Why you should be thinking about Distributed 4.0

Nearly all companies have been forced to wake up to the distributed workforce model over the past 6 months. However, the word ‘distributed’ is far more encompassing than simply having your team join the monthly management meeting from their breakfast table.
My prediction is that ‘distributed’ will become a more prominent buzzword over the next couple of years as it begins to bring about a new approach to how we think about our people, processes and technology.
Through the adoption of distributed models; teams, systems and businesses we’ll be able to work more autonomously, accelerate initiatives and provide organisations with the ability to rapidly pivot and change, whether that is a reaction to industry disruption, such as COVID-19, or to exploit new business opportunities.
If you google ‘distributed business models’, you will get mostly 2 results:
Within tech, there are already a number of established terminologies such as:
Outside of development, perhaps the only other job role that is distributed is that of the salesman. This needs to change.
Distributed needs to be a guiding principle for your business strategy and an enabling force behind people, process and technology.
Right now, there are a number of challenges that hinder the ability to become distributed, these include:
Security seems to be a responsibility that is put upon the few specialists. I remember an old company value that read ‘the reputation of the entire company lies in the hands of each and every individual’. Never has this been so true and it’s about time companies started investing in their people to give them the tools they need to protect the business and customer.
Even though many companies are investing in things such as RPA / Intelligent Automation, it’s very much driven from the ground up, a tactical approach to save effort and money as opposed to thinking about the bigger picture. So yes, a few bots could save ££££££s, but getting rid of your awful ERP and then embracing the cloud with an architecture that supports forward thinking partner collaboration, could multiply those savings and open up new opportunities.
Distributed operating models need to encompass everything within the organisation, not just desks. This is a big change but a few things can be done right now right now to help start that journey:
If you can start to fix these, then the cultural changes become easier as you will have solved a lot of pain for your internal and external users.
As Managing Director for our Private Sector, Liam works closely with our capability leads to define and deliver propositions that solve industry challenges