As a first post and before the yet-to-be-written 2022 posts, we are happy to share our global vision here.
A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away…
Disclaimer : at Skilld, we used to live in an open-source world, focused on one particular technology which is Drupal as our core business. As a result we are among the biggest active contributors to Drupal worldwide (here here & here). We have been distributed from day 1 (in 2012) with what we called at the time our “Cloud Production Network” (with people aka developers in Ukraine, Russia, Latam). This was no less than one of the first highly distributed open-source Services Community (at least in the Drupal world).
We have also been easily happily growing :). Hum happily ? Not all the time. We also experienced a few crisis (logically related to growth) and a lot of sh**ty projects. We have had plenty of time to experience political conflicts and governance challenges of large IT projects, even more related to digital transformation (& orgs change management).
We had already the feeling that we were facing a few identified challenges and started to look around us how these paradox could be solved.
And because we did not create our company for such suffering, and because we also had in mind that we wanted to build a scalable organization to solve this issue, we started our intensive R&D program in 2016.
At the time, we already had in mind that we needed :
An organization which would be highly distributed (we had one), open and scalable. In other terms, we wanted to build an open & distributed community (for services).
A set of “Tools” which would allow piloting this scalable org, thus needing a similar IT architecture : open-source (ofc), scalable, near-real-time data driven, and distributed aka cloud (but remember that at the time, there was no mature Cloud ecosystem, Docker was a rising star and Kubernetes was still fairly immature)
A great Methodology which could be used to ensure seamless piloting, industrial quality and velocity even though we had this distributed context. (Think of Wikipedia)
Overall the vision was this one :
What’s new in 2022 ?
Our initial vision is still true. However the pain is growing faster than ever :
Freelancing is booming + Organizations still need to fulfill their needs
This is true by all means
This is true in IT Services overall
This is true with Open-source
This is also true for Drupal Open-source projects, which has been our core business since the early days of Skilld in 2012 (here) .
Hiring has never been so painful.
This is true by all means
This is true worldwide (see here)
This is true in IT Services overall (here)
A whole bench of successful startups are focusing on the hype of Matching (with some success - at least on a funding scale :) Eg : Malt Comet Toptal Talent.io Eightfold.ai Worksome Stoke Braintrust Torre)
Onboarding takes (an incredible lot of) time.
This is true by all means
This is true for any kind of Teamwork (vs crowdworking : Uber Mechanical turk)
This is true for IT projects (still a research topic in 2021)
All that we know for certain, is that the future in uncertain… (a VUCA world)
This is true with Covid-19 (maybe Covid-2x would be a better name ?)
This is true with environmental issues (Remote job is the new hype and this will quickly distribute the pain worldwide : Eg Facebook in Europe)
This is true by all means :) (2022 biggest threats)
Human Happiness and Identity comes from being social, aka being part of a group (eg an organization, a company, a country, a religion, etc. )
This sense of belonging is key in a context to growing freelancing and ever-more-rapidly changing orgs.
So what ?
If this was easy, you would already have a nice solution. There are a lot of other challenges to overcome. We just had a small overview of a few of them.
However we did this mapping with an (almost) exhaustive vision of all the challenges we need to overcome :-) As it looks, we will still have some interesting topics ahead :-)
Towards a Community as a Service business model + Challenges Map
Please find below this detailed challenges map. You can see it as our [Strategy + R&D] roadmap somehow.
All our future posts, insights, topics will be (should be) related to this Challenges Map, mixing some theory, some feedback, and newly identified challenges.
We are happy to share it with you !
If you are interested by all these topics and want to reach out, you are warmly welcome to contact us, either on Linkedin (here or here ou here), or directly on Skilld.cloud