People Cloud
When we started our research in 2010 on the Virtual Enterprise we knew the next leap beyond cloud computing was greater optimization of people or the “virtualization of the worker”. Through our CIO workshops we identified several attributes that if served would produce a more virtual enterprise and drive more margin contribution to the bottom line. Two attributes stood out as key: The virtual employee and social problem solving. (not social media). What we meant by the virtual employee was any knowledge worker – employee, mobile or not, part time, external services, or social networks. Eventually we replaced employee with “worker” as it did not limit the problem solver to just full time employees. “Social” meant virtual problem solving. Eventually we dropped the word virtual since we meant any worker and we intended the word virtual to mean any worker not just remote employees. As we examined emerging use cases within enterprises and the motivation for the (virtual) worker we discovered what we are really talking about is next generation Cloud – the People Cloud.
In the past five years much as been said and done about cloud computing. This capability has been powered by the development of low cost middleware such as hypervisors that increasingly made computing systems transparent to the application. The result was a far greater utilization of computing resources and further commoditization of systems and IT services. Today cloud computing services are available in private (enterprise only), hybrid (between specific enterprises), and public verions (Amazon, MicroSoft, Google, etc.). Regardless of computing cloud, the three prime attributes boil down to: Availability, optimization, and speed (cycle time).
The People Cloud is the same model with the same motivation as cloud computing. Just replace systems and applications with people and problem solving. Five years ago cloud computing was fuzzy and today it is a major market. We are just at the beginning of the People Cloud era. There are many examples emerging but little middleware exists to create the scale and versatility needed to unlock the huge economic potential. The performance attributes are the same as cloud computing, namely – availability, optimization, and speed (of people solving problems. However, the economic potential of People Cloud is more than 25 to 1 cloud computing since the average company spends 50% or more on people and 3% or less on IT! The challenge is to gain knowledge worker productivity. This will mean re-thinking how organizations are structured and how people are accounted for. (Just like data centers where re-thought in cloud computing). Jobs, like custom computing systems will be seem more as services with opportunities to optimize talent instead of sticking to job functions.
