Work Like You Live
In case you haven’t been paying close attention, the world is changing at an accelerating rate. The comforting norms of even the last five to ten years are being laid to rest, replaced by new paradigms of behavior, beliefs and expectations. And though world change is being affected on many fronts, the rapid acceleration of technology is one of the principal drivers in altering our collective social fabric.
One new class of expectations and behaviors is the increasing intermingling of work and life. Though not at odds with an older notion of work-life balance, technology is quickly overwriting this meme by breaking down the segmented time and focus that have historically separated ‘work’ and ‘life’. In reality all aspects of your life are now tied together, and can be interleaved at the discretion of the individual. It’s a phenomenon that can be characterized as ‘work like you live’.
And, due to the accelerating capabilities of technology, people now have an increasing level of expectations for all aspects of their lives. Already, the use of instant services for transportation, travel, entertainment, dining and even social interaction have changed our assumptions of speed, relevance, value and experience. We don’t buy things, we join things and, whether it’s Netflix, Lyft or thesnugglebuddies.com, we use them when we need to. Great leaps in technologies like mobile, internet search, big data, machine learning, AR/VR, quantum computing and many more are powering all these trends.
Sadly, the technology for the work environment requires that people, used to an amazing consumer and personal experiences, to drastically lower their expectations. We have asked people to forget their thumb-driven world when they get to work and take a step back in time. To be frank, enterprise software is decades behind life outside the boundaries of work.
At SugarCRM, we believe we should help people work like they live. And that’s why we’ve created the vision and our first service in our new line of Relationship Intelligence solutions. In fact, in the near future CRM will look something like this:
Let’s unpack this video a bit. What do we know about our protagonist, Marco Delgado? With little input, Sugar Relationship Intelligence provides his title, where he works, his education, family information and even his personal hobbies and interests. By automating the aggregation of large and diverse data sets, and using deep learning techniques, we can understand him at a deeply personal level. He scores high on openness and achievement and low on tradition. He’s a little light on his emotional range, but very curious and stable. Having this kind of information and knowing the personality of the person you are about to meet is incredibly valuable. This is SugarCRM Relationship Intelligence and a future step for our Hint service.
Marco’s world is not yet our world, and predicting the future is always fraught with surprises. But prefer to reuse a quote from Abraham Lincoln, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. And that’s what we’re doing here at SugarCRM.
Stay tuned.
-Rich