Data Will Drive Your Car. Oil, Not So Much

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Oil Rig. By Soliven Melindo.
Oil Rig. Photo courtesy of Soliven Melindo.

Are cars no longer fueled by gasoline because they are now fueled by data?  Consider how driverless cars, electronic vehicles, and Uber are changing the outlook for the future.  And reflect on how the in-vehicle computer has increasingly changed you safety, your comfort, and your ability to manage the vehicle’s maintenance.  Gasoline is so last century; today it’s all about the data.

A Financial Review article from July 2017 by Mark Eggleton plays with the idea of data as the fuel of the future.  For a century oil ruled our world, influencing geopolitics, urban design, and decisions about where to work and travel.  Today, it is data that is significantly changing our world.  However, we cannot just obey data on blind faith.  We need to look up from the GPS, so to speak, and decide for ourselves if the data we are being fed is relevant and appropriate.

We need to consider data in the context of trust.  Take banks for an example.  Although banks could do lots of things with our personal financial information, they operate within the context of trust that has built over centuries.  Regardless of whether we trust their profit motives in society overall, we do indeed trust that the information they hold will be handled in a responsible and diligent manner.  Banking is deeply immersed in a human context, regardless of whether it always seems that way.

I personally think that in workforce analytics, there is a similar concern about trust.  We have at our fingertips sensitive information that could be used for good or evil.  So let’s ask, are human resources departments actually good? Perhaps we need some time establishing ourselves, to give a better sense that when we’re wrapped up in industrial conflict and individual terminations, that we’re sincerely doing what is expected of us.  If we collect accident statistics and attendance lists for mental health workshops, do employees bank on us only using this information to make people well?  Have we truly established that the employment equity data we collect will be used exclusively for its intended purpose?  When we survey employees on their engagement experience, is the information used to create a better workplace, or are there attempts to punish those who express low motivation?  While we closely guard peoples’ confidential pay data, do we have the correct attitude towards employees discussing their pay amongst themselves?

I think it’s high time we subordinate data to the human context.  After all, if big data peaks, we are probably into the human economy.   If data is going to change the world, we need to ensure it dovetails with our history, the geography, the people and their culture.  If we get this wrong, it will be a dystopian science fiction movie come true.  That’s kind of what happened with oil.  So let’s get it right this time.

(Hat tip to KPMG’s Hugo van Hoogstraten for sharing the original article with me)

Boxes Without Humans: What Will Fill the Gap?

Posted on by Stuart Murray
IMG_3651.JPG
Amazon cat. Photo courtesy of Stephen Woods.

It’s been couple of days since the latest social disruption.  I wonder what’s going to be turned upside-down this week?  Flat on the heels of online shopping ravaging the conventional retail sector, warehouse and trucking jobs might be the next to go.

Amazon.com holds contests every year entitled the Amazon Robotics Challenge, where academics and graduate students compete for prize money to help automate warehouse jobs with robots.  The technology gets a little more clever each year.  “They now use neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence that helps robots learn to recognize objects with less human programming.”  The good news is that there might be lots of work for technologists.

The bad news is that this could take a bite of decent-paying warehouse jobs.  In the US, there are about 950,000 warehouse and storage-industry jobs with an average wage of about $20 per hour.  Those jobs are threatened.

But a more pressing concern would be trucking.  Self-driving cars are already starting to make an appearance on the roads.  For trucking, the change will happen more quickly according to a Guardian article.  The decision to go driverless with trucking is a corporate decision, not a consumer decision like with driverless personal automobiles.  The financial motivation is extremely favorable to use self-driving trucks. “The potential saving to the freight transportation industry is estimated to be $168bn annually… [including savings from] labor ($70bn), fuel efficiency ($35bn), productivity ($27bn) and accidents ($36bn)…”  The trucker’s wage is similar to that of warehouse workers, but there are far more jobs at stake.  There are 3.5 million truckers in the United States, and the drivers themselves spend a lot of money at road stops, hotels, and diners.

Now, if you work in finance or information technology this might not concern you so much.  Technologies are created, investments made, money saved, and we’re better off on average.  But in human resources we know that the unemployed are our people.  We terminate them, we screen them when they apply for jobs, we help them with problems if we know them personally, and occasionally the we ourselves are the unemployed.  We think about them a lot.  We don’t always show it, but frankly we have to care or we die inside.

Thankfully, people have started to talk more openly about the broad-based social disruption that Artificial Intelligence may have.  In the Guardian article on trucking, there are calls for a Universal Basic Income, direct payments to everyone regardless of how well they have fared in a disrupted labour market.  There may be other policy concerns as well, such as improved access to training and education.  Of course, these are government-funded solutions which seem obvious to me.

There is still a persisting risk that the disruption will be misattributed to an outside factor.  If the technology-based job losses are blamed on immigrants, environmental regulations, or the abandonment of tradition, I can’t foresee broad democratic support for government solutions or the embracing of change.  And this spells trouble for the very business interests whose success relies on the rule of law, stable diplomacy, and a diverse workforce who are engaged to stay productive.

Humanity Is In-Scope For All New Projects

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Public domain from USDA
Photo in public domain.

