Technology As Innovator

I had a discussion with Buu Nguyen on the topic: Shorter working week in the IT industry

The article that inspired the discussion

IT’s future - how about 20-hour work weeks?

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9589-6187506.html

CIOs need to prepare for the 20-hour working week as social models and technologies change to promote a work-light future, analyst house Gartner predicts.

By 2015, more people will spend less time in work as companies surrender to individual demands to retain more experienced and skilled workers.

Brian Prentice, research director of emerging trends and technologies at Gartner said as IT becomes woven into the fabric of people’s lives, traditional work/home boundaries will become obsolete and a “digital free-agency” will emerge.

The “digital free-agency” is a term coined by Gartner to describe how professional and personal computing requirements are being blended to enable different working models–such as working from home and part time roles.

Prentice said: “CIOs need to prepare for the arrival of this new work phenomenon, which is being driven by political, social and technology changes.”

These changes include the move away from a single bread-winner family model and the shift away from the conventional view of retirement as the end of working life, said the analyst house.

Prentice added: “The additional pressures of an ageing population and skills shortages will lead to the adoption of digital free-agency and flexible work structures as social, political and business necessities.”

Traditional nine-to-five work structures are inhibiting people’s ability to juggle personal and professional responsibilities and the 20-hour working week is designed to retain skilled workers who are not able or willing to work 40-hour weeks, according to Gartner.

Gartner said the potential power of this combined demographic will be a “force to be reckoned with” by governments and businesses around the world.

Prentice added CIOs need to accept the fact there will be an increase in jobs with shorter working weeks and develop specific governance strategies to take a more proactive approach towards this predicted business change.

Tai

Nice article, this is not something to be surprised about, as 36-hour work week is spreading out in Europe.

Here, the writer pointed out several reasons for the emergence of this prediction
1. Enterprises will be willing to hire specialists after their statutory retirement. This is ‘backed-up’ by an ageing population.
2. More flexible work structures need to be introduced in order for IT firms to attract the skillful (who are usually more demanding) for dealing with skill shortage.

So I want to start a discussion with some questions for you
1. What other factors do you think will add up to this trend
2. When will this be happening in Vietnam?

Buu

The article means people will work 20 hours/week for a particular job, it does not mean they don’t have other jobs at other companies or by self-employment.

People work less hours not because of things like “flexible work structure” or “lack of skilled resources” - these are reasons for flexible-hour jobs, not reasons for fewer hours. People can work less hours because they have increased their productivity to the level that they can produce enough value in their working hours to fulfill their needs (recognition, purchasing power etc.) Of course, some people (like Bill Gates) do not need to care about the hours at all, they work because they like to work, not so much because of money or recognition (anymore).

So, the real question is when man-kind reaches the productivity state that they can work much less hours (less than 40 hours) and produce much value than what necessary to fulfill their needs. As human needs are unlimited and as there are new needs every single day (e.g. cavemen don’t need money to go to Karaoke), and as there will be more and more people who work longer hours for fun (e.g. Bill Gates), I don’t think 20-hour/week working will happen by 2015 or even 2030 or 2040.

BTW, when in time does the Matrix take place ?

I think I already answered the questions in the above paragraphs, but here the quick sum:
>> 1. What other factors do you think will add up to this tend
- Value created + Needs
>> 2. When will this be happening in Vietnam?
- Value created > Needs (and nobody likes working for fun)

Tai

I agree with you that “flexible work structure”, or more accurately, “work schedule with less time dedication” is the consequence for a bargaining process between workers and employer, not the cause of the change.

However, you don’t pay much attention to the fact mentioned by Prentice that firms are to make concessions to retain the skillful. In developed countries with ageing population, the number of people joining the workforce does not compensate for the loss of retirement. Shorter work week that allows the retired to have more time for their personal interest and family is an interim way for the firms to deal with the lack of resource.

