Month: February 2019

Okay, if you’re a small to mid-size company, you probably don’t have a Chief Information Officer, but you should.

While you may still conceive of your business as operating in the “real” world, almost everything your business does consists of information that is being managed.

IT is seen by most business leaders as a tool, like a hammer, to use to do other things. But now that everything exists in the dataspace, from corporate communications to your company’s customers and vendors to your inventory and manufacturing, business leaders need to understand that IT is not a tool, it is how you do business.

A question I like to ask clients is “how much would it be worth to get a list of your biggest competitor’s customers, what they bought, and when?” Aside from the moral issues, the answer is never surprising.

Somewhere between “priceless,” and “a lot.”

And yet the same executives don’t give real thought to the security of their own information. Everything connected to the internet, from your vendor’s API to a web form for your customers is a potential target. For this reason alone, your company needs someone in the CIO role constantly on the lookout for security and data management developments.

A CIO can help you digitally transform your company by continually assessing your data needs for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Business Intelligence (BI), and Customer Relations Management (CRM). CIOs can revolutionize not just back office processes but also customer facing engagement and development initiatives.

At your next staff meeting, make it a priority to discuss who your digital transformation officer will be. At ATC, we recommend you find an in-house leader who’s interested in what IT can do, and give that person the tools to build a robust datascape for your business.

Of course, it would be best for you to hire a full-time, creative, CIO, but you’ll have to get in line. There are an estimated 200,000 CIO positions unfilled in the US alone.

Your business runs on data. Who sold what to whom? When did they sell it? How did they sell it? Who do we buy this from, and how much does it cost? How can we reduce transportation and logistics costs?

These are pretty simple “who” “what” “when” “why” “how” questions. And the answers might seem pretty straightforward.

But one of the biggest issues facing management is the quality of data–the answers to these questions you get from your managers and assistants is only as good as the data you collect and whether that data is correctly interpreted.

At ATC, we recognize that all data is not created equal. What’s important to your business may not be important to another business. One size fits all data management solutions won’t work if the person implementing them is not core to your business operations.

Possibly even more important, you need someone in a CIO role at your company who understands that data isn’t just answers: it poses questions. Your CIO needs to be smart and creative to look for questions your data is asking and knowing what data to collect moving forward.

When people talk about how little they want to pay for IT, the old carpenter’s adage comes to mind. “You can’t afford a cheap tool.”

Don’t shortchange your business being penny-wise and pound foolish. Rather than hiring another manager to analyze spreadsheets, hire one who will drive your digital transformation.

…for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the American economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.

Eduardo Porter –
Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two , NYT 2/8/19

In my previous post I expressed my discomfort at many of the constructions in this article. The quote above entails the most concerning aspect.

Here’s the problem: Society as a whole has determined that work best done by humans is not valuable. Caring for the sick, taking orders and delivering nourishment, creating a welcoming atmosphere to world-weary travelers, and helping people buy and maintain their homes and businesses is not worth a lot of money.

When Capital needed human-as-machine labor, it created manufacturing and clerical jobs to execute all those tasks. Those jobs had the most value, because without them, nothing could happen. Everything else was “just” service.

In the big, bad “shiny new high-tech” world, however, automation is taking those human-as-machine jobs away from humans and giving it to machines.

Humans should fight back!

But no. Everyone in the AI, machine learning and robotics world knows that the jobs they are “taking away” from humans are jobs that should never have been done by humans in the first place.

The human toll of human-as-machine labor is terrible. That’s what the Luddites were opposed to–not just their loss of work, but also their loss of humanity.

We are social animals. Everyone is lamenting the loss of connectedness, yet many people want to increase human-as-machine productivity, rather than off-load it onto automated processes that would execute it easily, quickly, and with no alienation, eye or back strain.

The lowly “service” job is a by-product of harmful human-as-machine Capitalism. If you have ever watched a nurse lovingly support a sick relative, you know the rage you feel realizing that this person is overworked and underpaid. Nurses, teachers, servers are humans who care for us, educate us and feed us. What more important work could there possibly be?

In today’s New York Times piece by Eduardo Porter, Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two (https://tinyurl.com/y72qmxlj) the threat of automation is foregrounded.

The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.

But the cost of automation to workers and society could be substantial. “It may well be that,” Mr. Summers said, “some categories of labor will not be able to earn a subsistence income.” And this could exacerbate social ills, from workers dropping out of jobs and getting hooked on painkillers, to mass incarceration and families falling apart.

Silicon Valley’s dream of an economy without workers may be implausible. But an economy where most people toil exclusively in the lowliest of jobs might be little better.

— Eduardo Porter

I’m sorry, but Silicon Valley dreams of an economy without workers? That is absolutely not the case. Many in Silicon Valley, particularly in the AI and robotics fields are deeply conscious of how their work is impacting the labor market.

Many understand that the middle-class job-for-life is not coming back, and so support measures like a universal or minimum basic income precisely to offset the massive gains in productivity and concomitant losses for human laborers that automation generates for society.

