CIO Asia: Senior Director at Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Says Digital is More About Humans Than Machines

“The challenge for many companies today is to assemble work teams to blend skills, capabilities and innovative thinking inside, outside and across traditional organizational structures. Oh, and did we mention the need to master the Robots,” writes Euan Davis. Excerpts:

“Although leaders in Asia-Pacific are exploring robots to reshape process work, it’s clear that the workforce of the future needs a new architecture to work because Cognizant’s analysis indicates that new human-plus-machines workflows will become the business norm.

Robots need smart people to ask good questions, solve problems creatively, and manage data. It is not about having one or the other; rather, robots will need to work in tandem with humans to enable more agile and smarter businesses.

Humans must focus on jobs that require a high degree of intelligence — at least more than what can be applied today by any robot. Here are five principles organizations can use to begin the journey:

Use data on talent to build better talent: Leading companies are increasingly adopting sophisticated methods of analyzing employee data to enhance their productivity and well-being.

Synthesize what talent likes (and doesn’t like): The true detail of what employees jointly dislike about the job is mostly hidden and unanalyzed. Employees will increasingly use their mobile devices or wearables to monitor the applets in the workplace in order for employers to better understand their productive behavioral patterns.

Build an intelligent workplace: Watch for the rise of the intelligent workplace that can monitor its workers’ environment, moods, wants and needs, to create an all-encompassing, intelligent and unobtrusive working environment.

Enable new human-to-machine workflows: Adding software “robots” will allow talent to work smarter as software begins to automate rote process work and enable new human-to-machine workflows.

It’s time to get serious about your organization’s most important asset — its people — and about giving them the power they need to succeed in this exciting digital age of newer opportunities.”

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