File structure or search

Do you organize your documents in a hierarchy of files or do you dump them all into one place and use search to find what you want? I think this will be the difference between today's and tomorrow's organization structures.
Photo by bfiOfficeFurniture Flickr CC

Top down structured pyramids of the past

If you book dinner dates and set up meetings with calendar synchronizing software - chances are that you born before 1980 and belong to a generation that is in for a tough change.

With Google Latitude and other gps applications you could know where all your contacts are at any moment, if you are good at searching data on the Internet, you can use the same techniques to create virtual files on your computer. Both of these are ways you can recognize someone from the Generation Y.

Flat organizations with ad-hoc working groups

The Generation Y expectations on work are very much different from earlier generations. They are the first generation to grow up with technology, they have tens of thousands of hours in gaming and computer use. What computers do much better than humans is sorting, filtering and finding data, Generation Y knows how to use this strength.

The consequence is that existing knowledge will be mined and used. The way data is sorted and distributed will become inconsequential and probably a lot of new correlations will be discovered.

Dialog instead of silos - a productive future

Today's organizations in silo like structures with effective inner communication and difficulties to speak to other parts of the organization will be a thing of the past.

Since it is a Open Management principle that productivity can be increased through "interface management" (productivity through dialog), and that the future could bring companies without inner borders - productivity will surely improve drastically.

Do you agree? Does this seem possible?