Decisively Digital. Alexander Loth
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industries. Blockchain will enable fast verification of all sorts of transactions. Lamborghini, for instance, uses blockchain technology to certify the authenticity of their vintage cars. Buyers can follow the history of the car and all its spare parts and thus be assured about what they are purchasing.
But you could imagine applications that are useful not only for the super-rich. Anyone who has ever bought or built a property knows that it takes weeks to clear many bureaucratic hurdles. What if building permits could be issued via blockchain technology? What if a contract could be notarized with the push of a button?
Fast, reliable business transactions will be like grease to our modern business machinery. At the same time, by making transactions transparent, it could mean the end for another type of “grease,” namely, bribery, kickbacks, and other corrupt practices that endanger the trust of our societies.
Alexander: How can technology shift the roles and responsibilities of the workforce? You mentioned the commoditization of modern digital technologies before.
Florian: First, we already talked about how everything that can be automated will eventually be automated, whether it is capturing or presenting information (what we called stage one), transmitting information (stage two), or making inferences from that information (stage three). Therefore, fewer of those tasks will be done by humans.
Instead, your employees will generate new ideas, create new content, and make decisions that can't be based on historical data. The role of the knowledge worker will continue to become more important. In many organizations it is, for example, common for someone to take notes during a meeting and share them with the rest of the team afterward. AI-based transcription services can now automate that task for you. That means that that person who used to have their head buried in the notepad now can join the discussion and contribute new ideas.
Second, and this is where the commoditization of digital technologies comes in, everyone will in some ways become involved in setting up new automated processes, whether that is by working with ready-made SaaS offerings or by creating customized services with so-called low-code platforms.
We are even seeing first products that commoditize machine learning so that anyone can deploy AI technology on their data.
The integration of separate services also will become more prominent as B2B companies offer more holistic offerings, such as the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Offerings such as those by MuleSoft allow you to string together your different data sources and the individual steps of business processes.
At a simpler level, the online tool IFTTT, which stands for “If This Then That,” lets anyone connect their popular business apps with one another, including Outlook, Google Sheets, Asana, and many more. For example, you can easily connect your SurveyMonkey form to Slack so that you can be notified when a new survey response has come in.
In other words, many things that traditionally were done by IT can now be done by the subject-matter experts themselves. Therefore, the role of IT changes too. It is more about managing and enabling, as opposed to creating new systems.
Alexander: How can companies today prepare their employees to achieve organizational readiness for the digital future?
Florian: Everyone should have a basic understanding of how machine learning works. I don't mean that everyone should know how to code, but they should be able to explain the concept to their grandmothers so that they can evaluate the potential of using AI-powered applications in different business processes.
Given how AI changes our everyday lives, I would recommend that everyone take the free online course “Elements of AI” that was created by the University of Helsinki.
I would also make sure that all my employees have some basic data literacy skills to be able to take part in the conversations. Once, when explaining some research findings in a meeting, I had a participant ask halfway through, “Why are we looking at all this data in the first place, when statistics is all lies anyway?” I had to take a long detour to explain the fundamentals of what we were doing.
Alexander: What can managers do to develop and foster the company's digital culture?
Such a culture would be one of collaborative problem solving, innovation, and constant introspection. Now, there are many factors that influence a company's culture, but here are a few things that any manager can practice.
First, encourage employees to point out problems and inefficiencies. I know an organization where every day a certain boring and time-consuming task is performed, involving the manual transfer of content from one system into another. For over 10 years, complaints by employees fell on deaf ears. Some employees were admonished for their lack of enthusiasm. Not surprisingly, attrition is high on that team. A simple upgrade of the system that would automate the bulk of the process could have saved many labor hours and, more importantly, the morale of the team.
Managers should ask themselves whether they can apply the Japanese manufacturing principle of the Ando cord. In car factories this is a safety cord that any employee is allowed to pull to stop a production line if they think there is a problem. The tool in itself is secondary. It is the culture that it fosters — one where anyone's input is taken seriously, no matter their pay grade. If you want to use the digital transformation to grow your business, you need every input that you can get.
Second, because it is not enough to just optimize, you will want to keep some creative heads around too. People who can come up with innovative ideas that will help you leapfrog ahead, rather than just change incrementally. That means you need to learn to put up with their quirks and antics. In an effort to treat everyone the same, creative people are often pushed out of organizations, and teams become too homogenous in their thinking.
Third, empower your IT and subject-matter experts to come up with solutions together. When I worked at a business school, we asked the IT department to set up a form where students who wanted to change courses could put their names on a waiting list. Since IT didn't have time to help, we secretly proceeded to set up a form using an off-the-shelf SaaS tool instead. This sort of self-service culture should be fostered, not forbidden. But you still want IT to vet and manage the different solutions; you can't have everyone rebel against IT, fun as it was for us back then.
Alexander: Returning to the socioeconomic consequences of the digital transformation, 10 years ago you predicted that cloud applications like Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365 would change the way we work. You argued that knowledge workers could be more geographically mobile and less dependent on corporate employers, because they could own the tools of their trade — their laptops. Has this become a reality, and where do you see this trend going in the next 10 years?
Florian: Business applications in the cloud have absolutely made remote collaboration so much easier. I have worked with many geographically distributed teams and with tools like Google Docs, Slack, and WebEx, by and large, collaboration was as good as, if not better than, it was in in-person teams.
What hasn't happened yet is that all knowledge workers became freelancers, partly because of IT security concerns that prevent people from bringing their own devices to collaborate. The bigger issue, though, is that in many countries being a full-time employee is a requirement of becoming part of the social safety net. The US, where health insurance premiums and retirement fund contributions are paid by employers, is an extreme example.
All that said, the number of freelancers seems to be going up. In the US, 35 percent of the workforce has done freelance work in 2019, with 28 percent of the workforce doing it full-time — that is up from 17 percent in 2014.3
Alexander: Can a universal basic income (UBI) help here?
Florian: If implemented well, it could make it a lot easier for people to transition back and forth between employment, freelance work, educational breaks, and, yes, even time for self-discovery.