The new “rules” of the workplace are being defined as computers are frantically being programmed to take the lead in the workplace, when it comes to judgment and intuition. We humans need to be the idea generators, the motivators, the negotiators, and the trouble-shooters to fix computer errors, if we want to govern our emerging digital environments. In short, we need to get closer to our firms, be more tightly integrated and intimate with work performance than ever before… which means the role and tenure of the much-derided middle-manager in the Dilbert Cartoons could be taking on a whole new potential twist – and a whole new (potential) level of relevance.
I would go as far as declaring 2018 as a new beginning of the value of the full-time employee – where alignment with the mission, spirit, culture, energy and context of an organization has never been so important. We are seeing the value of contract work diminish as so much “outsource-able” work is so much easier to automate and global labor drives down the cost of getting things done quickly and easily. Business success is more about investing in the core than ever – and that core includes the people who are the true pieces of human middleware to hold everything together.
The onus is circling back to the value of being a full-time employee, who needs to value the fruits of having a predictable income and adapt to the changing balance of how humans need to work with computers.
Remember when the rise of the gig worker was supposed to revamp how so many of us worked, as we escaped the shackles of the “evil employer”?
Almost two decades ago, the internet was creating the independent worker, as exemplified in Dan Pink’s timeless book “Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way We Live” became the seminal guide for what is now known as the “gig worker”.
Furthermore, unless recent research from McKinsey of 8000 workers can now be categorized as fake news, 162 million people in Europe and the United States—or 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population—engage in some form of independent work today. And a recent study from freelance site Upwork (which undoubtedly wants to hype the impact of gig world) cranks up the numbers even further, claiming that a staggering 50% of US millennials are already freelancing, before declaring the freelance sector will comprise the majority of the US workforce within a decade. Wow.
So are the days of being gainfully employed really disintegrating before our very eyes? Or is the gig hype beginning to atrophy for many people?
The gig economy is becoming a tough place to craft a living if many of the new reports are to be believed. And it’s not just about driving Ubers, delivering food orders and contracting for logistics firms – i.e., working for businesses that exploit the gig economy to drive down labor costs and improve services. It’s the freelance gig economy where people forge a living writing code, supporting content development, delivering consulting work on-demand etc. Even that lovely Upwork research admits: “While finances are a challenge for all, freelancers experience a unique concern — income predictability. The study found that, with the ebbs and flows of freelancing, full-time freelancers dip into savings more often (63 percent at least once per month versus 20 percent of full-time non-freelancers)”. So even if the most biased of sources admits most gig workers can’t cover their living costs, we can conclude that those “Free Agents”, which McKinsey describes as the gig worker sector using gig work as its primary income, are not in a sustainable earning situation.
Today, it’s a buyer’s market for gig work
You only need to spend a little time on LinkedIn to observe just how many people are now marketing their wares as solo free agents, or as part of a company bearing their name. It’s abundantly clear that so many people have decided to set themselves up as independents, that the market for gig talent is saturated and it’s become a “buyers’ market” for gig work. Whether I want to commission a crack consultant to validate some RPA software, hire an analyst to endorse my product, commission a writer to produce a white-label assessment of an emerging market, produce a go-to-market strategy for my business, redesign my website, my logo, or just have someone support my business on a part-time basis… today, I am spoiled for choice. I barely need to hire fulltime employees these days, unless they are truly core to keeping my business ticking along – and I can create real competition to get the work done for much lower costs than a few short years ago.
On top of the risks of commoditizing gig work, we have to contend with the impact of automation and Machine Learning to stay relevant and worthy of earning a paycheck
We’re not in a world rejecting human work, but a world where work is rapidly changing – and the skills of the dynamic middle manager has never been so important. In short, the increasing availability of computing power to crunch massive amounts of data, coupled with advancing tools to tag and label data and workflow clusters with breakthrough programming in languages such as Python for syntax and R for data visualization, are the game-changers that will increasingly impact how we get work done, as we develop continually smarter algorithms to keep teaching computers to do the work of the human brain.
