There’s a great blog post on the Harvard Business Review titled “Here’s How Managers Can Be Replaced by Software” written by Devin Fidler.

The article discussed how a prototype software application automated the decision and delegation process to create a 124-page research report.

The software was named “iCEO”, which I expect to be trademarked by Apple Inc. soon!

The post explained that after spending a few hours configuring iCEO and then setting it to run, iCEO:

routed tasks across 23 people from around the world, including the creation of 60 images and graphs, followed by formatting and preparation.

The processes were so smoothly operated that the team was simply spectators.

We rarely needed to intervene, even to check the quality of individual components of the report as they were submitted to iCEO, or spend time hiring staff, because QA and HR were also automated by iCEO.

In the end, the full report was created in just weeks, compared to a traditional management-employee structure that may have taken months to complete.

This is awesome if you think about it… unless you’re a manager that is.

There’s an especially important point to note here that you may have missed: all of the actual work was outsourced via Elance and Odesk.

So it’s not only the manager’s job that may be at risk, but also the workers under his employ.

The Knowledge Worker at Risk

Automation, since the industrial revolution, has threatened jobs of workers. Manual work replaced with mechanised ones caused jobs to no longer be worthwhile. Now we have thinking work being replaced by computers and software.

In his book, “The Zero Marginal Cost Society“, Jeremy Rifkin mentions that:

Automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence are eliminating human labor quickly in the white-collar and service industries… Secretaries, file clerks, telephone operators, travel agents, bank tellers, cashiers, and countless other white-collar service jobs have all but disappeared in the past 25 years as automation has driven the marginal cost of labor to near zero.

He goes on to later say:

We are in the midst of an epic change (my emphasis) in the nature of work. The First Industrial Revolution ended slave and serf labor. The Second Industrial Revolution dramatically shrank agricultural and craft labor. The Third Industrial Revolution is sunsetting mass wage labor in the manufacturing and service industries and salaried professional labor in large parts of the knowledge sector.

Others are also anticipating this level of disruption to knowledge work.

A 2013 McKinsey Global Institute report predicts that by 2025, the automation of knowledge work would have potentially the greatest economic impact second only to the mobile internet, and exceeding that of the Internet of Things and the Cloud. (See the figure below.)

Time to address the skill gap

As with the industrial revolution, workers have to be ready for the next stage. It means that they need to learn new technologies and new ways of working. Learning skills that can be repetitive, regardless of the complexity, is under threat as they can be replaced with automation.

According to the Institute for the Future, the new worker will be required to have skills such as Social Intelligence, Sense-Making, Novel and Adaptive Thinking, Design Mindset, Computational Thinking, Cognitive Load Management, New Media Literacy, Cross Cultural Competency and Virtual Collaboration.

The challenge we have right now is that the rapid evolution of the Internet, the cloud and automation may change the workplace faster than we can retrain workers to work in this new environment. It means that we have to start training the new workers from the schools.

But this does not mean that we can’t start training for the new era. We can start learning the new skills required, as well as teach it to others before we are out of a job.

What the future holds?

I don’t know what the future holds, but automation offers great opportunities for businesses to function at a far more efficient and economic level than ever before. It means that we can look forward to cheaper and (hopefully) more sustainable goods and services.

It also means that we can let go of mundane and repetitive tasks and focus on creating greater things.

We can choose to fear what the future holds, or look forward to it with excitement and anticipation.

I’m in that latter group.

What about you? What are your thoughts on the future of automation?

Original article: The knowledge worker has a lot to lose if we don't act.'">Will automation eliminate your job? The knowledge worker has a lot to lose if we don't act.

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The Caribbean is still trying to keep up with global development trends, but that’s not to say that we are not making any successes.

Despite the downturn in many of our economies, and the high-debt in some cases, we’ve had new entrepreneurs launch businesses, and organisations make large investments in new infrastructure.

So interest and investments are there.

These are what I see as trends that you should look at for the year ahead. There’s a lot of hype behind these trends, so take them with a pinch of salt.

