Can you keep up with the new non-stop workplace?

Many industries are adopting a Silicon Valley concept called agile computing

Whether you like it or not, your boss may want you to start acting more like a programmer.
 
In offices ranging from a museum in Sydney, Australia, to a car dealership in Maine, to the tech department at the insurance giant Allstate, the work force is adopting a tech industry concept called agile computing.
 
No doubt, Silicon Valley has changed how we work, for better or worse. Our smartphones keep us connected to the office all the time while internet searches bring the world’s information to our fingertips.
 

But people may not realise that it is the subtler aspects of how tech companies operate that often have a more lasting effect on other industries.

 
The “agile” part of this increasingly popular management concept is simple: Rather than try to do giant projects that take months or even years, create small teams that do a bit at a time. This way, small problems don’t balloon into enormous ones hidden inside a huge bureaucracy. And progress can be measured in small steps — one little project at a time.
 
The idea has been around for at least 15 years. It is used by the small tech company Twilio, for example, to turn out 40 changes to its product every day. But it wasn’t until recently that this sort of employee organisation found its way into other industries or even into the technology departments of other companies.

 
“Folks want to talk about the Airbnb and Uber, but this is like when the assembly line showed up,” said Douglas Safford, Allstate’s vice president of technology innovation. “All the layers and specialisation are breaking down. Instead of a year, we want to put an idea in front of a customer in a week.”
 
Tech culture finding its way into other industries is nothing new. Decades ago, Intel’s founders tried to create an egalitarian culture where the chief executive sat among his employees, and everyone at the company shared in the risks and rewards through stock options.
 

In more recent years, Google’s drive to take care of employees’ everyday needs, like commuting or dry cleaning (all so they could focus on work), has been adopted with mixed success in other industries.
 
Now cloud computing — putting your data or your software on the servers of a giant data centre that is accessible through the internet — is having an outsize influence. Cloud computing (a technology) and agile computing (a management concept) have proved to be a strong combination for creating and tweaking products faster than the competition.
 
New technologies and the management ideas that come with them have always presented risks to rank-and-file workers. Email improved communications and helped do away with a layer of management that was responsible for that communication inside big companies. Global fibre networks tied the world together and made it easier for jobs to be outsourced to other countries. And automation and robotics have wiped out countless manufacturing jobs.

 
© 2016 New York Times News Service