strategy

The impact of the freelancer on the organisational knowledge use & development

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
A recent article in MIT’s SLOAN review indicates that three quarters of respondents to their 2020 global survey of 5,118 managers now view their workforces in terms of both employees and non-employees (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-future-of-work-is-through-workforce-ecosystems/?og=featured).  The workforce eco-system has become more complex than the long term employee who builds on a linear career in line with company expectations.
For example, some organisations offer development opportunities not only to their own employees but also to those in their greater ecosystem community.
Freelancing is not for outliers anymore. Some countries, like the Netherlands, have a specific legal framework defined for them (ZZP – Zelfstandig Zonder Personeel). This has an impact on organisations, the way they work, engage and value knowledge acquired or generated over time when working and interacting. Fending off the opportunities made available by these itinerant workers is not an option.
According to Eurostat, that is collecting data from the European member states, people who were self-employed in 2018 amounted up to 14% on average. Professionals make up nearly a quarter of the self-employed in Europe. According to  Statista.com a large 55% of freelancers in Europe work in IT and marketing and communication.  IT makes up for a quarter of the freelancers in Europe ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/946967/freelancers-in-europe-by-sector/ ). For the period between 2000 and 2011 their number nearly doubled according to the https://freelancersmovement.org/ .
Although there is no clear definition of what a freelancer is, Stephanie Rapelli defines freelancers as ‘self-employed workers, without employees, who are engaged in an activity which does not belong to the farming, craft or retail sectors. They engage in activities of an intellectual nature and/or which come under service sectors’.
In an outlook on what next freelancers look, Forbes predicts the diversification of the freelance population and integration in a mixed corporate knowledge network: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonyounger/2019/05/04/what-the-next-generation-of-freelancers-will-look-like/#39b7994353ad. They will cover more domains, choose to freelance earlier in their career than current freelancers.
The need to realise more complex projects or business goals for which organisation will contract them, it introduces links and relations that are rather based on coopetition rather than that they are pure competitors. When posting for a job, freelancers are each others competition. Once the contract obtained and the job started they are imbedded in teams with other freelancers or company employees. They may have similar, overlapping or complementary knowledge and expertise. They become colleagues.
These continuously shifting relations demands flexibility but also opens options for networking and sharing. Freelance networks with like minded professionals even competing for the same assignments are not contradictory as their offering is not scalable (one can only take one mission at the same time, an hour can only be sold once). Once on a mission referring a new request to a co-freelancer in the network will help all parties involved in the staffing process.
See also Stowe Boyd in his keynote speech for the Social Now Europe 2015 when he talks about Deep Culture where more stress is put on loser connections with a need for more creativity – combined with agile (self steering teams).
As also recalled by Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey in their book Extreme Teaming, the cross-pollination that happens at the interstices of knowledge domains, experience sets and frames of reference are most inspiring and a source of radical innovation. Newly formed, temporary teams assembled from members form various backgrounds often set the stage for knowledge recombination and innovation. Social network theory suggests that highly diverse teams can obtain valuable knowledge from interpersonal relations outside the team.
