A Research Study
By Mark Dixon & Philip Ross
May 2011
Virtual work, VWork, will be a fact of life for most people as social networking collides with the physical workplace to blur the boundaries.
As inter company collaboration becomes more prevalent, as work gets distributed to lower cost centres and as our towns and cities become more and more immobile, people will begin to look for and adopt new approaches.
Virtual work is a response to these pressures.
It challenges the traditional fixed workplace as the container for work, and instead paints a more eclectic picture of ‘Martini’ work: anytime, anyplace, anywhere; a fragmentation of the rules of office and corporate life that will be mirrored by a growth in distributed work, both through outsourcing and collaborative workstyles.
As the concept of ‘virtuality’ gains ground, monetizing agility and creating a robust business case for changing the way we work will become essential. Case studies from early adopters of more virtual approaches to work, from Nortel and Yell to Boeing and Cisco all paint a picture of significant cost savings and clear business benefits.
This report identifies the three Vs that will define the benefits of agile working as it emerges over the next decade:
Virtual, adVantage and Value