Read Blog Post

Read Blog Post

Contributed on November 17, 2016

2.0K

732

The new wave of automation: Unpicking the business impact

There’s a new wave of work automation now starting to impact businesses. Yes, partly this is enabled by Machine Learning technologies and techniques: but there’s more to it. The new wave of automation brings advances in interaction, insights and integration. This report shows how different technology applications play in this landscape.

Written by MWD Advisors’ lead analysts Angela Ashenden, Neil Ward-Dutton and Craig Wentworth, this report is the second of a two-part series.

The new wave of automation we outlined in three distinct, but related, layers in our first report – interaction, insight and integration – is most visible through the impact of specific applications that package technologies from one or more of our three layers together in order to address particular kinds of work scenario.

In this second report, we provide you with a simple framework for thinking about the potential for these new applications to impact organisations like yours (or your customers’), and then we work through five different example technology applications, analysing their nature and potential impact of each.

Backdrop: a spectrum of new automation use cases

The figure below shows you a useful way to think about the potential impact of applications that are part of the new wave of automation. The first thing (indeed, perhaps the most important thing) to note about this framework is that its starting point is an examination of how a technology will impact individual tasks.

Source: MWD Advisors

Your unit of analysis: tasks, not jobs

There’s been a lot of very widely-read and shared debate in the media[1][2] about how future automation will destroy jobs: this debate is very worthwhile, but the danger is that we focus our thinking too much on ‘jobs’ as if they were homogeneous things rather than the messy collections of responsibilities and roles that the vast majority of them really are.

Even brain surgeons have to fill in forms from time to time, and even back-office administrators have to manage exceptions. Almost all jobs involve the performance of many different kinds of tasks: some tasks are very prescribed, systematic and routine; others require the application of non-trivial judgement and discretion. When we look at the potential impact of automation, we need to explore and analyse at the level of the individual tasks that support business activities, services and processes.

The figure above examines the impact of the new wave of automation on particular tasks in two dimensions. On the vertical axis, we segment tasks according to the level of expertise required to successfully complete them; on the horizontal access, we segment tasks according to the frequency with which they will be performed.

As you can see, there are four broad categories of tasks we need to consider:

• Truly expert tasks. The role of new automation technologies in the context of these tasks is to provide ‘expert assistants’ – to augment what experts can do, enhancing their expertise through the in-context application of sophisticated analytics technologies. A great example of how technology assists in these tasks is the current collaboration between IBM and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in the USA: the two organisations are working together to deliver expert software-assisted cancer diagnoses. In these use cases, the likely value of new automation technology is in how it can process and analyse vast volumes of (perhaps very diverse/dispersed) data quickly, also referencing against an existing corpus – something that’s not really practical for an individual expert to do in a timely way.
• Knowledge work tasks. These tasks don’t require truly advanced professional expertise but they do require people who have professional experience in a given subject matter area (for example, fraud management, customer service, sales, complaints management) to apply discretion and professional judgement to investigate problems, close cases, and so on. The role of new automation technologies in the context of these tasks is to provide ‘case advisors’ – tools that can provide context-specific insights and action recommendations to enable every member of a team or organisation performing a given knowledge-dependent role to be as high-performing as the best.
• High-volume clerical tasks. These tasks do commonly require training, but it’s principally training on how to use the GUIs of (very often old and inflexible) business software applications to most efficiently perform data entry, query and reporting tasks. Many of these tasks today involve people performing highly repetitive actions that transfer data between systems in order to ‘close the loop’ in the back-office administration of business services. The role of new automation technologies in the context of these highly repetitive, programmatic tasks is to automate them as completely as possible – to drive business productivity and process quality and accuracy.
• Personal administrative tasks. These tasks – like meeting scheduling, email management and so on – are common, ‘hygiene’ tasks that should in principle require little effort but can cause work-time disruption and create frustrating, inefficient communication loops between people and teams. Improving the productivity of an individual personal administrative task may not be in itself something that justifies a technology investment, but in aggregate, in some organisations, there may be a case for investing in personal productivity services or products that can fulfil some of the more transactional parts of the roles of human personal assistants.

In looking at these different task types and how they’re addressed in the new wave of automation, we can see that the tasks that appear in the lower half of the figure are most likely to be automated in their entirety, whereas the tasks in the upper half of the figur are most likely to be supported with automated elements. We call this state ‘augmented’ rather than ‘automated’ (after the established concept of ‘augmented reality’[3]).

Now we’re going to take a look at how this ‘new wave of automation’ is coming into play in different ways.

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/robots-will-steal-your-job-citi-ai-increase-unemployment-inequality-2016-2

[2] http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-robots-are-coming-to-take-your-job/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

The post The new wave of automation: Unpicking the business impact appeared first on The Advisor.