This mixing of people from different back-ground and experience will stress the need to pay attention to the interactive skills and openness to share ideas in a continuous search for adding value, growing a process or service provided, in a context of continuous innovation.
According to https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/freelance-stats/ about 60% are looking for a stronger community and more chances to collaborate.
Is this shifting knowledge ownership to professions or corporations? In reality this is already the case as a knowledge corpus is often owned by a group of professionals, acquired through education and reinforced through experience. It is based on common understanding, experience and general information and communication shared and studied. Product communities and certainly Open Source Software initiatives can be considered as communities sharing a common interest and related knowledge and know-how. The latter have also a common goal and purpose. Product communities however are vendor led and facilitate the sharing of product and specific technical knowledge, leading to different sub-communities with their own specific interests in mind. Broader communities addressing more or less specific roles exist as well. They may limit themselves as content sharing platforms requiring subscription as www.techrepublic.com/ , addressing a technical public or more interactive virtual groupings like www.mindtools.com or www.12manage.com . These highly curated platforms thrive, more peer oriented networks are harder to find and when they exist they have a hard time persisting.
Still, the majority of companies consider freelancers as temporary workers and are not considered as a member of core staff. Once the contract is terminated the freelancer is revoked access to the systems of the company they were working for. They are not part of the internal social network with whom they shared information and knowledge during the period in which the contract was active. From a legal and competition point of view this is completely understandable. There is a risk that by accessing internal information they can divulge this knowledge with the client they are currently working on. On the other hand isn’t  the reason why you engage freelancers to introduce experience, insight and knowledge so it can cross pollinate and enrich the already existing company insights.
All newcomers, be it employee or freelancer, come with sector or technical experience during other assignments with your competitors. Also, mobility of employees has increased.  Both trends lead to a more volatile strategic advantage for companies. Unless you want to limit their input to execute what is told, you would better open up. Encouraging knowledge sharing platforms covering both technical topics in the style of mindtools or 12manage and why not generic sector oriented communities can certainly speed up evolution and innovation in a guild like manner like https://www.businessarchitectureguild.org/ focusing on informed, creative and connected membership. The common frame of reference is also to be considered as a a point of reference for quality.
As an organisation or company you can profit from setting up alumni communities. It offers opportunities to have regular contacts with them, curate the information shared, tap ideas. More permeating borders allow current employees and freelancers to interact on this platform increasing the interaction and flow of ideas. Of course some of these will pass over to other alumni communities of competing organisations, however this goes both sides. At moments you will be on the sending side at others you will be on the receiving side.
Working with knowledge from freelancers is used in an opportunistic task oriented manner. A lot of knowledge is available for those who want, dare and can access it. It may not be without risks or bring undivided advantages, but it will guarantee a fresh influx of ideas and experience.

