From Looking Digital to Being Digital: The Impact of Technology on the Future of Work Finally, move to augmentation. Intelligent company decisions about what kind of The benefits to be derived from intelligent digital processes augment human turbine to purchase set real constraints on digital processes are certainly attractive. capabilities on three levels. With cognitive plant managers and crews. From a cost and Companies should beware, however, that augmentation, they enhance the alertness liability perspective, operating conditions the technologies themselves are merely of human beings to new developments, were either inside or outside the specified the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface tee up alternative courses of action and parameters; there wasn’t a lot of gray area. are huge changes in the ways that work make it possible to test alternatives is organized and managed—changes that or even to experiment via simulation. In the era of intelligent digital processes, require a dramatic modification in mindset. Intelligent digital processes also employ other options are available to plant The employees and managers of 7-Eleven new generations of communication and operators. Equipment manufacturers like and Rio Tinto, for example, work very workflow tools to connect people across GE now routinely put sensors all over the differently now. Their jobs and roles have time and space—that’s collaborative turbines they sell (and usually all over fundamentally changed. Being digital is a augmentation. And, finally, through the power plant, in pumps, relays, cooling transformation, not an installation. physical augmentation, they extend human equipment and condensers). As a result, capabilities and perspectives by means of they are now constantly collecting data To better appreciate the nature of the deep next-generation robotics. about all the components and how they shift, we need to look more closely at how operate under all manner of conditions. work practices are changing in the era of With advanced analytics they are able intelligent digital processes. In Chapter 2, Intelligent digital to develop sophisticated algorithms and we highlight four emergent work practices. processes at work models to optimize assets and operations. Standard operating parameters are now Consider the operation of a contemporary just a starting point. power plant. Before the advent of intelligent digital processes, power plant From the company’s perspective, intelligent operators focused almost exclusively on digital processes have made the system operational efficiency rather than, say, more agile. The speed of decision-making exploiting market opportunities. Service can improve by an order of magnitude. contracts for key equipment like turbines Because intelligent digital processes are specified operating parameters; power driven by data derived from both upstream and downstream sources, they make it possible to optimize an entire system rather than just a series of work islands. Intelligent digital processes optimize an entire system rather than just a series of work islands. 13 | Accenture | Copyright 2014 Accenture. All rights reserved. ©