DecipheringTransformationDigital

We have seen multifarious changes in business cycles, black swan events like pandemics, recessions and geopolitical turmoil. The world has always been in a state of flux. Yet with all these uncertainties, we constantly strive to use the best of management thought and technology to cope with and dominate.

There are several paradigms shifts that have occurred in management thought. The pace of change and the relevance of experience is being questioned in every field, as the truisms of yesterday seem like an afterthought today. The experience accumulated on repetitive tasks has limited use today as artificial intelligence mediums are taking over and bringing unprecedented efficiencies there. The entire first wave of digitization has adequately addressed the easy monotonous and set tasks and made them literally 'hands-free' or people-free. Artificial Intelligence goes in deeper and builds algorithms for possible outcomes. The entire subject of digital radicalisation is not the subject I am delving here and hence I digress.

What has really changed due to the pandemic and the steep arc of technology innovations is the conversations in organisation about embracing digital transformation. It is not just the eagerness of adaptation of the digital tools but rethinking the way we do our respective businesses in various sectors and industries. Digital tools are technologies and as tools, they allow us to do new things in new ways. They give us opportunities to act. And what a digital tool does primarily in our organizations is it provides us access to data. And so, at the heart of any real digital transformation initiative is this idea that we need to learn how to cope with data and make sense of data and use data for our strategic advantage and to help our employees and to touch our customers in more profound ways. So, if we can think of how tools become an avenue for us to get access to make use of all these new forms of data, then we're on the right track to thinking about what digital transformation is.

We always think about digital transformation as data, the collection of data, the analysis of data, and the implementation of new strategies and processes based on data. But the crux of the matter is what professionals and academicians, in general, think about digital transformation. In a recent seminal book The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in an Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI – the authors Tseedal Needley and Paul Leonardi. In a simplified way look at it as three important changes that have influ- enced the core of digital transformation. The first of one is the quantum change in the access to data from myriad sources. We're talking about a million data points, or what's called metadata, which is data about data. To complement the presence of data in extraordinary ways, the second important aspect is computing power. Computing power has allowed us to crunch data, to have so much data being processed in ways that were not possible 20 years ago. The third one is models, algorithms, and statistics. So, the presence of these three forces is why in that center we're seeing the digital transformation. An interesting example to explain this is Netflix. So how does Netflix figure out the types of things that they should recommend to you? It’s all algorithms. It’s collecting historical data, being able to predict what are the things that an individual or a family or a group consumes and doing some matching and being able to make recommendations, recommendation engines. That’s all because of data, computing, and algorithms. That’s what digital transformation broadly is.

Besides all the changes, the most ominous and fiercely debated issue is that of the future of employment and whether will robots take over. More than a handful of movies have made the fast and the big buck preying on exactly that sentiment and showing us destruction at the hand of the robots in a scale and cruelty that makes us even more insecure. Before we indulge in another set of spasms of 'anti-machine' rhetoric, it helps to relook at the anatomy of employment in general, across sectors. We can broadly classify work into the following categories

1. Providing expertise- these cluster of jobs are for subject matter experts who have the ability to provide deep expertise in an area and topically most technically professional jobs are to fall in this tranche

2. Collaborative decision making- these are jobs where there is the need for constant interaction with others, understanding data, working with people

3. Pair of hands- typical bluecollar and some white-collar jobs which are normally a regular set of activities that are detailed and supervised by others

4. Training, coaching and counseling- these are a slight variation of the first category of expertise, but the bulk of the work content is instructive and pedagogical

Jobs are also not endemic to a particular category and have flavours from all the categories and are normally a collage of all the categories. The immediate category which will get affected is the third one – ‘pair of hands ‘. The displacement of labour by technology and globalization is hardly a new phenomenon. Technology has been reshaping work since the first Industrial Revolution, which demolished trade groups and replaced artisanal craftsmanship with assembly line production and templated manufacturing. Globalization has been changing work for decades, thanks to trade liberalization and emerging markets.

As the latest technology unfolds in the form of - AI, robotics, virtual reality, IoT, and sharing economy platforms - are poised to take labour shifts to a higher level. Automation has long displaced workers in blue-collar jobs, from factory labourers to supermarket cashiers. To appreciate the scale of blue-collar displacement ahead from driverless vehicles alone, consider that driving is the single largest occupation in many parts of the world.

Disruptions will also be there in the white-collar domain. Algorithms have uprooted white-collar work in the financial sector (high-frequency trading) and are starting to do so in health care (mobile health apps, surgery robotics and diagnosis by algorithm). They are even expanding into spaces once considered exclusively the domain of human creativity. Already, algorithms are writing articles indistinguishable from those written by humans and have even recently composed musical compositions. But these are early stages and there is a need of a new line of professionals who will conceptualize these technologies.

It is not the time to panic but the time to realise that these are just changing norms of work and rejig of the traditional ethos and routines of employment. What we are also like to usher in is the ‘freelance economy’ where, professionals will increasingly barter their expertise across organisations and projects, rather than being employed with one organisation. The rise of various business platforms such as Airbnb, and Uber has already ushered in the freelance economy in which non-employee freelancers provide labour in temporary assignments and actually form the core workforce of these companies.

While all these elucidates the digital forays of different businesses, what has also emerged is the fundamental tenet that human is at the centre of all this transformation. The future of digital is human – technology is just an enabler!

Dr Arun Oommen MBBS, MS (Gen Surg), MCh (Neurosurgery), MRCSEd,MBA Senior Consultant Neurosurgeon VPS Lakeshore Hospital NH-47, Bypass, Maradu, Nettoor PO, Kochi 682040, India.

During the sensory register, the brain gathers information passively through visual and auditory cues known respectively as “iconic” and “echoic” memory.