What’s more, the rapid development of Machine Learning (ML) environments such as Google’s TensorFlow, the Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning Workbench, Amazon’s Sagemaker, Caffe and Alibaba’s Aliyun are becoming the new environments driving armies of coders and developers to align themselves with ML value – desperate to stay relevant (and well paid) against the headwinds of commoditization of legacy coding and app development.
As ML takes over judgment and (eventually) intuition, the human-value onus moves to interaction, agenda-setting, problem defining and idea generation
In short, the disruptive ML techniques are teaching computers to do what comes naturally to humans: to learn by example. Today’s emerging ML tools use massive amounts of data and computing power to simulate neural networks that imitate the human brain’s connectivity, classifying data sets and finding patterns and correlations between them.
Net-net, pattern-matching jobs are increasingly being affected by ML – vocations such as radiologists, pathologists, financial advisors, lawyers, procurement executives, accountants etc. are all being challenged as judgment work is (gradually) being replaced by smart algorithms. However, as elements of these types of jobs are being affected, other job elements become even more important, namely interacting with other humans, creating, setting the agenda, defining and finding the problems to go after. They motivate, they persuade, they negotiate, they coordinate. They are the dynamic conduits of driving information and ideas in an organization and will be increasingly in the driving seat as Machine Learning advancements increasingly take hold. The digital middle manager who can bring a team together and lead people in the right direction does not exist and likely never will…. I’d be amazed if we saw one emerge soon.
Fulltime employment is now becoming a premium situation
Having predictability of income, healthcare costs covered, guaranteed paid vacation time – and a constant supply of work to do – is fast becoming the dream scenario for the disgruntled gig worker. So here’s a thought – go get a JOB. Or if you’re in a job and wanted to try the gig work thing… spare a thought for what your ideal situation looks like, because last time I looked, most firms are doing everything they can to avoid hiring well-paid staff… especially if they can get the work done much cheaper from desperate gig workers.
The Bottom-Line: Five steps to keeping your job:
i) Become the conduit of ideas and information that is irreplaceable right across your organization. So we’ve now come full circle, where the value of having people really close to the business is becoming more important than ever, as computers perform more and more of the routine and judgement based tasks. To the point, the value of the full-time employee goes both ways: companies need people who really understand their institutional processes, their quirks and ways of getting things done… who are onhand to troubleshoot mistakes, but also there to keep the ideas flowing to keep the business ahead of its competition and close to its customers. “Human middleware” is becomimg the real OneOffice glue to break down those siloes and help govern a slick business operation from front to back office.
ii) Develop a positive attitude by finding aspects of your job you do like. Your full time job is likely the best gig-work you will probably ever get, so even if you hate your boss and most of your colleagues, ask yourself if you’d prefer scrapping around for the boring work other companies prefer to outsource. Focus on the interesting stuff you can do and keep reminding yourself that the grass is rarely greener elsewhere. Unless you are a whizz at Python development, the chances are your job-hopping days are numbered and you need to figure out how to stay put and make it better for yourself.
iii) Motivate yourself and become a real motivator. Being motivated – and helping to motivate others – is probably the least computerizable trait of all. If you aren’t motivated, you are placing yourself at risk when your leadership assess which of their team then want to take them forward into the future. If you really can’t get yourself excited about what you do, or your company just demotivates you in such a way you can’t dig yourself out of your rut, then you may need to take that Python course and brush up your resume…
iv) Let the computers take the lead and become the controller to fix mistakes double checking, intervening when the computers do something dumb. Humans and computers make different kinds of mistakes, so we really need to bring humans and computers together intelligently to cancel out each other’s mistakes. Fighting automation and ML is a lost cause, especially when your firm is completely bought in to the concept and it rolling out bots and working on developing smart algorithms. Just let these things take the lead and them figure out how to make them functional and monitor their errors, ad computers will always keep making them. You can’t fight innovation, but you can nurture it, manage it and troubleshoot it.
v) Find your pareto balance and stop whining. Nothing in life including your current or prospective employer will be perfect. Focus on the 80% that is right, versus making yourself (and others around you) miserable by the other 20%. There is rarely a perfect fit where workers only get to focus 100% on all the things they love to do… there has to be this 80/20 compromise, or you will be forever hopping around trying to find a workplace nirvana that doesn’t exist. And it today’s social world your reputation follows you around like never before… and employers are steering clear of the whiners at all costs.
