Unified Workforce

[JonWalden]

So often, articles in the news or posts on various blogs predict that the sky is falling because robots will take all of our jobs, causing widespread unemployment. Perhaps it is society’s love of science fiction and horror. Perhaps it is the result of not understanding history sufficiently, or some unknown reason. Whatever the case, the sensationalism sells movies, baits clicks, and drives analyst reports. However, reality doesn’t reflect this.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) needs to be considered as more like Gene Roddenberry’s “utopian view of possibilities” where people and technology work cooperatively. Both in fiction as well as reality, work needs to be accomplished. RPA provides the capability to an organization to accomplish more, in a more agile and entrepreneurial fashion, than previously possible. The over-hyped controversy about robots taking jobs from humans promotes the idea that there is a finite amount of work and automation will take it away, leaving humans with nothing. Work, like to-do lists, are not closed systems. Employees often realize there is enough work to fill, and often overflow, the standard 40-hour workweek. Everyone with a boss, parent, or spouse realizes that a to-do list never ends. There will always be things being added to the list at least as fast as items are crossed off.

Work needs to be considered as an open system where people need to prepare to grow into future demands. Rather than pit technology against biology, let’s consider the concept of a Unified Workforce. There will always be work, so organizations need to take the opportunity to align that work to the right resources. The idea of Getting Stuff Done (GSD) is a significant paradigm shift that needs to occur. When the shift occurs, the consideration becomes one of selecting the proper resource for the work at hand.

This is not that far from the way we assign work today. Resources that are appropriately qualified get the work that is best suited to them. The system often breaks down because of the quantity of work that continues to be added to the list exceeds the capacity of the qualified resource, so quality of the work suffers. The balance of Quantity, Quality and Resourcing dramatically changes when you have access to a true Digital Workforce.

The issue is that process automation and thoughts of a Digital Workforce have been manipulated by the hype of a market driven by vendors and analysts that feed off the sensationalism. Work needs to be accomplished (the GSD principle), which requires consideration of both processes and capacity management. Mr. Bill Gates recently suggested that Robots should be taxed. This idea is questionable because work is generally not taxed; product and output are taxed.  Because taxation is not the focus of this post, it is merely mentioned to help consider the purpose of companies having a workforce. It is only responsible to accomplish production in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. Just as in agriculture and manufacturing, information management and transactional data processing need to be optimized. Therefore, the assignment of the work must be considered in light of a Unified Workforce perspective. Just as the output of a horse drawn tiller is more effective than man by himself, or as an assembly line allowed products to be created more productively, our current information age needs to be evaluated not as competing prerogatives of human and digital but through the lens of productivity or GSD.

With this consideration and understanding, the assignment of work to multitudes of Digital Workers or Humans should focus on productivity which opens up the utopian possibilities of doing something other than work beyond the overly-optimistic 40-hour work week.  Embracing the idea of a Unified Workforce will ultimately allow us to regain our humanity.