Log

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.

This is the sentence spoken in more small business offices than almost any other. Her name, be it Marge, or as in my experience, “Lucy,” “Anne,” “Ellen,” and “Diane,” means the one person in the office who knows where “that information” is kept.

If you’re not hands on with data management, do not work in a Fortune 500 company, and have been in business for more than twenty years, you probably rely–to some extent–on Marge.

As an industry modeling contractor for McKinsey, I went on-site at many companies to collect data. Usually, a higher-up at the client would tell a senior VP to meet with me. I’d start out enthusiastically, asking what they did and how they did it. Ten or fifteen minutes in, the increasingly uneasy VP would call in “Marge” to answer my questions. Marge was his assistant. She did all the work. She kept all the records. If she was born before 1970, her records were all in ledgers and binders. If the company was big enough, they had a mainframe with legacy custom software that only she knew how to use. For all intents and purposes, the data was inaccessible.

When I was a manager at Yale University Press, it was Annie who had all the answers. If anyone needed any information, Annie knew it. Her memory was astounding, being able to recall titles, authors and editors going back decades. Knowing they wouldn’t be able to rely on her for the rest of time, YUP decided it needed computerized records. They hired a “Developer,” to build a custom mainframe database in 1995. By 1998, when I arrived, the “system” had cost the press more than $300,000, not including ongoing consultation fees, but it simply didn’t work. When the Editorial Director needed some publishing and sales numbers, I asked him where I should pull the data from, he said, “Ask Annie.” But instead of trying to pull up out-of-date information in query form from the maddeningly slow and defective database, Annie gave me a box of stacked MS Word printouts for each book with sales figures neatly hand-penciled on manila folders. I asked her if there wasn’t a better source of this info, and she said “Absolutely not.”

I know my father had relied on a “Marge.” Lucy was in her mid 60s when I started at my family’s business in 2000. She kept records in card catalogs, filing cabinets, chronological notepads, alphabetized or chronologized. She used a computer for word processing. For each new contract, she would copy the boilerplate text, hit “enter” a few times until she came to a new page in Microsoft Word, then paste. The “contracts” file was more than 300 pages long when I first looked at it. Every time I asked a question, the answer was “Ask Lucy.”

Of course, the threat of relying on “Marge” is that if she gets hit by a bus, who’s going to pick up the pieces. Vital information, important processes, key contacts all disappear into thin air. In 2004, Lucy suffered a triple aneurysm and her ability to write and speak was greatly diminished. We couldn’t tell if she was also cognitively impaired, so the business just limped along. During this period of time, I spent many long nights at the office extracting data from her files so that were the worst to happen, we would still know what was going on, and what had happened in the past. Lucy died a year after her aneurysm. If she hadn’t shown me everything about her system, our business activity would have been effectively erased.

Structuring your data in a coherent way is of vital importance to your business. Not just for analysis, but for record keeping, purchase orders, shipping records, sales, and so much more. Even if you’re not ready to employ Robotic Process Automation or AI in your business, how you keep your information may affect ways you can improve your business in the future.

This was the cri de coeur of my boss at Yale University Press.

I had been made Acquisitions Manager at Yale University Press, at least partly, on the basis of my experience as a data management contractor with McKinsey & Co. At McKinsey, I’d worked with large multinational corporations whose databases included hundreds of thousands of strings. I used Paradox, one of the most robust relational database management programs available in the mid-1990s, to break out useful data for analysis.

When I arrived at Yale in 1998, they had recently contracted with a “Developer” to build a mainframe resident database to keep track of the whole of their publishing process. SAP’s Industry Solutions for media was more than two decades away, and the custom solution had already cost YUP more than $300,000. The “Developer” was a big, combative, teary guy who’d somehow managed to learn programming. Sadly, he wasn’t very good at it. On top of that, a glitch in the wiring caused the interface to be maddeningly slow. Forget deploying a query (which the developer would have to write) to generate a report, entering a single datapoint could often take as much as three minutes.

I’d been instructed to work with the developer, figuring out how to get the expensive system to work and hopefully generate some useful information. When I asked the developer how many data rows (books that had been, or were being published) were in the database, he said “almost a thousand.” A thousand rows, no matter how many fields there might be in a row, shouldn’t have merited a mainframe solution. I would have managed that in an Excel spreadsheet. But someone very high up at YUP, someone who knew nothing about computers or data, had met with a vendor who’d promised–I don’t know what.

In a number of very uncomfortable encounters, I discovered that the “developer” didn’t know how to extract data from the mainframe, even in a CSV format. My level of stupefaction at the vendor’s incompetence was so great I could barely express my disgust to my boss. “What the hell is going on!” he demanded, again and again.

I appealed to the office “Marge,” Anne Richardson, to help me out. She gave me boxes and boxes of typewritten (MS Word) summaries of each book that she’d prepared so the data could be put into the mainframe. She’d also kept up-to-date production and sales information penciled on each title’s manila folder. When I asked about marketing budgets, she referred me to another woman in the marketing department. The design department, it turned out, also kept a set of files on money they spent on contractors. Then it was down to the basement to visit accounting. They gave me their information in Excel spreadsheets, which was very useful.

I spent a week concatenating all this data in a local Microsoft Access database. I knew how I wanted the data structured so it didn’t take long for me to simply re-key it all.

Over the weekend, I did some rudimentary number crunching that I thought would be of value. I met with the Director, the Editorial Director, and the Editor in Chief on Monday. Because I’d heard a general figure before I began my work, I asked them how many books they’d published the previous year. Their answer was off by a factor of ten. As I began to lay out all the data, pointing out fields that sold more than others, editors whose lists were remarkably thin, the relative costs of marketing or designing a given type of book, the Director’s eyes lit up. “That database was worth every penny.” Fortunately, the Editorial Director took the blow by explaining that I’d had to completely circumvent the mainframe to put these reports together.

But because of the sunk cost fallacy, the Director refused to believe his mainframe was worthless. By the time I left Yale two years later, the “developer” was still in the basement, sweating and swearing, promising things that would never come to pass.

If you or your boss has invested in hardware, software, or data management processes that just aren’t working out, don’t perpetuate the mistake–despite what the vendor is promising. Go back to the drawing board to figure out what you wanted to do in the first place, and what’s available now that can help you achieve your goals. That’s where ATC can help.