***

Can this be happening in developing countries, where the population is young and the skillfulness of workers is not strong enough for bargaining?

My answer is theoretically yes, for a reason different from the one discussed above. Shorter work week can help to reduce unemployment rate, assuming that the currently unemployed can perform at an acceptable level. The skillful ones, allowed to take on more than one job, are in good condition to be more efficient in tasks that require creativity.

Buu

I agree with most you say - it’s no different in principle with what I try to argue though. What matters is the value produced, if the aging folks can still add value, it is more helpful to the nation if they are encouraged to work rather than staying idle. Hence, flexible working hours is the trend (but that is a different issue from everyone can work 20 hours as like they work 40 hours now).

>> Shorter work week can help to reduce unemployment rate,
>> assuming that the currently unemployed can perform at
>> an acceptable level.
Good point! I like it that you do mention about “acceptable level” . But be careful with this though, it also depends on the amount of available work. Otherwise, there’s no point in having 2 persons to do part-time for 1 person full-time job unless it’s very necessary to do so.

RUP the Star

Rational Unified Process has been one of the most successful iterative processes. It is also one of the firsts to encourage UML as the universal language. With problems of traditional software development methods identified and diagnosed, RUP arises to solve them. From one perspective, RUP is an effort to manage projects by effectively dealing with failure symptoms.

The world is not enough

Looking from the business perspective, one project in a software development company is one business unit. Though bearing specific characteristics, it follows common principles of every business department. It receives from resource management and provides feedback, it employs its own budget and maintains production plan. Something seems missing. RUP serves as a development process; it is contained within the boundary of software development. Organizational aspects, enterprise management and strategy are not looked into.

Moreover, post-deployment system maintenance and support is critical and it has not been described in RUP. Additionally, systems don’t last forever; they need to be replaced. How to decompose and let a system retire also requires a clear process.

Enterprise Unified Process covers these concerns.

EUP extends RUP

Enterprise Unified Process is an extension of RUP. It is created by Scott W. Ambler from IBM Agile Development. From RUP, EUP adds 2 phases and 7 disciplines

Two phases

1. Production phase offers assistance to end users by clarifying queries, resolving production issues by root-cause analysis and applying fixes for dealing with change requests

2. Retirement phase provides guideline on decommission the product

Seven disciplines

1. Enterprise Business Modeling The artifact - enterprise models - distinguishes the relationship between business process, domain process, enterprise activities, functional entities and functional operations. The difference between EUP Enterprise Business Modeling and RUP Business Modeling is that EBM targets goals and vision of the enterprise.

2. Portfolio Management Portfolio and Program management maintain systems inventory snapshots. They build up data for overall efficiency and effectiveness of diversified software projects management, and help scheduling software implementation in a more strategic fashion. Duplication in functionality is eliminated.

3. Enterprise Architecture Enterprise-level Architecture promoted consistency across the entire organization. The impact is on multiple systems for both the present and the future. Enterprise Architects cast their efforts into building a foundation for future enterprise efforts. It is easily seen that the difference between enterprise architecture and application architecture is on scope.

4. Strategic Reuse Reusing software assets ranges from source code, frameworks to strategic approach to similar accounts. The scope being firm-wide makes it very different from reuse within one application.

5. People Management Due to its particular characteristics, HR management and recruitment in the IT industry faces a lot of difficulties. EUP promotes more focus on HR strategies, where organizing, monitoring, coaching and motivating are all standardized to ensure and improve collaboration.

6. Enterprise Administration Network administration, Facilities administration, Information administration and Security administration are universal across all enterprise. In order to generate consistently effective supports and environment to development, all are to be standardized in the enterprise management process.

7. Software Process Improvement Processes need improvement, and even the activities to improve the process are themselves process.

