E-Mobility (business processes)
The term e-mobility or e-mobility is used to describe the handling of orders and business processes via the Internet , in which work processes are primarily organized in virtual space with the help of machine-to-machine communication , detached from the mobility of the person can. This is made possible by technical innovations such as assistance and delegation technology (such as software agents) as well as the possibilities of communication between machines. Machine-to-machine communication is viewed by the large IT companies as one of the largest growth markets.
Origin of the term
The term was created as part of a large technology project of the federal government in the years 2002 to 2004. The term E-Mobility was coined by the Forum Soziale Technikgestaltung at the DGB Baden-Württemberg in 2002 as a term for future forms of the world of work . The Forum for Social Technology Design introduced this term into the lead project of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi), which was called MAP - Multimedia Workplace of the Future .
The Forum Soziale Technikgestaltung , a personal network of around 1,800 women and men from works and staff councils, research and development departments, companies, businesses, trades, unemployed initiatives and women's networks, heads the lateral thinker group "Arbeit 21" in MAP.
Conceptual content
In the specialist discussions on “New Infrastructures in Work”, experts from business, trade unions and science assume that the change processes in the world of work will not only change the form of work (for example the organizational model), but also the structure of the employment relationship. In particular, the pluralization and the tendency to minimize the number of normal employment relationships and the increase in new self-employment, but also the increasing “virtualization of the world of work” and the “de-operationalization of work” should be considered. Electronic mobility builds on these developments or results from them.
Under Electronic Mobility five different forms of network-based or IT accompanied work or work modules are currently being summarized as "personal" and "non-personal mobility" that serve to intelligent ways of assistance, the delegation or other agent-based tools. The revolution in the idea of mobile working - compared to the traditional field service of the old style - is also in the process of an "intelligent intensification" (Schröter). This is to be understood as the process of increasing the productivity of mobile work considerably by expanding it into various dimensions of mobility that are integrated either in relation to people or use. This is more than the previously known, above all, personal consolidation of work processes . From the point of view of electronic mobility, the recognizable new mobilities include work
- the mobility of the person (personal mobility),
- the mobility of the work or the work content partly detached from the person (non-personal mobility),
- the mobility of technical tools,
- the mobility of working relationships in dynamic, mobile work teams or to equally mobile customers or customer groups and
- virtual mobility in parallel environments.
In general, it can be assumed that in future working environments, strict assignments of work forms to specific content will be broken more and more. This means that there are changing mixtures of stationary and mobile, work-sharing and result-oriented, company location-related and virtual, interactive and face-to-face work. Structurally, the mixtures form a new constant; only the proportions of the mixed components are flexible. Pure online forms of work and pure PC-free workplaces are becoming exceptions. In these contexts, electronic mobility is a further development of e-working . The following are to be understood under the five named tendencies:
Mobility of the person
Traditionally, the term “mobile working” is based on the idea that the person involved is mobile between different places of work in order to carry out their professional tasks or to increase the compatibility of leisure and work or work and family. In addition to the mobility of professionals who manage without technical support, the number of working environments that can be described as technology-supported mobility is increasing. The work tasks follow the employee. Technical aids ensure that the work content is transported to the respective location of the person actively involved. We speak of “personal mobility” (Schröter).
Mobility of work - mobility of work content
The infrastructures of new communication technologies, based on the use of software agents, allow the mobility of work content through assistance and delegation, detached from the mobility or immobility of the respective employee. It is about “non-personal mobility” (Schröter). While in classic industrial work with the idea of continuous central machine times, the locality of productive work was affirmed with simultaneous rotation of workers, the virtualization of work steps allows decentralized mobile provision and mobile availability of work. Work becomes mobile, independent of people. At the same time, there are forms of work mobility in which work is mobile with the person.
