Future of Work Trends: Simple Things Become Smarter

Technology developments such as cloud computing, AI, and IoT are being combined to add intelligence to things that previously had little or no intelligence. Executive leaders seeking workforce improvement should invest in making simple things and applications become smarter to drive productivity.

Overview

Opportunities

·        The ascent of cloud computing giants, such as Alibaba Cloud, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, have made it far easier and less expensive for more organizations to utilize advanced technology, such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine vision.

·        The move of many business processes to the cloud means that data about work activities, employees and customers can be inexpensively collected, stored and analyzed, most often by these cloud giants.

·        The “democratization” of technology — whereby sophisticated computing services are more easily used by non-IT employees —vastly increases the rate of digital change.

·        Internet of Things (IoT) and physical sensor providers will exploit improving price, performance and capabilities to enable more situational awareness and “intelligence” at endpoints, including employee “wearables” and deployed devices.

What You Need to Know

Enterprises are working to improve a range of entities, from things such as cars and machine tools, to applications such as email and predictive maintenance, as enterprises seek to improve profitability by providing employees with better tools.

·        Basic entity: The enterprise entity is used by the employee for work, but it requires extensive monitoring, operation and control from the employee to get it to contribute to work productivity. The employee effectively provides the sensing, connectivity, processing and context analysis. The basic entity applies to everything the employee uses for work, such as cars, machine tools and emails. For these, legacy entities, the employee must actively monitor the environment and the entity, such as the car or application, and determine the next appropriate action, such as turning to avoid a pedestrian or prioritizing a prospect’s email.

·        Connected entity: The enterprise adds connectivity and internet capabilities to the functionality of the entity to drive enhanced employee productivity. As enterprises add more connectivity and sensing capabilities, the employee can rely on more functionality from the tool. Examples include email filters to highlight key emails from projects employees are working on, or vibration monitors or location trackers on equipment to issue alerts when the equipment starts to exceed vibration thresholds or is taken outside the plant.

·        Intelligent entity: Individual technologies are used to improve functionality of the enterprise entities the employee uses to continue to drive productivity.

·        Contextual entity: The multimodal use of technologies leverages the specific context of the specific employee to drive the employee’s productivity based on the individual’s real-time data.

Recommendations

Given the pace and value of technology change, executive leaders should:

·        Accelerate the pace at which enterprise moves toward using smarter things by investing in the executives’ own digital dexterity skills and encouraging teammates and frontline stakeholders to do the same.

·        Seek opportunities to “ride the technology curve” by building increasing intelligence in objects and work tools, and driving culture change by training employees to exploit the decision power enabled by these new capabilities.

·        Form “fusion” teams that are populated by technical specialists and businesspeople to accelerate digital change that improves business operations.

·        Assess the efficiency, profitability, competitive differentiation and enterprise risk that can result (or the lack thereof) from digitally uplifting objects and work tools by capturing the outcomes and experiences resulting from these tools.