A businesses dependence on IT, technology, communication has kept evolving over the years. Most transactional activities at work places have gradually been automated. With the reduced cost of technology deployment – using SaaS, and cloud based offerings, even small companies can leverage technology for a minuscule costs to automate most of their transactional process. Future of work, will be different, much more technology dependent.
Affordable & accessible technology.
For quite some time now – erp, hrms, crm platforms are not just for those who can spend millions. You can get these for your 2 person business as well, for a fraction of the earlier costs – at times for free. There is a multitude of option and easy availability of computing resources, bandwidth. Since communication has been well integrated in almost all transactions, everyone in the process has access to information in real-time. All, these are enablers of a processes productivity, and thereby overall business performance if leveraged well. They also help save on costs, as against doing things manually and in a less connected manner.
Changing nature of transactional jobs.
Automation, supported by self-service by those dependent on the process – has been replacing the transactional work of humans at workplace. In a few years, one will need minimal human effort to get these work process’s live and running. Probably, the job roles presently involved in these transactional activities will go up the value chain, and will be expected to supervise the working of these process through dashboard, and only intervene when something gets stuck somewhere.
May be the entry level and operations jobs of future, in transactional process related to hr, finance, record keeping won’t have to worry about paper stubs, files etc. May be these job roles wont even be needed. All this has been already happening.
Possibly, interns and entry level resources won’t even be expected to work on spreadsheets for data crunching. Most of the data and their analysis, etc., would easily be available from the system.
Non transactional work, decision support:
Considering that all these automated systems host and generate vast amount of data at each stage of related transaction – more relevant decision support systems has also been evolving. Analysis, number crunching for future predictions by human business analyst’s may also gradually become a thing of past.
So, what are we looking at – let’s say 10-15-20 years ?
Some questions that emerge, about future of work:
- What new opportunities can get created ?
- What jobs will disappear from workplace ?
- What reform’s may be needed in higher education ?
- How to people presently employed, approach their own re-skilling ?
Plus, a lot’s more.
We may be taking these up in subsequent posts. Meanwhile, you are welcome to share your thoughts.
Praveen is the Founder & Principal Consultant of KHEdge, a boutique HR & Business Process Advisory firm. Over last 15 years he has advised & worked with promoters, founders, business leaders, HR leaders in areas of - Business Strategy, HR Strategy, Organisation Design etc.
1 comment for “Future of work and workplace : Some questions ?”