Cloud Computing and Peter Drucker

Still, for all his wariness, even Drucker would have been taken with an essay written by a young economist named Florian Ramseger, who asserts that "we are at the doorstep of a new era" due to the advent of "cloud computing." This is the Internet-based system in which shared resources, software, and information are provided to devices on demand, much the way that electricity moves across the grid. Indeed, as Ramseger sees things, it is an era that Drucker himself helped define.

"Cloud computing has the great potential to put in place the three main elements of Drucker's knowledge society," writes Ramseger, 29, a German native who just joined the World Economic Forum in Geneva as a research analyst. His composition on the topic was recently picked as the winner of the Peter Drucker Challenge, a contest that drew more than 200 entries from around the globe; participants could be no older than 35.

The first element

The first element, according to Ramseger, is enhanced connectivity. This is crucial because in a knowledge society, workers tend to take on highly specialized tasks. But "by itself," Drucker explained in his 1995 book Managing in a Time of Great Change, this "specialized knowledge yields no performance." To produce meaningful results, groups of people boasting different areas of expertise must often come together and contribute to a common goal. Cloud computing promises to make this increasingly easy, Ramseger writes, because it will "create many new platforms of exchange for knowledge workers to engage in."

The second element, he says, is a shift in "the balance in employer-employee relations." In his 2002 book Managing in the Next Society, Drucker advised corporations to recognize that they need knowledge workers more than knowledge workers need them. Unlike laborers of the past, Drucker wrote, "they know they can leave" most any time for other opportunities. Ramseger suggests that with cloud computing, this trend toward mobility will only accelerate. "Workers will no longer need to be deskbound," he says. "Instead, by being able to plug into the cloud anytime and anywhere, they will finally be able to own their work tools: a netbook and some server space."