Frontline
The dawn of the digital Manager By Helen Masters, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Asia-Pacific at Infor Systems
42 | Australian Security Magazine
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hink about your boss. You may be experiencing a positive feeling due to their genuine support and encouragement — or you may have felt a tinge of frustration resulting from their controlling and authoritarian approach. So, the following news may be or may not be welcome: the role of manager (as you know them) is going the way of the dinosaur. We are incessantly bombarded with the message that artificial intelligence (AI) and robots will soon replace as many as half of today’s existing jobs. While there is undeniably an Orwellian fear associated with the future of work, we must step back and remember that we have already relinquished control to technology in other areas of our lives. Consider transportation: virtually all of us have ridden a train with no human conductor, self-driving cars are supposedly just around the corner, and soon airplanes may not even need a captain. So, is the notion of replacing your existing manager with a digital one that hard to imagine? And if you think this is a tale about the distant future, keep in mind that Gartner predicts in 2018 more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a ‘roboboss’. Operational Automation Before we wish them a bon voyage, it may be helpful to reiterate the actual role of a manager. The basic premise of “management” in most organisations is centred on the responsibility to monitor individuals and ensure compliance with policies/procedures. This is admittedly an oversimplification that excludes many other critical obligations, but it is nonetheless an accurate portrayal of most of their daily tasks. According to a recent study by Accenture, these administrative activities typically comprise 54% of a manager’s time. If time is money, that equates to some serious savings, especially if we can offload transactional tasks to someone (or something) else. Absent the influence of technology, the millennial generation has already begun to challenge the old-school, command-and-control form of management, in favour of new ways of engaging, enabling
78% of managers of managers said they would trust the advice of intelligent systems in helping them make better business decisions in the future. and empowering the workforce. These evolving social conventions, when combined with new technologies, paint a very different picture of the role of the manager in this new framework. Operational automation is arguably minute in comparison with the true value that comes with what many refer to as “augmented intelligence” instead of AI. All organisations rely on managers to make frequent decisions that fall into “gray areas.” Far too often, these decisions are based on all-too-human intuition (which is subject to attribution errors, unconscious biases and a host of other problematic elements that frequently prevent us from reaching the correct conclusion). Banishing bias What if you had 24/7 access to the relevant data you needed to make an evidence-based decision versus an intuition-driven choice? In a recent survey by Harvard Business Review, 78% of managers of managers said they would trust the advice of intelligent systems in helping them make better business decisions in the future. As the role of humans in the workplace evolves, there is an increased need to balance both technical and social skills. While some will continue to rage against the future of robots in the workplace, others will welcome having a digital manager to approve expense reports and PTO requests so we can focus on creating authentic, meaningful relationships with our people.
