To increase a company’s productivity, how do you know what needs to be automated and what needs to be robotized? What human task would benefit from being performed by a robot or artificial intelligence?
In this era of major organizational change, identifying those activities considered unprofitable is the key to successful digital transformation.
Business books are full of practical advice on how to qualify tasks: repetitiveness, volume, precision, low added value, and so on.
All true. But by adopting an overly technocratic approach, we run the risk of missing out on the central role that humans can play in the complex, living system that is a company.
During my doctoral studies on cultural interfaces, I developed a passion for ethnography. With hindsight, I think we should re-read the work of Bronislaw Malinowski – made famous by his research on the people of Papua New Guinea at the beginning of the last century – to help us make companies more efficient. Like him, like ethnographers in the field, we need to immerse ourselves in the day-to-day life of an organization, not only to identify the pitfalls of productivity, but also to understand the role of people in a process, their added value, and to ensure that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
We’re so far behind in terms of automation in the service sector, compared with certain industries, that the priority is not to replace humans, but to augment them with robots and AI, as with the THALAMUS robot or the CODA platform. It’s up to us, as informed ethnographers, to identify what needs to be automated, or semi-automated, while valuing the work of our employees.
By Renato Cudicio,MBA, President TechNuCom
