ABSTRACT
This chapter provides useful insight that treads the difficult path between being too specific and being too general. It's about providing principles to give guidance to the intelligent manager who is not a technology specialist about the role that technology plays in Smart Flexibility. The chapter analyses current trends, outlining some potential pitfalls, and doing a bit of crystal-ball gazing about what's coming up on the horizon and how it may affect the increasingly smart and flexible world of work. Instant messaging (IM) was the kind of technology banned by organisations in recent years. It was seen as a consumer technology associated with chit-chat and timewasting, and as coming with considerable security risks. Cloud computing is a term currently put forward to describe a range of third-party services that will probably change the way most organisations structure their Information Technology (IT) provision. Forward-looking IT departments are now grappling with the issues around using employee-owned devices for work purposes.