Benefits of EUP

1. Reducing IT costs. Implementing a strategic approach to reuse for the enterprise can significantly reducing your cost of developing software. Just having an enterprise view of architecture will lead to fewer ‘stovepipe’ applications, which are costly to develop and maintain.
2. Improved IT/business alignment. By improving your enterprise business modeling efforts you improve your understanding of the overall business and thereby increase the chances that you will build systems that reflect their true needs. With a portfolio/program management approach to choosing projects you prioritize and then execute projects based on business needs, thereby improving alignment with the business.
3. Improved business planning. Improved enterprise business modeling has the advantage that it provides insight into your overall business needs and vision, insight that can be used by your executives to manage and guide your organization.
4. Higher quality. Reusing software can lead to higher quality, as reusing an already tested component can lead to fewer defects. Leveraging enterprise architectural solutions that have been tested and proved to work ensure that applications built upon those architectures will improve in quality.
5. Improved IT planning and governance. By implementing the portfolio management discipline, you can obtain a better understanding of and control of your software portfolio by recognizing programs, or families of related products. This can lead to better strategic planning and elimination of overlapping requirements in different systems.
6. Improved levels of service. By understanding the ‘big picture’ through enterprise business modeling and enterprise architecture you are able to identify opportunities to take a systems approach to development which looks at the entire picture, not just the IT aspects of a project. For example, a project team should strive to improve the business process as well as (re)build an application for their end users.
7. Greater adaptability. By having an effective approach to enterprise IT issues you will be able to react to changes within your marketplace, such as new legislation or new competition, more effectively because you will have a better understanding of the potential impact of those changes and a consistent way of addressing them.
8. Reducing time to deliver systems. An improved enterprise-level software process will reduce your overall time to deliver systems for several reasons. First, an improved portfolio management approach enables you to identify projects which are more likely to succeed, reducing the change of late and/or cancelled projects. Second, an effective enterprise architecture strategy enables you to work to a common platform, reducing the learning curve of project teams. Third, improved reuse increases your development velocity by enabling you to take advantage of existing assents instead of creating systems from scratch each time.
9. Increased end user productivity. By integrating operations and support into your software lifecycle, you are better able to enhance your end users usage of your system and to respond to their feedback. End user requests for fixes and enhancements are automatically included in the requirements for new releases of systems and ensure that their needs don’t slip through the cracks.
10. Increased developer activity. With an effective approach to enterprise administration, developers can gain the technical resources that they need, such as workstations and network logon IDs easily. This enables them to focus on their jobs, developing working software, and not on trying to get access to resources.
11. Higher return on investment. By leveraging enterprise efforts such as an enterprise approach to architecture and a strategic reuse program, you can reduce costs and speed up development time, realizing a significant increase on ROI.

A glance over the high stance

Initial observation gives the impression that what EUP has to offer are nothing new. Tasks described in Enterprise Business Modeling are named differently and are usually done by Sales, Portfolio Management is crucial to achieve wiki(CMM) level 4, any company has their HR, Properties, IT departments. The problem is that the collaboration is loose and they are standardized very differently from one another. EUP does very well the synthesis job to focus on the omni-picture. It requires very high level management to involve, lead, share the business vision and have it made practical. EUP does have good foundation and reputation of RUP. One good thing is that it is an extension, not a replacement of the still evolving, state-of-the-art RUP.

One important thing to notice, EUP is no magic wand. There has been warning about applying RUP as-a-whole may lead to cumbersome project failure. New EUP disciplines promote even more sophisticated collaboration between desultory departments. Sophistication leads to impediments. The total cost of utilizing EUP may well exceed the sum of costs from single business units.

Reference & Acknowledgement

• Scott W. Ambler, Introduction to the Enterprise Unified Process
• Frans Faase, The answers by Rational Unified Process
• Craig Larman, Philippe Kruchten, Kurt Bittner, How to Fail with Rational Unified Process: Seven Steps to Pain and Suffering
• Sterling Hoffman, Extending the Rational Unified Process: From RUP to EUP
• Gideon Schipper