With our governments going broke and looking to go even broker, here is my simple wish-list to fix our endemic societal issues, and recoup some much needed tax income, so we can start dreaming about things like improving disastrous education and health services…
Trump is gone …and a new political party emerges in the US that isn’t controlled by greedy corporations and corruptible misogynist dinosaurs. The American voters go back to voting on policies, not stereotypes and hatred. Wouldn’t that just be so awesome? Is it illegal to dream these days?
Britain finally gives up on Brexit, realizing that changing the color of passports from red to blue doesn’t make up for trashing the country’s economic future and hurtling it back into the 1970s. Please can we all just admit there is not one single good thing about Brexit for any living being, so we can just consign the whole thing to the time-capsule of bad ideas, along with communism, dodgeball and the George Foreman grill. Bad ideas are OK, as long as we admit later they were bad ideas…
Political leaders finally realize that smartphone addiction is the worst disease to affect society since cigarettes and booze. In fact, it’s worse – they could fund entire health, military and education programs taxing booze and ciggies, but with smartphones, all the money is now getting sucked offshore somewhere, and into Mark Zuckerberg’s and Jeff Bezo’s bank accounts.
Re-open pubs and bad discos. Back in the pre-smartphone era, our social world was centered on bad pubs and even worse dance floors. Yes, we had to get drunk and make idiots out of ourselves to meet people and get married… now it’s just swipe left or right, a few photos and you’re all done. Where did all the “fun” go? Can’t governments declare what’s left of our pubs as places of national heritage and conserve what we have left of life before Instagram? Is the joy of youth consigned to sharing bad selfies and playing online video games alone in their bedrooms?
Tax gym memberships. What was wrong with a few extra pounds and a beer gut? Now, if you don’t have a perfect six-pack on your chest, rather than in your fridge, you’re not exacty making friends like you used to… where did all the fun go? Not sure about you, but I don’t have much energy left for socializing after 45 mins on the treadmill and benchpressing 130lbs, so I might as well donate the $20 I should be spending on booze to the government to fund the reopening of classic pubs.
Tax anyone trying to buy Bitcoin. Just because.
Tax vendors double for sponsoring every ropy conference under the sun. They’re wasting their money in any case, so why not make them do something useful with it?
Place income tax on robots. This will end the inane conversation about “digital” labor, as everyone goes out of their way to call it something else, like workflow efficiency… which is what it really always was, right?
Tax vendors for using the term “digital” in their marketing. Why not make some use out of a meaningless overused term…
Tax #fakenews. Forget the detritus of Obamacare, this will fund a whole new health system, right?
Tax bloggers for writing opinionated blogs, because they think they can. Make them realize there’s no such thing as free opinion these days…
The Bottom-line: As we near the end of a ridiculous year, we can all dream, can’t we?
On behalf of the HfS analyst team and global community, I am delighted to announce our flagship FORA summit taking place this coming March 7th and 8th at Convene, Times Square, Manhattan, New York City.
This will span the entire two days with the theme “Learning to Change” dominating the conversation. The tech is here and is being proven, but are we really, truly ready to disrupt our underlying corporate DNA to exploit it to its full potential? Can we really change how we operate, think, collaborate and focus to embrace the new wave of data-driven transformation that is engulfing us?
Key Topics up for Debate:
Intelligent Automation in Practice (not theory); Blockchain demystified; Emerging Sourcing Models and the Digital OneOffice; The Emergence of the Chief Data Officer; Making Change Management actually work.
