Everything is as a service, now. SaaS, PaaS, BaaS, IaaS are all in the realm of service. I am fascinated by IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Who would have ever imagined? Fittingly, Workplace is a service too. We left, industrial era a few decades ago. Safe to say, we moved into information era. Service economy and deep into it from the production economy. This puts the Commercial Real Estate under duress to be agile and function as bits and modules and go more granular is solutions than macro. No singular idea will sustain for a long time. Hence, workplace is reinventing itself as a service, with technology, operating and business models.
We have never been more connected digitally, in the history. Contextually, we will be looking at more connectivity, productivity but within the framework of security and privacy. Every opportunity will come mushed together with its unique challenges. In that context, Coworking – WaaS is something, lot of experts are watching closely. Providing as personalized solution as possible. Essentially, a user can change their requirements everyday, every morning and go look for WaaS. But do we really behave and change that disruptively everyday or every 6 months for that matter?
Disruption is more rhythmic than seismic. More like Evolution. Disruption in bit size incremental changes than chunks and large piles. Because, change is messy, slow, arduous and unknown. That said, change always meets resistance.
So coming back to WaaS, until recently, when a firm took office space, the landlord provided a vanilla box and occupiers were responsible for everything else inside the box.The expectation was that the occupier would take that box, design, build, deliver their own experience and the landlord didn’t really have to do anything outside of the box. That changed. Landlords are stepping into the driving seat for this. It’s not only finding the real estate but customizing it, designing it, building it, marketing and selling it. And operating it on a day to day basis for their customers, whether they signed on for a month or five years or for few hours.
I will leave you with this thought. Work will consist of (as a service) listening, watching others, thinking, talking, asking, socializing, connecting across boundaries, doing stuff. So the workplace will translate into working together or on your own. Online and in physical spaces. Synchronously (at the same time) or asynchronously (in our own time).