The one trick pony syndrome and shorter shelf-life of knowledge

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
Attracting talent with efficiency in mind may back fire on the long term in a context of higher flux and need for differentiation based on innovation, evaluating the need for specialisation.
When looking at the majority of recruitment advertisements for both in-house and freelance jobs a lot of attention is given to experience. Focus is on acquired experience and tasks well performed in the past by the job candidate, on efficiency and specialisation, confirming the key of modern organisations operating as a well oiled machine. Once on the job, focus goes to a particular job.
This is stressed by the tendency for specialisation and the related engagement of specialised freelance or independent workers, staying only a short period until the job is done, acting in multi-disciplinary teams. This agile or ‘lean’ talent is pushed for specialisation and specific jobs where the experience obtained is repeated at every engagement. This however may lead to narrow mindedness and lack of oversight or even sense of overall purpose. As is illustrated by the banking experience. Now that the need for innovation and customer orientation is increasingly central to the success of a product or service, specialisation will hamper the definition of a broader answer to a customer’s need.
In an economic environment with the instability we know and a growing life expectancy this model may not be sustainable in the future.
The average life expectancy in the Western world hovers around 75-80 years and is expected to continue to increase. Higher education levels make that we spend more time at school. Depending on the education culture more people are coming on the labor market at 23-25 with at maximum student working experience. Under pressure of previous economic downturns and the need and/or will to mobilise youth, retirement age in Western Europe came earlier, in the late 50s on even 50 or 55. This leaves us with 25 to 30 years of economic activity and about 55 years of economic inactive life, of which some 30 years living of state pension or retirement fund. In light of the increasing percentage of elderly, this places an increasing burden on a decreasing group of economic active of which a part will be involved in the care for the elderly. They will have to provide for the funds needed to support retirement pensions.
Added to that, figures of Forbes, McKinsey and Oxford university indicate that the top jobs in demand of 2010 did not exist in 2004 and that nearly half of current jobs are under pressure of automation. This would stress the shorter period of economic activity.Screenshot 2020-09-14 at 15.33.29
Looking at skill deployment and the structure of job groups it is remarkable that most of jobs are generational. A job is learned in school or shortly after graduation. New disciplines or new jobs get introduced together with new groups of graduates. It is commonly held that you will continue this job until retirement or when it goes out of demand. Given evolution of economy, technology and the job market the latter is increasingly the case.
In the context of an increasing shift to freelance employment participating in specialist tasks as they are engaged by companies on project basis, seems to lead to a dichotomy in the work force. The company manages direct employment contracts with management and coordination profiles. Technical specialists are engaged from an increasing pool of freelancers, consultant and temporary working via agencies. This may result in increased agility on company level and the products or services provided, but it risks to be at cost of organisational sustainability. This trend is in line with increasing specialisation, due to technical complexity or driven by efficiency.
The one trick pony syndrome or at least the expectation of people hiring somebody for a specific task or skill and being convinced that this is and will be the only trick the hired person has on his sleeve is untenable for the future society. Can we permit people having ever shorter careers. In light of the economic and technological evolutions and the concept of stable specialisation (as described above), it is to be estimated that the active period of an employee, freelancer or independent professional is to end far before they come to the age of 50, leading to an active life of less than 20 years. Even when society manages to have enough income for its citizens not to work and provide us all with a basic income, the psychological need of being busy and useful will result in a need for successive re-skilling and learning.
Shouldn’t we be looking at more agile talent as advocated in the HBR interview with John Younger leading to more sustainable organisational, company or team agility. Engage the people that work for an organisation and focus on skills and competences will lead to longer relationships regardless the contractual relationship. People are involved in tasks that evolve with the needs of the organisation and its customers. They need to adapt and learn through time responding to contextual needs.
In their article ‘How Work Will Change When Most of Us Live to 100’ Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott  paint a picture of life where we go through as a succession of working and learning periods. After a few years of career we re-enrol to school, college or university to learn new things. The structure of a linear life of growing up and getting through school by the age of 25, working and then retiring will cease to exist. It certainly will have an impact on the definition of wage  and career policies and perceptions but also on recruitment and the way we organise and fund education.
Structured education as presented by schools and institutions will and already are not the only sources of gathering knowledge. Already, new skills and trends are not exclusively taught at school. Continuous learning through interacting and observing the environment where we live in, is a corner stone we should look for when staffing organisations and jobs. Experience still matters but will be much less defined by ‘having done the job for a number of years’ and more by being able to englobe experiences and bringing them in the job at hand. A focus on underlying skills and competencies to adapt to new situations and the capability of incremental learning will (have to) end up weighing more. The availability of different learning experiences and possibilities provided by the employer will be included in the evaluation when choosing whom to work for in a still tight and maybe even tighter pool of knowledge workers and professionals.