Key Speakers and Panelists:
Tim Leberecht (Author of the Business Romantic); Tony Saldanha (VP, IT and GBS P&G); Phil Fersht (CEO, HfS Research); Mike Salvino (Pioneer behind Accenture Operations and a key investment partner for Carrick Capital); Larry Carin, Professor of Computer Engineering, Duke University (More to follow….
CEOs of the leading Intelligent Automation software firms and IT/BPM service providers
Key enterprise leaders managing data, automation, global business services and operations initiatives
HfS analysts spanning emerging technologies, industries and sourcing solutions.
Why FORA is Special:
The worlds of software providers, business operations leaders, and services providers have always been chasms apart – different mindsets, vernaculars, conversations, ideas of what constitutes value – and vastly different cultures. At FORA, we are bringing together these diverse groups of people to rethink completely how we run global operations in this robotically digital era, to debate the challenges and opportunities posed by automation, AI, analytics, blockchain, global talent on our business operations and our careers.
If you have further questions regarding FORA, how you can attend, sponsor, speak, or just make suggestions, please drop us a note at [email protected]
When the statement “It’s just like BPR from twenty years ago, but with tech that actually works” rang out at the recent London FORA Summit, the nods around the room were palpable.
2017 has undoubtedly been the break-out year for enterprise robotics software. We witnessed a whole new industry emerge around robotic technologies that can stitch together workflows, processes, applications and desktop interfaces to provide a genuine transformation of the digital underbelly for so many enterprises, many of whom have suffered for decades from inefficient manual workarounds and spaghetti code clogging up their ability to access data and run their businesses properly. Today, the emerging solutions available on the market do not load the enterprise transformation blunderbuss with silver bullets, but they do provide a starting point to improve fundamentally the data underbelly of an organization. And, for so many organizations, they are turning to robotics software RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation) as the starting point.
Robotic Process Automation
The global market for RPA Software and Services will reach $898 million in 2018 and is expected to grow to $2.2 billion by 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of 54%.
RPA Definition:
Example use-case: automating invoice processing across multiple business applications handling rule-based exceptions. RPA is different from traditional automation software as it is inherently capable of recognizing and adapting to deviations in data or exceptions when confronted by large volumes of data. In effect, it can be intelligently trained to analyze large amounts of data from software processes and translate them to triggers for new actions, responses, and communication with other systems. RPA describes a software development toolkit that allows non-engineers to quickly create software robots (known commonly as “bots”) to automate rules-driven business processes. At the core, an RPA system imitates human interventions that interact with internal IT systems. It is a non-invasive application that requires minimum integration with the existing IT setup; delivering productivity by replacing human effort to complete the task. Any company which has labor-intensive processes, where people are performing high-volume, highly transactional process functions, will boost their capabilities and save money and time with robotic process automation. Much fr RPA is self-triggered (bots pass tasks to humans), but requires human intervention for judgment-intensive tasks and robust human governance and to make changes / improvements.
Similarly, RPA offers enough advantage to companies which operate with very few people or shortage of labor. Both situations offer a welcome opportunity to save on cost as well as streamline the resource allocation by deploying automation. The direct services market includes implementation and consulting services focused on building RPA capabilities within an organization. It does not include wider operational services like BPO, which may include RPA becoming increasingly embedded in its delivery.
Robotic Desktop Automation
In addition to RPA, the other software toolset which comprises the emergence of enterprise robotics software is termed RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation). Together with RPA, RDA will help drive the market for enterprise robotic software towards $1.5bn in software and services expenditure in 2018 (with close to three-quarters tied to the services element of strategy, design, transformation and implementation of enterprise robotics). HfS’ new estimates are for the total enterprise robotics software and services market to surpass $3 billion by 2021 as a compound growth rate of 39%.
