Bursty work
December 7, 2007
A recent Tweet from factoryjoe aka Chris Messina is worth putting up here.
It just dawned on me that startups are obsolete. Sustainable, distributed bursty work is the future.
The other day I blogged about the SourceForge Marketplace and a microeconomy developing around expert offerings. Chris takes the thought one step further. Is the future of web-based “startups” not a formal legal long running entity, but high value projects where you get together with a set of people, perhaps via a network of some sort (the “sustainable” is key in the above tweet)?
I am not completely sure. However as work gets increasingly distributed, and resources go into the cloud, I can see the forming of small distributed teams or individuals that come together on a project by project basis and the aforementioned economy developing around support services, workspaces, etc. The challenge is maintenance. Perhaps maintaining such systems and products will become an industry of its own (more reason for standards).
As I was writing this post, FoundRead pointed me to a report on business technology trends from the McKinsey Quarterly. The report starts with the following
Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
The trends in that list are exactly what we are talking about, including distributed cocreation, tapping into a world of talent, extracting value from interactions, and last but never the least for me, making business from information. The question, for me, remains. Are those of us in the business of science ready to embrace such a world? I do think there is a lot to be said about distributed expertise and being able to build value from distributed networks of people, especially in the software and informatics world, but as a field we are a long way from being successful.
So I pose the question, especially to those of you getting started in a bioinformatics/software oriented career. Would you like to work in a traditional environment or in the kinds of environments we are talking about here?
Technorati Tags: Startups, Trendspotting, Services
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