About 15 years ago, I graduated from Salisbury State University, a small school in Maryland, just east of the Chesapeake Bay.
Why yes, I have heard that joke before, thank you.
Salisbury was a small school in the middle of a region known for corn, chickens, and seafood. In fact, the largest IT employers in the area were Purdue Farms, the number two producer of chickens in the United States, and the local hospital.
After graduation, I interviewed with both: Purdue was most excited because it had just beaten Tyson on turkey, moving to number one in that market. It was a big deal in small-town America.
The main reason to stay local was exactly that: A small town, with a relaxed pace of life. Biologists and sociologists agree that a lower pace of life leads to decreased blood pressure, a lower resting heart rate, and a better quality of life, by nearly any measure.
I ended up moving to Michigan, but took a job on the west side, mostly to avoid the traffic.
Pace of life in the enterprise
The year was 1997, and the Internet was about to take off. Dreams of overnight millionaires fueled caffeine-infused evenings and weekends. On one challenging project, I joked that if the company would buy dinner, I would bring in a cot and stay overnight. (I have one of those nice GI cots that feels just like a twin bed.)
We’ve learned a lot since those days, but our goal -- reduce time from concept to market -- was right. If we cut time to market, we can improve client satisfaction and have a bottom-line impact on the business.
Over the next 10 years, we did a lot right. We took advantage of virtualization to cut time-to-new-server from months to minutes -- and saved hardware costs at the same time. We got rid of the three-ring binder that was out of date before it was printed, replacing it with wikis, micro-blogging, and other collaboration tools.
Today, organizations I work with are moving toward software-defined networking, making plug-and-play routers a reality. They are also dipping their toes into cloud computing, taking virtualization and making it self-service for development/testing and elastic for production.
Location, location, location
You can now work for a Fortune 100 company with headquarters in London, New York, Los Angeles, or Tokyo from your home office in Idaho, the Lake District, or rural Sweden. The same technologies that allow us this freedom, however, also mean the steady erosion of personal versus work time. How often have you checked something work-related from your smartphone during the weekend or connected via your tablet while away on vacation?
Yeah. I thought so.
It's important, though, that IT executives make sure employees take time to -- literally – disconnect from time to time. Just as our smartphone batteries need to run down and then get a full recharge occasionally, it's equally important that we, the people who use these technologies, treat our bodies and minds with at least equal care.
Tomorrow
The challenge is to improve the pace of IT -- without increasing our heart rate, blood pressure, or killing our quality of life.
I’ve listed a few things, but they are the common and obvious. I’m curious: What are you doing? Do you have any suggestions?
I remember a line from the first Jurassic Park movie. It wasn't new even then.
We spent so much time arguing about whether we could, we forgot to ask whether we should.
This isn't a diatribe against the blurring of work and personal life. Humans are social animals, and while we sometimes feel invaded by this blurring, I think we feel a stronger involvement as well.
The questions we ask shouldn't be about whether we can. That ship's sailed and well beyond the horizon.
We need discussions about how to provide some leeway for people to be people and people to be employees. We need, I think, a fundamental shift of conversation away from these mobile devices and technologies as mere enterprise tools. They are interactive technologies that are expanding the workplace out into the personal space, but they're also expanding the personal space into the workplace. And I for one don't think you can have one without the other.
Either as employers *or* as employees. Both sides need to have conversations about that.
The more we use our leisure devices for work, the more the line between work and leisure will be blurred. Whether this is good or bad is going to depend on the individual.
@robjvargas - You make a good point that the two areas, personal and business, are colliding - and if we are not careful, business will take over personal, injecting stress and pressure. With BYOD entering the workforce, the time for the conversation about expectations is /now/.
I'd even argue it's several years past due. If I had to put a date on it, I'll pick the launch date for Twitter. It's as arbitrary a date as any other.
In a way, I retired several years ago. At least, that's how long it's been since I was working, full time, outside the home. To be honest, it wasn't entirely something I decided; it wasn't exactly voluntary. But I like it. Most of the time.
Taking a break from work now involves shutting off the chat windows, maybe even the computers. Turning off the ringer on the phone helps too. Not answering the door is a little too extreme, most of the time.
Riding my bicycle to the store can be a break too.
How fast is my IT in this environment? Well, it's just as fast as I want it to be, thanks. It's up to me.
Mobile technology and flex time has made it so much easier for the business and personal space to collide. I work longer hours when I work from home then on the days when I go into the office. Many companies promote work-life balance and wellness and give you a little freedom and flexibility so you can attend to personal matters. But this model, especially in the IT world, has changed the normal 8 - 5 hour workday to working around the clock. Having 24 hour access to your work emails on your smartphone or being able to VPN into your company's network at any moment's notice, when do you really stop working? I agree that the pace needs to slow down and it starts with the individual. As the saying goes, some people live to work and others work to live.
Kim, - That overlap is particularly common in the IT fields. And it makes one unable to disconnect from work fully at any point. Not to mention how any moment when internet cannot be accessed causes a real panic attack.
Simply put; I make a strong point to not check work e-mail or answer work calls after a certain time, and I don't work weekends anymore. Note; I work 100% remotely so self-discipline on working during specific times and relaxing during specific times is something I'm still learning to master.
"The more we use our leisure devices for work, the more the line between work and leisure will be blurred. Whether this is good or bad is going to depend on the individual."
- For most people who've done this... they embrace it at first, but slowly but surely, it creeps up on them and causes massive stress in their lives. If employers can't respect the separation of work and relaxation time, they'll keep losing employees.
@Matt, BYOD policies need a major overhaul, and not just from a company perspective, but with the software themselves. The way so many smart phones meld apps and services in a giant melting pot instead of separated, virtualized environments is part of the problem with implementing proper BYOD.
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