If you’ve been following my regular posts and are intrigued by Microslices, or if you’ve read my book, then you’re probably interested in how technology, data science, and millennial culture is changing knowledge work. You might be an organization that sells professional services and you know that you need to revise your strategy. You might be a buyer of knowledge workers, and you want to understand how to make sure you’re adapting to the change.

If you have worked around government, you’ve probably seen a lot of bad technology. This is criminal, because technology is supposed to make things better, faster, or cheaper. In government, technology sometimes seems to make a bad process worse even faster.  

I ran a workshop with a membership organization last week and I was struck by just how much Millennial Culture is a factor in executing strategy and operations. In this session, I was working with the group to confirm their alignment with a strategy they had previously set, and a discussion emerged about how to attract younger members.  

At face value, this is a marketing problem, and it isn’t new. Every organization charged with providing a valuable product or service needs to be aware of the demographics of its emerging target. This, however, felt different. Rather than discussing only the preferences of younger members, I noticed that the work I’ve done on Microslices has a profound impact even on this non-professional services group.  

In my last post I wrote about the implications of accelerating compression, automation, and specialization of knowledge work. That post dealt with commercial organizations, but the imperative to act is as important, if not more important for government executives.

Don’t believe me? Well listen up: the US federal government spent roughly $308 billion – roughly equal to the nominal GDP of Denmark – on services contracts in 2012.

In this feed I’ve been writing about the importance of Microslices: the accelerating compression, automation, and specialization of knowledge work in general and professional services in particular. The question remains: what are the implications for executives right now? If you’re leading the owner of a company, or an executive who hires and/or pays for knowledge workers, there are some things that you can and should start doing differently.