About Future Workspaces

The Future Workspaces (FWS) program is an innovation initiative of Novay. In an open public-private ecosystem of research, collaboration and knowledge exchange between large and small organisations, the program aims at creating a knowledge advantage on new effective ways of work and the role ICT can play therein.

The program helps organisations to improve the effectiveness of knowledge workers by introducing new ways of working and tools in a human-centered philosophy.

The core of the ecosystem is formed by the current business partners Rabobank, Royal Haskoning, IBM, Ericsson, Dutch Tax office (Belastingdienst) and Cisco and the research partners CeTIM, Erasmus RSM, Novay, TU Delft and VU Amsterdam. The multi-year program has started in the fall of 2007. The annual turnover of the program is currently 1 MEuro.

Why are new ways of work important?

Work environments are changing. Knowledge work is becoming more and more important. Knowledge workers want flexibility and freedom to choose. They want work environments that stimulate, empower and provide freedom to work anywhere. Long life employment is diminishing. Talents and experts know their value in a demographically shrinking workforce. A new Internet generation is entering the workplace. That means that organisations have to engage in new employment arrangements and employee facilities to remain attractive.Employers also need flexibility. They have to play in a networked economy with an international market of sometimes global customers, partners, and suppliers. This asks for new ways to organise work, get in touch with customers and create knowledge advantages. It asks for a workforce that can handle the dynamics, can juggle with tasks and can effectively collaborate across organisations and cultures.
Employers must also have the capabilities to deploy competences and experience in the most efficient and effective way. This means an ability to handle a constantly changing organisational knowledge and competence base where it is hard to find the right information and connect the right people via the best channel.
Finally, technology provides flexibility. In an “always on, always connected” world
people have become very flexible in their communication and interaction. They develop new working styles and patterns and tend to develop a ‘virtual existence’. People roam the Internet to participate in all kind of work and social interactions, communities and activities. Work and private become intermingled and people more and more get empowered to act, interact and be informed. On the other hand people also develop new coping strategies to deal with information overload and work pressure. This means that organisations currently have to rethink how to support and manage their knowledge workers.

Why is a joint R&D effort profitable?

The consortium recognises the strategic importance of anticipating to the challenges and possibilities of new work environments. They recognise that joining forces can create a difference and provide a lead. On the one hand much can be learned from the way partners have planned and successfully implemented effective working practice, knowledge management and collaborative concepts and tooling. On the other hand research mass can be created to tackle shared challenges.
Moreover the timing is right: new working environments are on the agenda as a strategic competitive edge. To outperform competitors. To be attractive as employer.

What is the key challenge to tackle?

The key challenge of the program is to get grip on the interplay between changing work settings and conditions, changing organisational support on knowledge work and changing ICT technology. Finding new balances between physical and virtual activities, the work and the private domain. All this while retaining the connected human as the central focus.This challenge must be played on a multi-perspective playing field: Networked organisations have to open up requiring new ways to collaborate with their (international) network and flexibly manage information and knowledge in this process. New ways of organising work or new options to execute work make new choices possible around mobility: working at the best place either at home, underway or wherever. Fragmentation of work poses new challenges on the work-life balance of workers.

What are the objectives?

The FWS project performs business-driven research and shares knowledge & experiences around new ways of working.
First objective, based on current practice, problems and challenges, is to make improvements work in the specific context of each of the partners. These improvements (re-designs) will focus on specific cases, covering specific settings in the area of information and knowledge management, working anywhere, anytime and fragmentation of work and work-private mixing. Challenges around open organizations, mobility and work-life balances are important focal points here. Objective is to make the improvements work in explicit terms of increased productivity, business agility, worker satisfaction and creativity. The improvements will be generalized into best-practices: re-usable insights, success conditions and proved approaches.
We strongly believe in a living lab approach to innovation: working together with users, in the context of their daily practice, to introduce and validate solutions and new ICT capabilities. The case improvements will be generalized into best-practices: re-usable insights, success conditions and proved approaches.
The second objective is to explore beyond tomorrow concepts and generate new solutions: the future workspace 2015. How does the future of work look like beyond current technology and organisational arrangements? We will work towards the concept of the Liquid Workspace: work is no longer delimited by place, time or presence: a new balance between physical and virtual activities throughout the day. First goal is to explore new scenario-based workspace concepts. To investigate new ways to organise work processes and provide workplace services in mixes of virtual and physical environments. Second goal is to build up a laboratory/ demonstration facility for demonstrating and assessing new inspirational concepts, experimental, maybe disruptive collaboration processes and beyond-tomorrow tools for the future workspace.
The third objective is to develop a leading national community on future workspaces and new ways of working. Main goal of this interest group is to create alliances and share knowledge and experience among the members and with leaders in the field.

What will the program deliver?

Insights and analysis. Provide news, trends, insights around future of work. Collect best practices on successful work processes, work styles, work place design, coping strategies and motivational factors for empowered knowledge work. Provide quickscans, tools and measurement approaches to analyse effectiveness of current work practice in the business context.
Living lab based innovations and improvement. Support the organisations with knowledge to leverage on state-of-the-art collaborative technology and Web2.0 developments. Suggest interesting new ways of work for knowledge workers, activate new ways of working and advice on possibilities to improve organisational structures, processes and procedures. Provide directions and strategies for successful change on a human, organisational and technological level and implement and test improvements in living-lab oriented pilots.
Inspiration. Provide an outlook for important new trends in working environments. Continuously scan relevant developments. Translate the potential of exciting innovative technological developments on a somewhat larger timescale to demonstrators and possibilities for the partners. Provide impact studies.
Network. Get in contact with knowledge institutes and other business organizations in different fields and from other backgrounds.

How is the program organised?

The FWS program is managed by the Telematica Institute and executed by a core team of leading researchers from Telematica Institute and CeTIM, TU Delft and VU. The program is supervised by a steering committee of all of the business partners.
The core team closely co-operates with business representatives in living lab settings at the business partner organisations. We use living lab settings to allow users to access and experience the new concepts both within a managed small-scale setting (for better observation and reflection/discussion) and in their full real-life setting. In this way people are motivated already in the earliest stages of introduction to take part in the improvement process. An essential ingredient to maximize benefits.