Are we still living in the information age?  Maybe not.  Here’s an interesting article from Harvard Business Review on the Human Economy, from November 2014.  Societies have evolved from agrarian economies to industrial economies to service economies to knowledge economies.  At this point, there’s such a glut of food and goods and services and information, the next bottleneck is humans.  Businesses that do well in this new era will be those with a greater sense of humanity.  Those that have a poor sense of humanity shall be sunk!

“In the human economy, the most valuable workers will be hired hearts.”  It is what makes us different from robots and artificial intelligence (i.e. emotions) that will make us special as employees.  Many of the examples in the article are from the perspective of a customer whose heart was won over.  Noticeably there’s always and employee whose empathy and enthusiasm closed the deal (so to speak).  The article cites several studies where CEOs place a higher priority on social skills than analytics.

This is what it feels like at my desk.  I spend half of my time getting the formulas right, and the rest of the time helping people become happy about the numbers.  They can’t use workforce analytics unless they trust us.  The analytics influence the decision making.  Clients get better because we help them develop patience.  They come back for more the data is addictive.  We persevere through inevitable errors and mistakes, being honest about having made best efforts.

Beyond customer engagement, employee engagement is increasingly recognized as having a major impact on productivity behind closed doors.  People are not monkeys at a keyboard sending customer service complaints in circles.  Or rather, sometimes it seems that way but it sure looks bad in the news.

At their best, people are the embodiment of the discretionary effort that dictates if a service or product gets to market, and they make every capital investment matter (or not).

Peeking Into the Future of Job Elimination

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Google Glass. Byi Karlis Dambrans.
Google Glass.  Photo courtesy of Karlis Dambrans.

There is increased speculation that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly replace the work of humans over the medium to long term.  Already, AI is performing well at the world-class tournament levels in such games as Chess and Go, the latter of which was a major breakthrough.  What about actual jobs?

At University of Oxford, a survey from the Future of Humanity Institute asked several leading experts how long it will take for machines to outperform humans.  Here is the average forecast for a couple of skill sets:

  • 2023 – Folding laundry
  • 2027 – Truck driving
  • 2031 – Retail sales
  • 2049 – The writing of best-selling books
  • 2053 – Surgery

In the long game, they think all human tasks will be out-performed by machines in 45 years.  All human jobs would be replaced in about 125 years.  So we’re kind of safe for a decade or so.  However, there are major concerns about what this change will mean for humanity, as this change may increase economic inequality.

In my opinion, as this relates to workforce planning, the challenge seems most interesting in the transition period.  That is, people will get new jobs designing new technologies, and people will make themselves more productive by using technology in the workplace.  But there will be more frequent changes, more dramatic changes, and things will happen more quickly.

These changes mean that human resources will be the key party delivering change management, knowledge management, hiring, learning and development, and employee communications.  The pace at which people adapt to change will determine success in investment decisions and the retention of engaged customers.  But only if you get the metrics right.  Anything else, and your organization is sunk.

Why So Complicated? Go Simple!

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Simplicity, Child Stares at Art (Stuart)
Photo by author, all rights reserved.

The world is complicated.  Do corporate leaders think this is a good thing? No, they do not.  There is an emerging effort to put a greater priority on keeping things simple, while human resources leaders get their people to adapt to changes in the nature of work.

In June of 2014, Josh Bersin developed a fresh opinion that simplicity is the next big thing.  (You’ll need to click past the Forbes pop-up screen, but then you’re in)  Large global corporations were at the time expanding their business, organizing mergers and restructuring efforts, and putting talent management ahead of cost reduction.  There was also a pre-existing struggle to redesign performance management, reduce workload for overwhelmed employees, and create a stronger and more integrated workplace culture.

Bersin notes “We have inadvertently become far too enamored with our technology, mobile phones, social networks, photos, video sharing tools, and all the various competency models, frameworks, process diagrams, and workflows we design in HR.”  Indeed.

By contrast, some organizations have put a lot of effort into simplifying their approach.  This could include reducing the number of competencies they encourage from seven to four, or reducing the performance management process to three simple steps, or creating apps that attach to their HRIS where the apps accomplish just one thing.  Solutions become smaller items that almost belong on Etsy.

For those of you who have written a one-sentence email to an executive it is obvious that keeping it simple is more work, not less.  Designing simple things for a lay audience also requires a special perspective and a devotion to good design.  Yet concentrating effort and attention to just one thing has obvious payoffs in focus and effectiveness.  I don’t have data.  In this case, you can go on instinct.

Modern Samurai Wield Swords of Data

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Samurai, by Johan Sinso
Samurai.  Courtesy of Johan Sinso.

Data analytics will be regarded as an increasingly important skill for professionals in the modern workplace.  These comments come from Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Jonathan Rosenberg, adviser to Google’s CEO Larry page.  They identify that jobs using analytic skills are expected to grow by 30% over the next seven years.

The executives name some known areas of higher-level skills such as Excel, SQL and Tableau, as well as a grasp of calculus.  However, they also noted that “an understanding of how to approach big data would still be very helpful in finding a job.”  My experience has been that just within Excel a couple of basic cross-tabular tables allow you to pinpoint key findings.  It’s like the high-and-low when you’re creating an outfit or decorating a room.  You need one or two blockbuster items to make things excellent, but other things can be pulled from Ikea or a thrift store.

Eric Schmidt poses the metaphor that “Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the samurai.”