WHAT IS A DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE?

A distributed enterprise hints at a company structure where business operations, processes, and employees are decentralized and dispersed across multiple geographic locations. That contrasts with traditional centralized enterprise models where essential company functions revolve around a concentrated corporate headquarters or single main campus. Enabled by technological advances over the past few decades, distributed enterprises aim to tap talent, reduce costs, and serve customers more effectively on a global scale.

A host of new and emerging business technological innovations have enabled practical distributed enterprise implementations after initial conception during the dotcom era. Ubiquitous high-speed internet connectivity allows reliable access to cloud software, making physical proximity to central servers unnecessary. Communication advancements through video conferencing, messaging, and collaboration platforms keep distributed teams connected. Productivity software, virtualization, blockchain, automation and artificial intelligence allow specialized work completed anywhere.

Drivers for enterprise distribution include access to wider talent pools as remote work expands, especially for scarce skills like software development. Distributing operations globally helps serve customer needs better through time zone coverage and localized interactions. Companies can also benefit from reduced real estate costs, broader candidate hiring reach, and greater resilience to local disruptions like weather events.

At the same time, managing a distributed workforce halfway across the world in different languages and time zones presents numerous challenges. Communication barriers, isolation, poor visibility, complex logistics, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and operational risks require mitigation. Still, distributed enterprises represent the future of work. Surveys suggest over 70 percent of companies already utilize distributed teams, and nearly 60 percent of employees works remotely part-time. Leveraging technology to access skills and customers globally provides overwhelming strategic and cost efficiencies – the workplace of tomorrow will assuredly continue decentralizing. And so, as you can see, the organization of the future is bound to look quite different than the businesses that we are all familiar with today.