Switched On with Paul Modderman and James Wood

The Future of Work: Space Janitors with Holger Mueller

Episode Summary

James and Paul continue their season on the future of work with a great conversation featuring Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. We weave through a lot of future/past thinking on tech, take a detour through last name significance, and wind up placing Paul in a new job (which he forgot about and went all nerdy before recalling the pre-show discussion). Don't forget to catch Holger at Constellation's upcoming Connected Enterprise conference in late October! https://www.constellationr.com/cce-2023

Episode Notes

Highlights

• Check out Constellation’s October event: Connected Enterprise 2023
• What a great sense that things are ALWAYS exciting — but in early days of his career that exciting-ness was slower.
• “Smith” — highly common last name these days — tied to the old profession of blacksmithing. What’s the new “smith” these days? Probably producting software.
• Holger: why can’t email be done better? (Yeah. I agree here for sure. It seems like a useful holdover ripe for some kind of sea change.)
• The art is finding the right ratio between human and automation. Find the right pace of digital transformation for people.
• Stay until the end where Holger catches me forgetting what we’d discussed in the pre-show!
• The “money quotes” section below is intentionally truncated. Holger says so many little nuggets of wisdom that I found myself just transcribing the episode.

Money Quotes

Holger

It’s all about how we will work, what we will work on, what we will get paid to work on…and it’s changing rapidly. 

You have to reinvent yourself every 5 years.

You have to find the right balance between the skills of people and the automation you can provide them. Companies who do that right do amazing things.

SAP is like concrete: it’s great when it’s warm and moving…but [after time] you need a sledgehammer to fix it.

James

You’re seeing the veil between the back office and the front office be torn apart — but it’s also creating lots of consternation and hand-wringing.

Paul

It’s never been more clear than now that what you do for work and how you do it have the distinct possibility of changing right under your feet. Difference is faster, now.