1. The continued exponential growth of the Internet of Things…

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues it’s hype and growth trend, and for good reason. The IoT offers some of the greatest opportunities at this time and has the power to impact chain management, energy management and personal healthcare.

The continually decreasing costs of electronic sensors and computing power, coupled with a rapidly expanding maker movement has added fuel to the growth.

My prediction is that the IoT will continue to grow, along with privacy and security concerns.

2. … followed by the continued growth of big data, data analytics and visualisation…

With the sheer amount of data being produced by normal business operations, the addition of the data from IoT will now pose a challenge on how that data can be used. This is where data analytics come into play, with a new position within the company called the data scientist, whose role will be to help make sense of all this data, which includes visualisation.

So far, businesses have not had much success getting returns from big data, nor are they implementing large scale deployments, but it has not stopped them from making investments in big data technologies.

My prediction is that businesses will continue to invest in big data, but still struggle to get returns from it. Data scientists are going to make a killing though.

3. … and adoption of reliable enterprise wireless networks

Too many organisations use consumer grade wireless access points (WAP) in their network to provide wireless access to users. These devices may have a lot of security weaknesses, and further, there may be no management capabilities built in. You can’t tell how the wireless network is performing, and worst, can’t tell if someone is trying to break in. The only indication that you have that something is wrong, is when users complain.

Many of the sensors used for the IoT requires wireless access, and organisations hoping to take advantage of those technologies now have to re-look at their wireless infrastructure and replace it with enterprise grade devices with centralised control and management, and far greater security features.

This is not to say that only if you have an IoT project at hand you should consider enterprise wireless networks. Unless you’re a home user, you should always consider enterprise wireless network infrastructure.

My prediction is that with the proliferation of mobile devices, and the IoT, you will find enterprises implementing enterprise wireless infrastructure.

4. Software defined everything

Software Defined Everything is really the virtualisation of hardware via software and includes Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS) and Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). SDN is the main leader in this trend, with many competing technologies available. Commercialisation has already started with offerings available from leading vendors such as VMWare and Cisco.

My prediction is that businesses heavy in VMWare technologies may move to adopt SDS and SDDC, however, the current trend of few businesses adopting SDN will continue until a major standard emerges.

5. Automating the enterprise

This is not new, but new technologies are making it easier to automate processes and keep track of changes. Products such as Puppet and Chef, and programming capabilities built into virtualisation as VMWare has.

My prediction is that as more services are being brought online, IT departments will need to look for automation technologies to help manage the new services and infrastructure. IT staff will have to learn to write code and scripts, with some becoming increasingly fearful of automating themselves out of a job.

6. Greater adoption of cloud services and mobility

In the Caribbean, companies are slowly moving services into the cloud, but concerns about costs and reliability of Internet services pose challenges.

Microsoft has been generally successful with getting users of its office suite to move into the cloud, but I’m not exactly sure if the businesses are actually using the cloud services, or just taking advantage of the lower licensing costs. I’ve only come across one company utilising Microsoft’s Azure to run internal services.

That’s not to say that adoption is not coming. On the contrary, I’m seeing much more renewed interest in the cloud and expect more organisations to make the switch this year, especially to Microsoft Office 365.

With the growing adoption of cloud services, I predict that more mobile access will be requested by end users and management to allow them to work on the road. Meanwhile, data loss due to theft of mobile devices will increase.

7. Greater IT security within organisations

This is really a hope rather than a trend. With the rash of high profile hacking that took place last year (Sony, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Home Depot), many companies should take a deep look at their security processes and infrastructure.

But I don’t expect to see that in the Caribbean, because you don’t hear about any attempts or breaches in the Caribbean. While I may hear something from someone who knows someone, there is no requirement to report breaches, and the cybersecurity monitoring and response mechanisms are almost non-existent at this time.

My prediction is that organisations within the Caribbean will continue to take security for granted with one high profile attack happening this year to change things around.

More?

Do you think there are any trends that I missed in my list? Let me know in the comments section below.

I take this opportunity to wish you a happy and prosperous 2015. Be safe out there.

Original article: 7 IT Trends to expect for 2015

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