Sometimes stepping away from my normal routine provides a fresh
perspective to help see opportunities and potential pitfalls. Last week I
did just that when I attended CIO Magazine's annual conference in
Colorado Springs to accept the CIO100 Award. This year's theme was
"Innovating in the Digital Economy." The week was packed with amazing
speakers. With my head still spinning with ideas, on the flight home I
decided to pull out my notes and distill a few of the key take-aways.
#1] From Agile to Anticipatory
While implementation of Agile is still important for organizations,
there is a new A-word in town; Anticipatory. Agile ways of working can
help teams keep pace with ever-increasing rates of change, but
developing the foresight to anticipate change before it occurs
is how to drive real strategic advantage. Some changes are relatively
simple to predict. For example, we already know that voice recognition,
intelligent virtual agents, and robotic process automation ('bots') will
change everything about how we interact and co-exist with computers.
One statistic cited last week was that 40% of all work currently done in
the legal industry will be fully automated within 2 years. I think
about the current generation of high-schoolers, like my daughter,
aspiring to go to law school in the future. Will they need
concentrations in artificial intelligence to go with their legal
degrees?
#2] Context is King
In a world dominated by impermanence, where the future unfolds in
real time, contextual thinking is the key to anticipating change. The
winners will be those who are able to see where the flow is headed and
get the context right before anyone else. I am reminded of my time in
the publishing industry in the late 90's. From our vantage point, we
were able to see the game changing potential of ecommerce sites like
Amazon.com, digital publishing as the new standard of media, and the
rise of mobile devices. Yet it took another decade for the true impact
of these innovations to play out. Why? Contextual factors like broadband
internet access, increases in mobile processing speed, and cheap cloud
storage all needed to be in place before the true breakthrough impact
could occur. Firms that saw this in advance were able to survive and
thrive while the more myopic organizations were not.
#3] Data Science or Data Arts
Data is the raw material from which we draw all these future-looking
hypotheses. Right now the world’s computer systems are generating enough
data that if we able to somehow print it out the resulting stack of
paper would reach from Earth to Mars, every day. Unfortunately,
not all of this data is useful. On top of that, ingesting and mining it
using our traditional programmatic approaches is extremely slow and, in
some cases, impossible. Artificial intelligence, neural networks, and
machine learning are becoming prominent because they have the ability to
rapidly commoditize this work, in many cases learning and optimizing
themselves without human intervention. This raises the question as to
what role humans will play as these approaches get more advanced and
autonomous. In contrast to my daughter, my son is an aspiring musician.
It may not be a bad career choice. In a future where bots and algorithms
automate increasingly wider swaths of the technical and scientific
fields, the arts may very well become the final frontier where human
beings create value. While this may sound far-fetched, I noticed
recently that the name of the STEM (science, technology, engineering,
and math) program in our local high school was changed to STEAM to
incorporate another A-word, the Arts.
#4] EX is the new CX
With all the discussion du jour revolving around the
customer experience, firms may be at risk of losing on another important
front, the employee experience. We are often asked to live two separate
lives inside and outside the office. In our consumer lives, service
providers compete to make every transaction 'frictionless' in the hopes
of retaining our loyalty and keeping our attention. As a result, we have
come to expect things like free two-day delivery and ubiquitous wifi
access as the minimum standards of service. However, when we enter the
workplace we often encounter cludgey internal processes that are
optimized for short-term cost efficiencies without much consideration of
the end-to-end user experience. This dichotomy may very well lead to
retention issues as more and more digital natives enter the workforce.
In a world where holding on to key talent may become just as challenging
as retaining customers, we may want to consider a new C-level role, the
Employee Experience Officer.
#5] Enter the War for Talent
So where do we find these agile, anticipatory, contextual thinking,
scientific artists in the first place? Nobody knows, but the search will
be difficult and it's more than likely that organizations will need to
develop some of these new skills within their own ranks. At the CIO100
last week, several speakers talked about the role of mentoring and
coaching in building these capabilities. Key to this may be finding
talent with the right mindset and pairing them with stakeholders inside
and outside their organizational walls who can broaden their
perspective. In terms of training, as a society we have very few
programs to prepare people for careers in the new economy. Growing up in
a family of German and Slavic immigrants, I was constantly surrounded
by people from the building trades: carpenters, plumbers, roofers.
Virtually all them had multiple years in apprenticeships to prepare them
for their role in the post-WWII boon in American construction. Where
are the analogous programs that will prepare our workforce to build our
new digital economy? At my current company, we are already exploring
digital business apprenticeships as part of our early talent development
programs. I would welcome thoughts from those of you going down a
similar path.
The Road Ahead
Having jotted down the thoughts above, I got off the plane and was
immediately brought back to reality. My unconnected car was difficult to
find in the crowded airport parking garage because it can't tell me
where it is. I drove home through rush-hour traffic created by the
stop-and-go of non-autonomous vehicles and made worse by several
accidents along the way. My GPS navigation gave up on trying to find a
better route as every option offered had a 'similar ETA'. As I finally
made my way through the winding rural roads near my home outside
Philadelphia, I was reminded that we sure have a long way to go.
by Matt Lasmanis
No comments:
Post a Comment