Let’s Get Digital

Three ideas for making automation work

Turning jobs over to computers makes workers nervous, and rightly so; a robot doesn’t have to put food on the table. But Venkat Venkatraman, author of The Digital Matrix and David J. McGrath Jr. Professor in Management, says embracing digital innovation can help turn your employees into superstars, by:

1. Focusing their time. “Automation can mean freeing up employees for different work that brings greater value to customers,” says Venkatraman. “If you automate faster than your competitors, and if you automate a broader number of tasks, you will have a competitive edge.”

2. Increasing their acumen. Digital innovations can give employees rich additional information that can help improve their work. Venkatraman gives the example of doctors at a cancer center experimenting with a software tool that sifts through published data to help physicians recommend specific courses of treatment to patients. Other tools pinpoint the data that are most likely to be useful in producing the first draft of a quarterly report. “Tasks that cannot be fully automated can often be well augmented by today’s technology,” says Venkatraman.

3. Amplifying their talent. Humans and machines work better in collaboration than they can on their own. When humans can work as designers, coaches, and strategists for the right kinds of machines, says Venkatraman, they can guide incredibly powerful work. He says an amateur chess player sticking to a solid process and working in tandem with a chess-playing computer can beat all challengers, whether the strongest human opponent or a chess-playing supercomputer. The advantages of this approach can be applied to work situations as well.

“Businesses win when they do things that are at the frontier of powerful machines and smart humans,” says Venkatraman. “They are comfortable automating tasks that should be automated, they strive to augment tasks that benefit from using machines as smart personal assistants, and they design processes that push the front lines of how organizations can be designed.”