warm strawberry-banana pancakes while arguing network migration schedules. It’s noon now, all my calls are finished, and I’m making my way to the office on a suburban shuttle coach (like a Greyhound bus). My regular train snakes gracefully along the Burrard Inlet, a fantastically gorgeous piece of water bordered by coastal mountains, where Bald Eagle sightings are common. The shuttle coach, on the other hand, picks its way slowly through the traffic and stop lights on Hastings street, where drug addict sightings are common.

It's a beautiful commute, but is it necessary in a post-geographic world?
(Photo by Tiberiu Ana)

All this stop-and-go traffic has got me thinking about the massive amount of infrastructure and energy it takes to move these people back and forth from their homes to their offices – the daily commuter tide. In many ways, this system is a hold-over from industrialization. Industrialization brought greater and greater quantities of people together in larger and larger factories in order to achieve manufacturing economies of scale. This was necessary because the scale was tied directly to the physical nature of the goods being produced. The assembly line exists in order to move physical bits of things to different specialized workers on the line.

These days, I suspect a lot of office workers spend their days moving non-physical bits of information around instead. Economies of scale are achieved through clever software, and the ability to link together large sets of data. If I e-mail our source control vendor's help line, I'll get a response within minutes, but it'll come from either Victoria BC, Australia, or England, depending on the time of day. Physical location no longer matters for this type of work. We live in a post-geographic world.

So if physical location barely matters, this begs the question, why do we continue to spend all this time and energy transporting ourselves to an assembly line environment when there's nothing physical to assemble? Is it possible, instead, to run large companies with tens of thousands of employees, and no significant physical presence?

I'm not sure, but I'm keen to start trying. I recently began working with our local city staff to promote the concept of the "Smart Work Centre". This concept is being promoted by Cisco at a website entitled "Connected Urban Development", which bills itself as helping to "reduce carbon emissions by introducing fundamental improvements in the efficiency of the urban infrastructure through information and communications technology (ICT)." That sure is a mouthful, but I think they are getting at the same sort of thing that I am -- work no longer needs to be about commuting. Here's what the city of Almere said about it:

"We want to invest in modern employer practice and make lifestyle changes in order to preserve the environment. We need new knowledge to help us make our lifestyles and production processes as energy-neutral and CO2-neutral as possible, said Annemarie Jorritsma, Mayor of Almere. "Almere is an innovative city. We have a new city-wide fibre-optic network, an innovative broadband ICT solution for high-quality visual communication that enables companies to maintain visual contact with their head offices elsewhere - both within and outside the Netherlands. This is the epitome of globalization. As a city council, we are keen to facilitate this."

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_092308b.html

Maple Ridge is having a "High-Tech Summit" this summer, and I'm hoping to get some speakers from Cisco to show up. Time to decentralize our lives and return our focus to our local neighborhoods. I'll keep everyone posted on the progress of the Summit!

-- Geoff

My Feet in the Dirt, and My Head in the Clouds

I suppose you have noticed by now that this blog is about 90% philosophizin' and 10% bloggin'. Well, today I will fill my 10% quota.

Last time I actually discussed what was happening in my world was the end of August, where I told you about the CEED Centre, the Transit Riders Advisory Committee, and the Maple Ridge Economic Advisory Commission (EAC).

It turns out that I didn't get the volunteer position with the EAC. The job went instead to Mike Shardlow, who happens also to be President and CEO of Canada Place. My theory on this travesty of justice is that the commission board, being so intimidated by my wild hair, chose instead a candidate who had none. While I figure out how pitch my hair to a wary municipality, allow me to congratulate both Mike and the EAC, who have clearly scored big with such a qualified volunteer.

That setback aside, my other hobbies are going quite well. On the Transit front, I met recently with Margaret Mahan of Better Environmentally Sound Transportation (BEST), located a short walk from my office downtown. Margaret is very keen to involve some of the more far-flung Metro Vancouver communities involved in the BEST programs, and we were able to identify a few projects which could be deployed in Ridge-Meadows. It's handy having friends like Margaret, as they are light-years ahead of me in terms of community experience.

Finally, I took a volunteer day off (I get one per year) to work with the CEED Centre a few weeks ago. I spent half the day at a local elementary school helping the students build planter boxes for a new school garden project. We got some pretty good press out of the deal too:

"You can't get more real than this," said Blue Mountain principal Linda Dyck, as the sound of hammering filled the gym. The community garden is being built with help from the CEED Centre and Dyck called it a "seed to feed" program. She hopes it will teach the students about sustainability, and where their food comes from.

(Picture from last year's pilot project at Glenwood Elementary)

The garden program is particularly exciting. Blue Mountain Elementary will use the garden as part of their main curriculum, and the neighboring secondary school will use the produce from the garden in their cooking classes.

The other half of the day was spent working with the Centre's executive director on their new website and CRM system. Therein lies the "cloud" part of my posting. As you know, I've discussed in previous posts the joy of the non-physical economy. It turns out that computer software itself is making a big push into the not-really-physical domain. This is generally called "Cloud Computing". This blog is a simple form of cloud computing. I didn't install any software to help me write it, and the entries themselves are stored on computers somewhere 'out there', well, in the cloud. It wasn't until I started evaluating CRM systems for the CEED Centre, though, that I realized just how sophisticated cloud computing is getting. You can literally run an entire company in the cloud, without investing in any real computer infrastructure.

I'm even more excited about cloud computing than I was about electronic books. My department at work manages literally hundreds of servers. Many of them are used at less than 15% capacity. Even our source control system, which handles over a million transactions per day, rarely runs over 50% capacity. All this unused computer power consumes a lot of electricity and space. It's the computer equivalent of the single-occupancy vehicle -- about as efficient as buying groceries in a Hummer.

Cloud computing, however, is like mass transit for software. Applications serving many different companies all run on the same computers. Having more users in the same system means that the systems are utilized more efficiently. It also means that companies 'on the cloud' don't need to invest in their own computer systems. And finally, cloud computing has that beautiful "location-independent" nature which I ramble about being important because it allows for the creation of new emergent behavior.

People will tell you that cloud computing is a fad, and that companies will never trust their data and processes to the cloud. I, however, think it's the future. And you will know the future has arrived when African wheat farmers start spontaneously managing their shipping orders from cell phones, using a cloud plug-in written by some Malaysian kid collaborating with a couple of Finnish university students.

Oops, there I go philosophizin' again...