Positioning Advanced Case Management and Business Process Management

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
Case management is an addition to the stack of business solutions, and is only recently permeating in a growing number of organisations.
Case management is positioned as a knowledge worker enabling tool. It places the knowledge worker at the center of the solution. He decides on the basis of case information on the process to follow. He can interact with the case through the case file or through an inbox presenting tasks generated by the business process underlying the case. Tasks may occur in an unpredictable order in response to evolving situations. At the other side of the process tasks are triggered by either internal or external events.
A well developed case management platform or package should support easy configuration for quick delivery.
With this capability it permits developing solutions for a lower number of cases and for smaller teams.
Compared with BPM solutions which are best suited for well-structure and highly predictable work; there knowledge workers mainly execute tasks that come in high volume and are presented to bigger user groups. Configuration effort is higher as you require to foresee all variants and conditions to be defined in the business process solution. You could compare business process solutions to assembly chains but for administrative work. All actors perform well specified roles fulfilling specific tasks presented to them using the application’s inbox. And like for assembly chains definition (like in the automobile sector), setup and modification or update of the chain requires considerable effort, quality checking and testing so the process does not contain any contradictions.
Functionality and features to look for
First and foremost the software solution supporting knowledgeable case workers should support the overall process for handling a case and give them sufficient freedom to make decisions along the way or to invoke case events that can influence the course of action.
The platform should support administrative procedures and should permit to automate clerical work to a maximum so case worker can focus on the content and the decision to make while handling the case.
This also implies that it is possible to interact with the case both via an inbox confronting case actors with tasks to perform but also with the case overview option from where it should be possible to initiate actions at any moment in time or during any phase in the handling of the case. Actions allowed should be governed by the possible actions allowed through the different phases of the case development.
Taking the example of a legal investigation case, where detectives build the file for prosecution, they don’t necessarily know what the sequencing of actions to be taken will be. They interact with the findings they establish. The result of an action may initiate new initiatives that were not foreseen at the onset of the case. Certain actions are strictly regulated and require specific authorisations. Obtaining these authorisation often goes through a fixed hierarchy. These procedures should be implemented as workflows interacting with the standing organisation and when required generate formal documents to be presented to the investigated parties. This digital interaction will speed up the work. The initiative is taken by the investigator.
In the course of the investigation there should be room to add an extensive set of investigative materials to the case. They can hold a variety of information file formats. While working the material conclusions may trigger new actions.
In more client oriented activities like insurance files or complaints cases, regular or ad hoc communication with clients require direct interaction with communication channels as standard mail, customer interaction portals or e-mail. These hooks should be available at any moment and are chosen by the case handler either at the moment of launching the communication or based on the declaration of the preferred interaction channel for the case/customer.
Pre-conditions for successful use of Case Management as technological component in the company solution stack
On a global level it should be clear for what business processes, organisational units or business cases, Case Management will be deployed. How does the case management solution positions itself with other applications and solutions and what is the nature of cases to be handled. Whether the majority of the work you do is based on data intensive or documentary information, it will have an important impact on your product or case management solution choice.
In order to be able to quickly deliver case management solutions you should have not only a clear view of your infrastructure requirements but als of the generic services providing information to the cases initiated. Think of user and customer directories, messaging services or common databases containing essential business data. The software providing the necessary information needs to be connected, taking into account global policies such as those dictated by legislation such as GDPR and more general principles as ‘store once’ and data integrity.
When to choose for Case Management
Taking into account the setup effort of well developed case management packages, they are candidates for implementing less intensely used business processes or less structured processes requiring knowledge worker initiative and decision taking. One should see them as complementary to BPM, specific or bespoke solutions when they are positioned as supporting exception handling for the main process, on the condition the exception handling is important enough to create an independent case file containing the necessary documentation. Alternatively they are to be used for less structured knowledge intensive work processes requiring longer time to close the case while collecting diverse materials to support the decision process.
When setting up case management a four phase approach is advised:
  • Evaluate the business architecture and identify the potential domains where case management solutions will provide added value. In parallel lay out an overview of the application landscape and identify on the one hand the applications to which case management can be an add-on concentrating on non structured exceptions that cannot be supported in an economic efficient way or for which no software support is available and on the other hand applications that provide standard services providing general information or data with which generic integration is a bonus for knowledge workers’ productivity.
  • Integrate standard components with the platform. When working in an agile framework or using scrum foresee a few sprints to realise these connections.
  • Architect your case management solutions in order to streamline the case types, their domains and storage setup.
  • Develop specific case management solutions with a clear focus on creating added value, fast delivery cycles and standard capabilities of the platform.

