Work Automation — The Dilemma
We live in fascinating times when it comes to how, when and where work gets done. As business leaders and managers, we have become increasingly capable of engaging a workforce that is some combination of virtual and on site, part time and full time, permanent and contingent. But just when we’ve sorted out preferred management routines, there is an entirely new landscape emerging with technology options central to the work and possibly your business model: work automation.
It’s not new though. In 1900, 30 million people in the United States were farmers. By 1990 that number had fallen to under 3 million even as the population more than tripled. So, in a matter of speaking, 90% of American agriculture workers lost their jobs, mostly due to automation. Yet somehow, the 20th century was still seen as an era of unprecedented prosperity.
In the decades to come, we are likely to see similar shifts. This creates a dilemma for leaders. Clearly, any enterprise that doesn’t embrace automation won’t be able to survive any better than a farmer with a horse-drawn plow. In this new era of automation, leaders will need to identify new sources of value creation. Leaders often ask what jobs are going to be replaced but the right question what work will be redefined, and how?
At CORPA we just released Automation 2.0 which allows you to complete a process or a workflow with a single tap on your mobile device almost instantly and you don’t need a PC or a desk. We didn’t build the technology to simply create efficiency but an entirely new way of how you build, integrate, automate and run a business process and or workflow. An algorithm might tell you from A-Z where are the loopholes but I will not tell you how to correct them, not entirely (at least not yet). That’s what humans are still brilliant at! I know you might be thinking there is a lot of talk about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and at CORPA we think of all these technologies claiming to be AI more as IA (Intelligence Amplification). IA is going to play a crucial role to help us do our jobs better. AI is a whole different story and we are certainly not there yet.
Therefore, are design and critical thinking the new fundamentals for how we get work done? May be! The key to winning in the era of automation, where machines do jobs formerly performed by humans, is not simply more efficiency, but to create new ways of thinking and at the same time identify how greater efficiency creates demand for new jobs to be done.