Automation is here, just like the combustion engine is here, just like global warming is here. The question is not how do we go back to heartless 19th century human-as-machine manufacturing, but how we go forward.

Will automation decimate the world’s workforce?

There’s a lot of scary talk bouncing around, from tech blogs to published books like “Rise of the Machines” to presidential contender Andrew Yang.

Many commentators in the tech sphere hoping to downplay the coming disruption to the workforce point to some statistics that seem to indicate job losses won’t be anything near the 80% figure touted by some.

One of the most popular examples given is that of the bank tellers. When ATMs were introduced in the 1980s, it was predicted that tellers were doomed. Why would we need a bunch of tellers when you could get your money from a machine?

What happened, however, was that the number of tellers in each bank went from 22 to 13, which reduced branch operation costs so much that banks were able to focus on expansion and consumer relations. There ended up being more tellers in 2000 than there had been in 1980.

Well, that’s just great news for everyone, right? Automation allows for growth that will offset employment reductions!

But it’s not quite that simple. If you take into account that many industries have already used analog/digital efficiencies to reach market saturation, and that the overall population of the US increased by 100 million people (or just under 50%) over the same period, what’s going to happen as the population shrinks and the economy contracts?

Business leaders have an “endless growth” bias. They need to remain optimistic and keep the masses from rising up in a Luddite frenzy.

The reality is that a lot of jobs will be “innovaporized” by the coming automation wave. Yes, cobots and RPAs will play well with humans, but if you don’t need twenty people on a machine floor, why would you keep them there?

There’s a great summary of current trends/activities in RPA leaders in Michael Baxter’s IA article here: https://tinyurl.com/yd3zjwko

The question of why RPA is such a boon to businesses running legacy, disconnected systems is not directly addressed, as the article is focusing on new, data intensive businesses that are looking to build new CRM > Operations scalable solutions.

While that will be the bread and butter of RPA advancement and deployment, for RPA to truly get onto “every desktop,” businesses with no digital agenda will have to buy in, which they should.

A little story illustrating the dangers of hype:

For Christmas 1984, my father bought a Compaq laptop computer for my stepmother. She was a reporter, and my father, an early technology adopter, wanted her to be able to file stories from home, the car, and our country house via telephone modem.

He spent almost $2,000 on the laptop, which he brought to me on Christmas Eve to set up. I had done some basic programming and had played with modems like the ones that Matthew Broderick used in “War Games.”

The problem was that neither my father nor the store clerk who’d sold him the computer knew that it needed software, particularly word processing and modem software, to function.

“Make it do something,” my father said eagerly.
“I can’t. There’s no software,” was my response.
“Then what can it do?” he asked, becoming concerned.
“I could write a basic program to make it say “Merry Christmas.”
“Do it!”

When I proudly showed him the result of my programming skills, in orange monochrome unicode text,  he was thoroughly demoralized. “Can’t you make it look better?”

I understood his disappointment. The box the Compaq came in had a full color, exciting image on the screen–something that wouldn’t become a reality in consumer laptops for another ten years. The dream of plugging a LAN cable into a laptop onboard modem and connecting to a company-wide network, again, wouldn’t become standard for years. And yet that’s what he wanted. He could see what computers could do for productivity and lifestyle, but the industry–technology–wasn’t there yet.

When I look at technology company sites, promotional videos, software marketing brochures, all I see are sleek white plastic and metal skeleton androids getting ready to run a race or a happy retro 1950s robot solving problems for cartoon business owners.

These images are just like the image on the Compaq box. They represent an artist’s idea of what the software might do. The fact of the matter is often far less sexy.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important, or that you should ignore it.

As a consultant, my objective is to help small business owners like my dad, who want to improve and grow, and have a dream of doing things better and faster.

*the title of this post is a shout out to my Harvard classmate Farai Chideya’s excellent book Don’t Believe the Hype, addressing the serious issues of misrepresentation of statistics depicting the black community in the US political and news spheres.

The CEO of Generali Link, Karl Nolan, recently stated that RPA has made his employees happier. He’d feared the introduction of these bots, which boosted productivity, would demoralize clerical teams fearing for their jobs.

Instead, they were able to generate better information, faster, and add their own observations. They were being human, recognizing patterns, recommending actions, and solving problems–none of which they’d had time to do before RPAs were deployed.

I hate jargon, but it is an employer’s responsibility to “up-skill” people. By helping your employees up-skill, you can ensure their continued value. Up-skilling is just a term for continuing education. Once your employees are completing their clerical tasks in seconds rather than days, you must make sure they learn new, valuable skills.

Subscribing your business to an online training resource like Lynda or Pluralsight, making sure your employees spend at least a couple of hours each week learning new skills, is a cost effective way to start.

Senior employees are often resistant to changes like this, and their choices should be respected. There is nothing wrong with keeping a legacy employee in place whose job has been automated. It might just be better to offer that employee a retirement package earlier rather than later.

