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