Will AI Replace Jobs? 17 Job Types That Might be Affected
Business Technology, 2020ZDNET
What will business and technology be like in 2020 – and what's IT's place in this new world? This is the subject of a teleconference that James Staten and I held for our clients yesterday, and also the subject of an upcoming Forrester report.
In this teleconference, we painted a picture of the impact of business-ready, self-service technology, a tech-savvy and self-sufficient workforce, and a business world where today's emerging economies dwarf the established ones, bringing a billion new consumers with a radically different view of products and services, and surging resource costs – especially energy costs – crush today's global business models.
In the past, when new waves of technology swept into our businesses – everything from the 1980's PCs to today's Empowered technologies, the reaction was the swinging pendulum of 'decentralized/embedded IT' followed by 'centralized/industrialized IT'. These tired old reactions won't work in the world 2020. Instead, businesses must move to a model we call Empowered BT.
Empowered BT empowers business to pursue opportunities at the edge and the grassroots – but this empowerment balanced with enterprise concerns. Key to this balance is the interplay between four new 'meta-roles': visionaries, consultants, integrators and sustainability experts, combined with a new operating model based on guidelines, mentoring and inspection. Also key to this is a mind-set change: from IT's need to control technology to IT embracing business ownership of technology decisions.
The teleconference chat window was busy as James and I presented our research. Here are the questions we weren't able to answer due to time.
There are a lot of elements to moving to a 'guardrails' approach, such as replacing lots of rules with many fewer rules that focus on outcomes, and using rules that identify boundaries rather than prescribe actions. There is a large body of research that people act more responsible in an environment of a small number of guidelines than they do in an environment of many specific rules – a mind-shift that has yet to happen in most IT shops. Watch for an upcoming Forrester report examining this in greater detail.
We in IT see proliferation of systems as flat-out bad – and for good reason given our experience. But we can't continue with this attitude: some proliferation does in fact give the business more agility. And the services model of new technology reduces the cost impact of this proliferation – we aren't proliferating data centers anymore. The new approach will be based on a 'zoning model' which reflects enterprise-wide needs for consistency with business area needs for speed and innovation. In the core zones, you will strive for system consolidation – and in the edge zones, you'll allow more system proliferation.
The "demand/supply" model may be a good one to evolve from, as it separates business-focused planning and solution-definition functions from the work of provisioning and operating a solution in-house. Over time, the demand side will diffuse more into the business areas, while retaining some centralized responsibility for the roles of Integrator and Sustainability. Forrester will be publishing more on the organizational evolution where we can address this question further.
Mind-set change! We don't try to combat that. Only business execs can determine whether something new will help them, or if it's just hype. But implicit in the Empowered BT model is that the entire organization 'gets smarter' – with the help from the new IT.
User research/usability stays with, or moves to being embedded in business areas. IT can help them with this, perhaps through a Center of Excellence or a peer collaboration function.
It will be very hard for IT to be seen as a strategic contributor if it cannot play a part in these two roles. This part could be being these two roles - IT as the source of visionaries or as the center for consultants, or it could be simply as a value-adding partner to these two roles – the advisor for the visionary, or the project manager for the consultants.
Success will clearly be based on business metrics – but success measurement could include a 'technology leverage' or 'business impact of technology' aspect, in a Balanced Scorecard-type model. This is early thinking – and an area where we'd really like input from you.
What are your thoughts on IT in the year 2020? If you were to start from a 'clean sheet of paper', what would you put in place? Comment here or in Forrester's community site.
Enterprise Technology For 2020 And Beyond
Every company is a technology company. Some don't know it yet. Companies that have truly realized this have been able to evolve much faster than their competition across all industries.
Over the last decade, this shift has been enabled by the rapid evolution of digital technologies. There has been the virtualization of data centers, the emergence of ambient computing, the evolution of elastic computing engines, the pervasiveness of APIs and the rise of the experience economy. Industry leaders have been rolling out these technologies ahead of anyone else.
Through these breakthroughs, numerous transformations have been possible. We've seen more personalized customer experiences and faster, nimbler business processes. Entirely new value propositions have emerged. Full supply chains have changed. And the velocity of transactions has accelerated. Ultimately, these have all led to new innovative ways of working and better business outcomes.
Along these transformation journeys, IT and digital, once run separately, are now coming together to drive the next set of transformations. The role of the chief data officer and that of the chief information officer have never been more aligned.
So where do we go from here? What will define enterprise technology in 2020 and beyond?
The New Fundamentals
To reach the next set of quantum leaps in technology and business outcomes, companies will need to go deeper and incorporate three fundamental capabilities into their enterprise technology architectures.
1. Core technology services utilizing new-age capabilities
Increasingly, IT services are taking advantage of serverless computing architectures on the cloud — a foundation of data that can enable greater insights, connected ecosystems that can drive bigger business synergies, and a scalable footprint optimized for agility and business growth.
It's a journey that many have started and achieved. But for those still using on-premises legacy systems, it's important to have a clear strategy prior to migration. Plan accordingly by taking into account each application's complexity, business value, immediate objectives and desired end state. The migration will likely take sequential waves, as some applications may be easier to migrate, while others need recoding or a complete redesign. The security of these applications when running in the cloud is paramount, too, especially with different compliance, privacy and risk considerations between industries.
2. Experience as the North Star
From robotic process automation (RPA) and smart analytics to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, there are digital technologies available now that can automate not only routine, transactional tasks, but also processes that require deeper thinking and judgement. These technologies have the power to redefine applications for the new age, but the best results come only when they are focused on experience.
