Is your business prepared for On-Demand delivery?

It’s January again, so everyone is revealing their 2015 predictions on what’s going to be the hottest technology and which company will suddenly take off and go through stellar IPO. Let’s keep it simple and predictable, shall we?

The internet is here to stay, the world of mobile and the internet of things (IoT) will grow, companies will be hacked and our privacy will be compromised. There you have it: your 100% guaranteed accurate predictions for 2015.

The much bigger change this year will be how companies will manage their workforce to deliver services. Everybody is looking for efficiencies in their organization to stay competitive and make more profit while disrupting and displacing competitors.

Let’s use Uber as an example of this highly visible change. Uber comes to the market run by monopolies or cartels. They build a technology that facilitates communication between the buyer and seller – allowing the market to manage the supply and demand. Too many drivers – price goes down; too much demand – price goes up. The system works!

With concepts like Uber the barriers of entry, both for the company and the worker is low. The only thing you need is a car and mobile app: no education, minimal training. You don’t even need to know the city; you can use GPS. The driver decides to work or not to work based on current demand.

However, more challenging is the implementation of such a concept in knowledge-based industries. Smart people are hard to find and they are expensive. The lead time to assemble effective teams is much longer. True, you can draw resources from place like oDesk to quickly put a team together and deliver a simple project. The harder part is how to preserve the artifacts of development, or to define the ownership of intellectual property. If the project’s outcome is some sort of system which must continuously support a business process, who delivers all the support and maintenance? On the other side, it is more and more difficult to keep a ‘fully loaded bench’ of experts as few slower months of activity can wipe out any hope of profit.

Here is the real prediction for 2015: companies in knowledge-based industries will have to quickly adjust to new realities of work delivery. Obtaining projects, assembling teams, capturing artifacts, creating business continuity for the company and the customer will define the successful organizations of future. The technology employed to achieve this result will play major role in business decisions. Critical pieces will include ultra fast acquisition and on-ramping of people, provisioning of tools, seamless integration among business applications, continuous search for required skills, and smooth information flow between vendors and customers.