Arrange sites & spaces High level structuring of content & information sharing platforms

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
Information platforms are increasingly structured along the lines of sites or spaces at top level.
The available functional/technical capability alone however, does not guarantee a good organisation appealing to your users. The structure has to take into account their working and social context.
Coming from the image created by web sites and made popular for corporate internal use of content and information by Microsoft SharePoint, there is little thought given to the logical structuring of sites and spaces. Often they are created on request and the environment becomes an ad hoc loose collection.  Current platforms have a wide variety of functionality which make them suitable for a broader use than sharing information on projects or structures along the lines of the formal organisation of the company. More so, in current organisations, there are more dimensions to be discerned. Not only do we need to be more efficient and work cross-departmental with a stronger focus on customer and consumer needs, our work place is also a social construct in which we interact and have a richer experience than the one strictly confined to the execution of tasks. Therefore an information platform has to be more than an intranet on which static content is to be made available. Social interaction and cross functional and hierarchical conversation is increasingly expected by colleagues and employees. In ages where innovation and creativity are perceived as the most important success factor of an organisation. Information sharing and conversation should foster engagement and belongness as profound as possible. The platform should also be able to quickly engage new comers and temps.
It is while thinking along these lines we come with a meta-structure or a number of dimensions along which one can organise these information intense platforms while fostering conversation and providing direct usefulness for corporate users.
The Home space or site is the starting point when accessing the intranet.
The content of this space reflects:
• global information of and on the company
• what you should know about the company as a newcomer
• press relations (both outgoing and incoming – comments made in the global press)
• global management information and announcements of the direction/general management
• references to practical information on how to find your way on the campus or the buildings
Per organisational unit or department a space or site gives the frame for specific organisational exchanges. As such it has a more operational character than the home space.
The content of this space reflects:
• information on and about the unit
• organisation of work
• notes periodic meetings
• person related notices about department members
• departmental announcements of practical nature
• references to practical information on the workings of the department
• operational announcement
This personalised space contains everything you need. It focuses on the tasks you need to perform, the information that is addressed to you as a member of the organisation or has specific pertinence (e.g. positing in discussions you follow) and can be enhanced with information or reference that are of particular use.
These (social) group spaces are free subscription based getting togethers where information and thoughts are exchanged. They may concern professional or practical topics relating to company life, logistics or amenities that can make life agreeable. It is here that communities of interest or practice would thrive. They contain discussions, documentation, postings, polls, … Topical interest may obviously also relate to products or services of a company or group.
For each recognised project a space grouping related information is accessible for the project participants. It is here they will report on progress, post information and documents related to the project. It is also here the planning is to be found.
For project and line management specific progress dashboards are made available.
The Geographical site is similar or a sub set of the overall company home space. It contains specificities related to a specific location, campus or building group.
The HR site is common for all staff of the company provides information on global HR policy and personalised services regarding holiday planning, compensation and benefits, career planning and evaluation, training …
The Governance space is a restricted area for the actors concerned with maintenance and extension of the intranet environment. Here administrators will find tools and documentation for enhancing and managing the intranet platform.
Relating to these space types, templates or models can be devised to structure the setup of requested environments referring to each of these types.
They are documented in the specific governance space.
A personalised global navigation instrument will give an overall user experience permitting to go directly to the information one needs, without having to recall individual destination addresses.
See also the related slide doc published on slideshare.

Why innovate and knowledge as the most valuable asset in the process

Posted on By sk14926-ovh
The pressure is on innovative capacity. Everybody agrees. Trends indicate shorter product or service life cycles. Customer satisfaction is short lived. Earlier than ever they want something new. Building on experience or a long lasting competitive advantage is less an option. However innovation can only be realised and delivered with a motivated team of knowledgeable people having sufficient entrepreneurial blood so they want to go and explore. They will explore the fundamental needs of existing and potential customers, but also their capacity to be creative and learn new skills and techniques and optimise team interaction. Younger employees tend to have higher education than previous generations. They are skilled in new technology however lack experience.
Learning and knowledge exchange or sharing patterns will need an upgrade. Not only is experience still an asset, existing workforce will need to work longer careers than previous generations. Increasing age and life expectance, decreasing numbers of younger people will require all of us to make longer careers. Understanding added value of all team members will become key differentiator for teams, groups and companies to maintain their market postion. We summarised the reasons for investing in innovation, knowledge creation sharing and new approaches to come to products and services in a slide doc stuffed with facts and figures about the need for investing in what is most probably the strongest sustainable asset you will ever have.