5.2 Medieval Communities and Their Digital Counterparts

In medieval society there were several hierarchical social infrastructures providing an unconscious framework in a loosely connected social contract. An individual belonged to a social class, religious persuasion and fiefdom with loyalties to a sovereign, allegiance to a local lord, and in the later Middle Ages, with the advance of merchants and town trade, with a socio-economic hierarchy. Many of these social structures were a fact of heredity, not a conscious choice made by an individual. However, there was on occasion the opportunity to alter one’s place in these social structures, usually due to a special circumstance. The majority of the population was subjugated to the land on which they lived (serfs or villains), binding them to a specific task or set of tasks that through community need and not planning benefited the entire social order of the geographic community.

What was true in the Middle Ages is true today: the majority of the modern population is bound to working for a single corporate entity or employer. Traditionally, a career consisted of working for one employer throughout one’s lifetime. However, in the United States during the last two decades, this changed as a result of a new feeling of self-worth (as opposed to Europe, where workers were forced to leave). Workers have been encouraged to be mobile and change jobs, seeking higher wages. The attitude of contemporary American society seemingly rejects the medieval notion of class; in reality, American society accepts and reinforces it. The notion of class is reinforced firstly at school, where children are taught that factory and manual labour workers need little education, whereas professional workers are smarter and require more education. The goal of labour, both manual and professional, is to add value, to fulfil a corporate need. Concepts such as ‘free agent nation’ are only starting to gain legitimacy in American society.

Knowledge workers can be found in both categories of labour, adding value by virtue of what they know and how they apply their knowledge. In designing business processes, it is often the experience of workers closest to the process that yields the breakthrough insight to a new process design.

Technologies such as the Internet now make it possible to revaluate the traditional socio-economic contract with employers. Knowledge workers – who are no longer bound by technology – are asking themselves: Do I still want to limit my value to one company? Will I get more satisfaction (and/or salary) by spreading my value across several corporations and minimize the risk of not having any work during times of economic downturn? Like the feudal barons of the Middle Ages, who came together to ward off invading enemies, the corporate elite has been practising this for decades. Corporate officers who sit on multiple corporate boards of directors, spreading their knowledge, receive from each company compensation packages less than a full-time employee. Yet, this type of cross-fertilization behaviour is frowned upon when applied to other levels of the organizational hierarchy.

Technology now gives individuals with specialized skills the opportunity to rethink this traditional relationship and develop a multi-organizational working state similar to an agent. Not to be confused with consultants, whose allegiance is to another corporate entity, the opportunity is for free agents to be connected in a new way to corporate entities, thereby establishing a new set of social contracts with profound implications. Analogous to having several part-time jobs, a specialist can perform a discrete activity for several employees during the course of a day or week. Tax codes, benefits, healthcare insurance, investments are just a few of the things that will have to be redesigned to fit a new social contract. Corporations are beginning to look at these phenomena with renewed enthusiasm, primarily because of the potential to reduce operating cost. Pay for the talent when you need it and use only the amount you need. At first glance, individuals will greet this change in the social contract with fear and anxiety because it changes some of our core beliefs in the social views of how we work.

The first group of individuals that will naturally gravitate towards the agent concept are people who have been downsized or outsourced – having felt the pain of corporate disloyalty, they will be less likely to pledge allegiance to a corporate entity. However, as an agent serving multiple companies, the individual learns a valuable new skill, that of business management, which will benefit all employees as a by-product of this work environment. In effect, the agent worker is running his or her own micro-business. The agent must master the practice of maintaining cash flow, record keeping, small office administration and customer services functions. The individual may never get an opportunity to master all these skills within a corporate framework; in order to survive as an agent, however, he must master them. Loyalty to a group of employers is directly proportional to the working relationship that the employers nurture with the agent worker. The one consolation for people going through this process of transformation is that there is a feeling of controlling one’s own destiny, not being solely dependent on one employer. In addition, if an employer suddenly makes one redundant, the impact is less severe. This redefinition of the social contract between employer and employee means that a large majority of people will be unprepared for the new roles they must play and quickly realize the skills they are lacking. This once again stems from an individual’s foundation of learning and the need to reform educational curricula to prepare individuals with adequate skills for the new working environment. The reform in education is thus both the driving force and the effect of the changes in the business environment and the nature of work.

One argument for narrowing the curriculum differences in American schools is that the introduction of intelligent environments will demand a broader level of knowledge. Technology companies envision a world in which every type of device is connected via an array of various networks which will coordinate, inform and detect the actions of every individual doing everything. Orwellian as this may seem, if the history of technology offers one lesson, as we discussed in Chapter 1, if society finds a technology valuable, it will be adopted regardless of the implications to ethics or privacy. One could argue that the increased paranoia over security since the September 11 tragedy will accelerate the development of an environment that seeks security, and that will support technologies that foster security because they bring a higher degree of safety.

Regardless of the social implications, or the preparedness of individuals to engage in a connected society, a world where a myriad of devices all communicate with each other presents business with opportunities to add value in a variety of ways. The underlying premise of this new environment is that technologies which traditionally were activated by the intervention of a person (switch on, switch off) will now have the ability to exhibit conditional behaviour. Businesses will construct their value propositions to enhance and exploit this new ability. For example, in automotive technology, an individual can sense the state of his or her vehicle and assess the conditions under which it is being driven. When a maintenance event is approaching – such as oil change, tyre wear or vehicle inspection – the car can deploy an agent to determine where the owner should take the car based on price, availability or any other criterion. Using cellular eMail, the car can send a message and make an appointment, conceivably logging into the individual’s electronic calendar to keep him or her informed. The same could happen, for example, with a printer whose print cartridge is almost out of ink; instead of telling the user of the computer, why not inform the store where the computer user normally buys cartridges and get them delivered, thus saving the individual time or the annoyance of running out of ink? This technological scenario is predicated on technology ‘sensing’ the physical state of the device’s environment and anticipating changes in its conditions.

Technology’s ability to be both proactive and reactive coupled with its influence on an individual’s personal and corporate behaviour refocuses our attention on the role of the corporation and its ability to generate value in this new technological environment.