RDA Definition:
Example use-case: automating transfer of data from one system to another. RDA is essentially surface automation, where desktop screens (whether desktop-based, web-based, cloud-based) are “scraped”, scripted and re-programmed to create the automation of data across systems. A well-designed RDA solution can automate workflows on several levels, specifically: application layer; storage layer; OS layer and network layer. Workflow automation on these layers requires equally specific technologies but provides advantages of efficiency, reliability, performance and responsiveness. Much of this automation needs to be attended by humans as the automation is triggered by humans (humans pass tasks to bots), as data inputs are not always predictable or uniform, but adaptation of smart Machine Learning techniques can reduce the amount of human attendance over time and improve the intelligence of these automated processes. Similarly to RPA, RDA requires human intervention for judgment-intensive tasks and robust human governance and to make changes / improvements:
The Bottom-Line: Automation and AI have a significant part to play in engineering a touchless and intelligent OneOffice
However which way we spin “digital”, the name of the game is about enterprises responding to customer needs as and when they occur, and these customers are increasingly wanting to interact with companies without physical interaction. This means manual interventions must be eliminated, data sets converged and process chains broadened and digitized to cater for the customer. This means entire supply chains need to be designed to meet these outcomes and engage with all the stakeholders to service customers seamlessly and effectively. There is no silver bullet to achieve this, but there is emerging technology available to design processes faster, cheaper and smarter with desired outcomes in mind. The concept was pretty much the same with business process reengineering two+ decades ago, but the difference today is we have emerging tech available to do the real data engineering that is necessary:
In short, every siloed dataset restricts the analytical insight that makes process owners strategic contributors to the business. You can’t create value – or transform a business operation – without converged, real-time data. Digitally-driven organizations must create a Digital Underbelly to support the front office by automating manual processes, digitizing manual documents to create converged datasets, and embracing the cloud in a way that enables genuine scalability and security for a digital organization. Organizations simply cannot be effective with a digital strategy without automating processes intelligently – forget all the hype around robotics and jobs going away, this is about making processes run digitally so smart organizations can grow their digital businesses and create new work and opportunities. This is where RPA and RDA adds most value today… however, as more processes become digitized, the more value we can glean from cognitive applications that feed off data patterns to help orchestrate more intelligent, broader process chains that link the front to the back office. In our view, as these solutions mature, we’ll see a real convergence of analytics, RPA and cognitive solutions as intelligent data orchestration becomes the true lifeblood – and currency – for organizations.
Do take some time to read the HfS Trifecta to understand the real enmeshing of automation, analytics and AI.
What we love about the Digital OneOffice™ is the simple fact it not only defines “digital”, but it also provides a meaningful framework, comprising of five fundamentals, that must come together to create a real-time flow of data across customers, partners and employees:
Fundamental 1) – Fostering genuine Digital Customer, Partner and Employee Engagement
A genuine “digital” organization has the ability to take all the cool social, mobile and interactive tech we use in our personal lives and create that experience for all the people in its environment – its employees, customers, and partners – and empower them to interact with each other seamlessly, and in real-time.
The outcome is all about creating, supporting and sustaining an immersive customer experience, where all touchpoints across an organization are tied to serving the customer as effortlessly and seamlessly as possible (and often not necessitating any actual human to human interaction). These “immersive” customer experiences are about leveraging these omnichannels (typically mobile, social, interactive technologies) and creating meaningful analytics from these converged datasets that make this real-time digital experience happen for the organization and its customers, its employees and its partners, right up and down the supply chain. The OneOfficeorganization needs a support function to service those customers, get its products/services to market when they want them, manage the financial metrics, understand their needs and future demands and make sure it has the talent which truly understands how to meet the desired outcomes of their work.
Fundamental 2) – Embedding Design Thinking Techniques to achieve Continuous Digital Outcomes
Design Thinking offers an approach for a diverse group of people to work together to identify and articulate a common problem, brainstorm ideas for addressing it, quickly prototype/wireframe/storyboard and test it, and continue to iterate on the idea as it takes shape into a proposed solution. A Design Thinking led approach to designing a Digital OneOffice framework moves the focus of the operations executive and service provider partner away from the process itself, and the internal, “what’s wrong inside of what we do” to “what do we actually want to achieve” (the business outcome), and what do we want people to feel and do naturally that will lead to further engagement and new—and different—results.