Mobility of technical tools - mobility of applications
In addition to the question of the mobility of the person and the mobility of the work content, the technical innovation developments increase the mobility of tools. This includes, on the one hand, mobile devices, and on the other hand, the mobility of platform-independent software applications and software agents is increasingly subsumed. This is relevant for work organization and the change in work culture, when these mobile tools allow delegation, when they have their own technical "intelligence" with them, when they independently implement, trigger, and terminate work processes, processes, access and transactions of all kinds , control or monitor. The "everywhere accessibility" (ubiquity) of technical environments is a characteristic of the trend towards the mobile office.
Mobility of industrial relations
A largely new challenge for the design of mobile working and professional environments is the complexity of the incipient mobility of working relationships in dynamic, mobile work teams or to equally mobile customers or customer groups . While in the past there was mostly a dynamic between local companies or clients and mobile contract executors, the number of dynamic relationships will grow with the number of people “on the go”. In result-oriented working environments with (partially) autonomous employees, there are more and more relationships between mobile clients and, in turn, mobile contractors up to mobile order or problem-solving teams. The quantity of horizontal relationships between mobile actors is increasing, the dominance of the location-versus-mobile relationship is relatively less important.
Virtual mobility
With the growth of partially virtual working environments, the requirement for employees to move around in different virtual activity scenarios at the same time increases. With increasing mobility of work, an increasing parallel working method in combined or separate virtual rooms can be assumed. Virtual mobility means that employees not only stand before the “real-to-virtual” action steps, but increasingly also “virtual-to-virtual” in parallel. The mobility between virtual order and task environments increases. When changing between different technology-supported work cultures, the differences in the real work cultures of the industries or customers also have a significant influence. The dynamic change in the worlds of experience is much more than just changing technical solutions.
Design of e-mobility
The further development of alternating or mobile teleworking towards new forms of electronic mobility also confronts the social partners with a change of perspective. In the past in terms of collective bargaining, only the traditional sales force and certain sections of the online working world could be recorded and regulated. With the term mobility, both partners basically assumed the mobility and mobility of the working person. The paradigm shift is now revealed with the increasing virtualization of work and agent-supported delegation technology, which means that the working person can be mobile or immobile, but the work or modules itself can be mobile in a thoroughgoing sense for the first time. For the design partners in the world of work - employers and trade unions - it represents a great challenge to describe and define the electronic mobility of work and to provide predictable framework conditions. This is new territory for both of them. At the same time, the setting of framework conditions for the use of agents in the sense of a legally binding decision-relevant delegation will mean new territory for the tariff partners if the delegation as assistance and decision-making preparation is exceeded.
Network "Social Charter Virtual Work"
In order to address the new challenges of further delimitation of the world of work from the perspective of "E-Mobility" and to examine the question of framework conditions and standards, a specialist discussion of various stakeholders has come together for a dialogue on a "Social Charter for Virtual Work". Under this name, the design challenges for the collective bargaining partners, educational institutions and social politics are controversially treated.
The idea of a network "Social Charter Virtual Work" was brought up for discussion by the head of the "Forum Social Technology Design", Welf Schröter. As part of the "mobilmedia" project funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labor BMWA and the nationwide first e-mobility congress in February 2005, the idea of the Social Charter was launched.
literature
- Manfred Weiss, Christoph Busch, Welf Schröter (ed.): Multimedia workplace of the future. Assistance and delegation with mobile software agents. Talheimer, Mössingen-Talheim [2003]. ISBN 3-89376-105-5
- Alcatel SEL Foundation / Forum Soziale Technikgestaltung (Ed.): Mobile working worlds - social design of "Electronic Mobility", Talheimer, Mössingen-Talheim [2002]. ISBN 3-89376-087-3
- Jutta Rump, Dirk Balfanz, Anatol Porak, Welf Schröter (Eds.): Electronic Mobility - Theses and Recommendations. Mobile working environments and social design. Ludwigshafen, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart [2005].
- Martin Jendrischik, Jürgen Hüpohl, Daniel Pohl: eMobility - CleanTech industry in Germany. Focus on drivers. , Bonn, 2010 - PDF 10.6 MB. Free study available for download.