People entering the workforce who were born after 1970 should be willing to learn new skills. New hires should absolutely be told that up-skilling is a priority for their employment at your business. It’s not a punishment–it’s a perk. By helping your employees learn new skills, you will be helping them stay relevant, valued and employed for life.

I’ll add on a personal note, that when I was seven years old, my mother enrolled me in a typing class at a local community college. I was the only young kid in the class–my brother, also enrolled, was 10–but I learned relatively quickly on the IBM Selectrics. I didn’t really need to type until I started playing around in the computer lab at my public school. I took off in that lab because I didn’t have to hunt and peck. I could just look at the screen and type. It was great to feel successful at something. It was a skill that no one else my age had. Imagine how something so simple could help your employees shine.

In fact, because I could type so fast, I was often hired by friends to type their papers in high-school and college, which required me to learn all the word processing software and OS’s out there, which then made it easier to learn database software, structure, computer languages, and other software. Always be learning.

Small business owners know the value of their employees. There is a lot of fear-mongering related to RPA and AI making good people obsolete.

The same concerns faced technological advances like the steam engine, electricity, cars, and the ATM.

Yes. Some jobs will cease to exist. Many dehumanizing clerical jobs will be done by RPAs in the future, but most experts agree that RPAs and other software, AI and robotics solutions will actually free those clerical workers from drudgery and allow them to do what humans do best, which is to be human, adding value to your business with their creativity and loyalty.

James Besson, in an EconTalk podcast, quoted in an American Enterprise Institute’s publication “What the story of ATMs and bank tellers reveals about the ‘rise of the robots’ and jobs,” says:

“Basically starting in the mid-1990s, ATM machines came in in big numbers. We have, now, something like 400,000-some installed in the United States. And everybody assumed –including some of the bank managers, at first — that this was going to eliminate the teller job. And it didn’t. In fact, since 2000, not only have teller jobs increased, but they’ve been growing a bit faster than the labor force as a whole. That may eventually change. But the impact of the ATM machine was not to destroy tellers, actually it was to increase it.

“What happened? Well, the average bank branch in an urban area required about 21 tellers. That was cut because of the ATM machine to about 13 tellers. But that meant it was cheaper to operate a branch. Well, banks wanted, in part because of deregulation but just for deregulation but just for basic marketing reasons, to increase the number of branch offices. And when it became cheaper to do so, demand for branch offices increased. And as a result, demand for bank tellers increased. And it increased enough to offset the labor-saving losses of jobs that would have otherwise occurred. So, again, it was one of these more dynamic things where the labor-saving technology actually created more jobs.

“We see a whole number of occupations where you might think that technology is going to destroy jobs because it’s taking over tasks; and the reverse happens. So, if you look, for instance, when they put in scanning technology into cash registers, the number of cashiers actually increased. When legal offices started using, beginning in the late 1990s, electronic discovery software for doing discovery of documents in lawsuits, the number of paralegals increased rather than decreased. …

“And so, what’s happened is that cash-handling has obviously become less important for tellers. But their ability to market and their interpersonal skills in terms of dealing with bank clients has become more important. So the transition–what the ATM machine did was effectively change the job of the bank teller into one where they are more of a marketing person. They are part of what banks call the ‘customer relationship team.’ But it’s a different sort of skill. Maybe it’s a higher skill. There is some evidence that their wages have gone up. They are hiring more college graduates as bank tellers. And in a whole variety of ways we are seeing changes of this sort where the nature of occupations is getting up-skilled in some fashion. Often very specific skills related to the particular technology, the particular job. This is happening across the board. And that’s part of the challenge that technology is posing for us: How do we develop all of these new skills?

How can RPA actually work for you?

The first hurdle to figuring out what RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can do for you is to understand what it is.

RPA is not a physical robot. It is easily customizable software that performs repetitive tasks on a computer.

It can surf the web, gather information from websites or databases, put that information in a spreadsheet and email that spreadsheet to an employee.

If you have someone in your office whose weekly job is to look up performance numbers, put them in a spreadsheet and get that spreadsheet to a manager, you might benefit from using RPA.

While that weekly task might take an hour for your employee, RPA could complete the task in seconds, freeing your employee up to do more value-added work.

It might take an hour or more to program the process–as many processes have more steps than initially meet the eye–but once tested and complete, the program can run without human observation.

Large companies, financial, insurance, retail, manufacturing, all have CIOs who know how to get RPA up and running for employees at their companies (they’re doing it now). But small business owners who use a computer vendor for IT solutions don’t know how to deploy RPA in their own businesses, and most generalist computer vendors, even if they know about RPA, would have to bill vast numbers of hours for programming.

ATC’s goal is to help business owners who don’t have a neutral guide to vendors, services, programmers and software. We will match you with the right service provider. Because we’re working for you, we have no conflict of interest. If you need just a few, preconfigured process bots, we know who to go to. If you would benefit from using SAP or Oracle and deploying AI to govern customer service management, we know who to go to. In the RPA, AI, Robotics world, it is not one size fits all.