Competence, Collaboration, Crowdsourcing & the Future of Work

Alex Kass has over 30 years of experience working at the intersection of technology, human learning, and human performance. He currently helps lead the Digital Experiences group within Accenture Labs, with a focus on the impact of technology on the future of work. He helps Accenture and its enterprise clients leverage technology to re-imagine how individuals, teams, and organizations get work done. His team contributes to all phases of the innovation lifecycle, from producing early-stage thought leadership, to technical research, patentable invention, live pilots, and at-scale implementation of new approaches. The biggest focus in recent years has been on bringing the crowdsourced “Liquid Workforce” to life. In his presentation, Alex examines…

1. Digital technology can enable managers to re-imagine how work gets done at the individual level, the team level, and the organizational level.
2. Sustainable transformations often require an integrated approach to all three levels, with clear value propositions for both the organization and the workers involved.
3. Technology can change how workers develop new competencies – and what it means to be competent as an individual, a team, and an organization.
4. The most transformational changes may prove to be at the organizational level – as hierarchical organization and fixed teams of resources giving way to ad-hoc teams formed and re-formed on demand through online labor markets that operate both inside the organization the enterprise boundary.
5. This new organizational model brings great potential benefit to both organizations and workers – but also raises risks and challenges that we must understand and confront.