So what does this mean for the future of the global services industry?<\/span><\/p>\nThe business and IT services industry has grown rampantly since the early service deals in the 1960s (with the likes of EDS, IBM and Hewitt Associates) and has reached a colossal scale we estimate close to 16 million workers across the prime delivery locations. Like any major industry that reaches a saturation point, as technological and operational methods improve, the need to continue adding staff will decrease once customer demand slows to modest levels. Just look at the evolution of automotive, aerospace and general manufacturing industries; now the same is finally happening to white collar industries where it is now very feasible to digitize work that was previously manually driven. Finally, automation has truly reached \u201cswivel chair\u201d business processes where manual interventions to process chains can be mimicked into software \u201crecordings\u201d to conduct said sub-task. While smoothing out various processes has the impact of freeing up time for existing office workers to focus on other (possibly higher value) activities, the ultimate effect, besides \u201chuman augmentation\u201d is to enable businesses to conduct more of the routine work with less human effort and, potentially, less headcount.<\/p>\n
How enterprise buyers and service providers of IT and business services will adopt\u00a0digital labor<\/span><\/p>\nMost buyers are constantly investigating how to improve processes and where automation makes sense for them. It\u2019s simply not possible to automate every flawed process chain\u2014the cost and time is simply not worth it, so they need to select processes that warrant the Intelligent Automation investment\u2014usually ones with high intensity repetition and throughput (and lots of paperwork that can be digitized), where RPA has a sizeable positive ROI. In most cases, Intelligent Automation potential is overlooked because the buyer just didn\u2019t have enough financial incentive to make the investment.<\/p>\n
However, on the sell side, the more service providers can deliver standard process delivery models to their clients, the more cost effective they become and the more price competitive they can be. Hence, smart automation is critical to their business models and competitiveness, and this is where we see most of the impact in the services industry in the coming years. The service providers will delivery efficiently automated services and then be able to pass on these \u201csavings\u201d from \u201cdigital labor\u201d to their clients. This is why we envisage significant updates from the service provider community as Intelligent Automation capabilities quickly get embraced and embedded in service models across all core business and IT processes.<\/p>\n
The Bottom Line:\u00a0Automation and digital labor are increasingly pivotal elements of service delivery\u2014we need to be smart about increasing human value in services<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe choice will largely be down to the workers figuring out whether they want to stay in this industry and learn new skills and ways of working, in order to continue to be effective. As the data plainly shows, the services industry, from an employee standpoint, is likely to be 10% smaller in five years\u2019 time. That may be a significant number of workers, but this reduction is gradual and gives ambitious workers the chance to reorient their skills and job focus. Our industry will likely lose that number (or more) through natural attrition over a five-year time period, so the core issue here is to embrace the value of making processes run better and how this helps us focus on growth initiatives and customer-aligned initiatives. As the head of a call center recently declared to us: \u201cAs long as we touch the customer in a valuable way, we can\u2019t be automated.\u201d That says a great deal about where we need to focus as this industry goes though this evolution.<\/p>\n
HfS subscribers can <\/em><\/span>click here<\/a><\/em><\/span> to download the full POV, which details the HfS sizing and forecasting methodology for the impact of digital labor<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s time we dispelled the scaremongering and hype and gave you the true picture of how advances in automation tools…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,52,57,78,80,81,90],"tags":[303],"ppma_author":[19],"yoast_head":"\n
Digital labor will trim 1.4 million global services jobs by 2021 - Horses for Sources | No Boundaries<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n