This starts with envisioning and defining what an optimal experience looks like — one that benefits customers and employees alike. From there, we can determine where and how to implement digital technologies services to get us there, making experience the North Star along our journeys. Banking is an industry that has seen numerous successful experience-led use cases, including chatbots that can assist customers with basic banking tasks and even use predictive analytics to offer financial guidance. For employees, several banks have added AI-powered anomaly detection technology to help with recognizing changes in customer behavior and finding patterns of money laundering or fraud, as well as predictive analytics to anticipate next best actions.
3. Proactive road maps to manage the change
Transformations from previous ways of working and traditional IT services don't happen overnight. They take methodical approaches. Customer and employee journeys have to be mapped so that they can be reimagined for the better. The desired future state needs to be architected to draw a path to transformation, including the wire frame and business requirements, and those requirements need to be deconstructed into technology. When developing applications, it's also best to use agile methods with iterative innovation sprints to manage the entire solution delivery.
A good example is one of our customers, an investment bank that wanted to break into the consumer banking market. The bank knew that competing on customer experience would be critical, so it set out to build a digital banking platform. Taking a well-thought approach, it mapped out its customer and contact center agent journeys across products such as personal finance and loans. This helped to draw a road map for development and delivery. Such proactive road maps help manage the change and deliver best outcomes, which for the bank meant a rapid increase in consumer loans.
Domain And Direction
In all of these projects, companies need a strong foundational base: domain knowledge. Only with a deep and pervasive understanding of the business, processes and industry can companies effectively incorporate business requirements, understand and thereby reimagine workflows, and adjust analytics, automation, and AI according to the context of their use. Having this deep understanding is critical to getting technology services right.
Above all, companies need a clear vision for how to execute these new capabilities, including overall operating models, desired business outcomes and industry best practices. Essentially, what shall the business look like in the future? That vision and direction are what propel us forward and drive different outcomes.
There are leading companies today utilizing emerging digital technologies to transform the employee experience across several shared service functions. Domain knowledge of existing processes is critical during early workshops to identify journeys prime for change. From these workshops, a narrow set of technologies can be defined to turn visions into reality. Key to this is designing digital capabilities that can not only deliver, but also suggest and anticipate services.
Ultimately, technology services need to be rooted in a deep understanding of domain and industry context. When these services are simultaneously bound by the ability to reimagine processes and drive desired outcomes, we can unleash the power and potential of new enterprise technologies — in 2020 and beyond.
ReImagine Nation ELC 2020: Census Met The Deadline With New TechnologyFedTech Magazine - Technology Solutions That Drive Government
Technology was always going to play a role in the 2020 U.S. Census, billed as the nation's first digital count. However, in this particular year, the count would not have been a success without it, Census Bureau officials say.
Despite a pandemic that temporarily halted the count, changed deadlines and forced the bureau to rethink the way it conducted in-person interviews — not to mention hurricanes and wildfires that displaced residents and complicated the count in parts of the country — the count was 99.98 percent complete when it officially ended Oct. 15, according to Stephen Buckner, assistant director of communications at the Census Bureau.
About 67 percent of those responses came through the very first online tally of U.S. Residents, a project that many critics thought was doomed to fail, Buckner said Monday at the virtual ReImagine Nation ELC 2020 conference.
"Our online responses never went down. We never had one minute of downtime," he said. "Everyone thought we would, but if we had failed, the Census reputation would have been tarnished and would have been difficult to rebuild."
Geolocation, iPhones Kept Census on TrackThe census count, which happens every 10 years, is the government's largest regularly scheduled project. It takes years of preparation to identify every one of the nation's residential addresses, to hire hundreds of thousands of temporary workers and to stand up the systems that support the count of the 330 million people who live in the United States.
For the 2020 count, the bureau turned to new methods for many of these processes. Instead of sending out workers on foot to verify that addresses still existed, it used aerial maps, geolocation and U.S. Postal Service information.
Enumerators — the temporary workers who follow up with households that don't respond online or by mail — used iPhone 8s that contained not only the addresses that needed a visit but the most efficient route to follow to get to all those houses and the best times of day to find someone at home.
They were able to upload follow-up information immediately to the Census Bureau, eliminating the need for a trip back to the office and more paperwork, and they were also able to submit payroll information.
The new technology sped up productivity rates to 1.92 cases resolved per hour, compared with 1.01 cases per hour in the "all-paper environment" of 2010, said Albert Fontenot Jr., associate director for decennial census programs, at a Census Bureau briefing earlier this month.
The count was completed in just 2 1/2 months, less than the four to five months the bureau had sketched out prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the assistance of the new technology.
"Technology has advanced significantly over the last 10 years," he said. "We scheduled the count just like we had in 2010 and 2000, but we did not take into consideration that computers are faster, technology is faster and a lot of the processes can happen faster."
READ MORE: The Census Bureau worked closely with CDW to deploy its iPhone Device as a Service program.
Census Customers' Digital Experience MatteredCensus officials spent time before the count began working not only on new technology to make the process more efficient but on the digital experience that U.S. Residents would have when they logged on to get counted.
This was a challenge, Buckner said, since funding requests are generally made as far in advance as two years before the money is available. "It's hard to plan for IT that way because technology changes so fast," he added.
Determined to give residents an enjoyable experience, officials focused on making response simple. For example, people could fill out their census forms on their smartphones: "Almost everyone has a cellphone," Buckner said, "and we designed mobile-first."
In some areas, the Census website would display a photo of the responder's home city for a personalized feel.
Going online meant that the bureau had to "redefine our operating model," Buckner said. "We had our fair share of challenges. Transformation was not just one and done — it had to persist across the organization."
Follow FedTech coverage for more articles and videos from ReImagine Nation ELC 2020.
U.S. Census Bureau
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