At HfS, we are finding that Design Thinking is actually changing the way many clients and service providers work, that there is a real complement between designers, consultants, engineers, and service delivery as organizations seek to bring the front, middle and back offices closer together to achieve common outcomes. Moreover, it’s vital that Design Thinking is firmly embedded as the method for ongoing engagement across all organizational stakeholders, as outcomes constantly evolve as markets evolve and business needs change.
Fundamental 3) – Building a Scaleable Digital Underbelly that Automates, Digitizes, Cloudifies and Secures
Every siloed dataset restricts the analytics insight that makes process owners strategic contributors to the business. You can’t create value or transform a business operation without converged, real-time data. Digitally-driven organizations must create a Digital Underbelly to support the front office by automating manual processes, digitizing manual documents to create converged datasets, and embraces the cloud in a way that enables genuine scalability and security for a digital organization. Organizations simply cannot be effective with a digital strategy without automating processes intelligently – forget all the hype around robotics and jobs going away, this is about making processes run digitally so smart organizations can grow their digital businesses and create new work and opportunities. This is akin to a “central nervous system” that incepts and processes all the elements necessary to make the organization function.
Fundamental 4) – Achieving an Intelligent Digital Support Function without Hierarchies and Silos
Enterprises need their support functions such as IT, finance, HR and supply chain, aligned with supporting the customer experience, as opposed to operating in a “vacuum”. We are terming this ”Intelligent Digital Support,” where broader roles are created and human performance is aligned with the achievement of common business outcomes. With the Digital OneOffice, the focus needs to shift towards creating a work culture where individuals are encouraged to spend more time interpreting data, understanding the needs of the front end of the business and ensuring the support functions keep pace with the front office. This is especially the case in industries that are more dependent than ever on real-time data, using multiple channels to reach their customers and being able to think out-of-the-box to get ahead of disruptive business models.
Progressive OneOffice enterprises prefer flat structures, where staff naturally collaborate in autonomous, cross-functional teams motivated by shared outcomes. They look towards much more dynamic management, where managers and staff constantly interact to fine-tune performance against evolving outcomes and manage diverse workforces across global cultures.
Fundamental 5) – Establishing Intelligent, Cognitive Processes that Promote Predictive Decision Making
The Digital OneOffice is not about collecting and archiving historical data simply to discover what went wrong, it’s about being able to predict when things will go wrong and devising smart strategies to get ahead of them. The Digital OneOffice is about embedding smart cognitive applications into process chains and workflows, it’s about learning from mistakes and new experiences along the way. This is the “organization neural system”. Cognitive technologies, advanced analytics and automation help create the capability necessary to operate in digital environments by automating and extracting the data needed real-time to respond to markets, support critical decisions and stay ahead of the game.
The Bottom Line: The secret sauce of the Digital OneOffice is the sum of the Five Fundamentals as one integrated experience, not merely the quality of individual fundamentals themselves
When we conducted the Digital OneOffice Premier League earlier this year, we focused on the ability of service providers to deliver each fundamental, and the winners were those who scored highest as an aggregate across the five. When we re-run this in the future, the Digital OneOffice framework should be mature enough to evaluate outcomes based on the ability of providers and their clients to create the most effective real-time digital experience, by managing the five fundamentals as one integrated organization unit, where teams function autonomously across front, middle and back office functions and processes to promote real-time data flows and rapid decision making, based on meeting defined outcomes.
And front, middle and back offices will cease to exist, as they will be, simply, OneOffice.
As a wise man once said: “It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins.” Well, if you’d listened to this horse, you may have turned a pretty profit =)
Kudos to HfS analyst Martin Gabriel for a very interesting analysis of how rich (or poor) we just could have been:
Terrific discussion from the FORA leadership panel featuring (from left to right) Mihir Shukla, Automation Anywhere; Dawn Tiura, SIG; Jesus Mantas, IBM; Cliff Justice, KPMG; Leslie Willcocks, London School of Economics; Mohit Joshi, Infosys and Ahmed Mazhari, Genpact.
