Company Net – Experts in Microsoft

Here at Company Net we’ve been thinking a lot lately about 2020 Vision – that is, what we think the workplace might look like in ten years’ time and how we can start to prepare for that today.

What investment can and should I make today to ensure we are on the right path?

What will the cloud mean for me and my company?

There are so many exciting things happening in technology at the moment, from increasingly sophisticated smart devices and the explosion of the cloud, to the literal rise of “smart” buildings on the horizon. While the technology itself is fascinating, even more exciting is the way that all of this will affect our daily lives and the impact this could have for sustainability and responsible business.

The green economy is a priority in Scotland – the value of the renewables sector is expected to reach £3.2bn by 2013-2014, with the wider low carbon market expected to rise from £8.5bn in 2007-2008 to £12bn by 2015-2016, representing over 10% of the Scottish economy. There’s huge potential for us all to get involved and start thinking about how we can change our modes of working now to stay ahead of the curve, using technology to work more efficiently and more sustainably. Will we still need an office? What will our homes look like? And will the boundaries between social networking and business communication blur until they disappear?

Attracting the brightest talent to our future workforce requires us to start thinking now about how to make our companies fit places where employees will want to be in 2020. How can we offer the most creative ways of working, collaborating and communicating? Employees increasingly value flexibility and development opportunity against purely financial rewards, so is your business in a position to support remote working, for example? Are you looking at teleconferencing as an alternative to the rising costs of business travel? And how is your organisation dealing with the capture, integration and analysis of increasing volumes of data gathered from increasingly diverse sources?

There’s certainly a lot to think about and we think that these questions are worth asking. We’ll be posting regularly about our 2020 Vision, talking to people with interesting insight, and linking to videos and articles as we come across them. So please join in, we’d love to hear your thoughts and get some ideas flowing!

But before we delve into the world of the office, we’ll leave you with some thoughts even closer to home with this clip of Microsoft’s “Storyteller”, Steve Clayton, giving us a glimpse forward into the house of the future.