From Looking Digital to Being Digital: The Impact of Technology on the Future of Work At Audi, for example, design engineers The difference between traditional and General Motors were among the pioneers engage in web-based, real-time exchanges contemporary approaches to product in math-based design. But being high-tech with customers as they experiment with engineering—between adaptable processes and being digital are not the same. To get 6 new infotainment system options. What and intelligent digital processes—ought the benefit of intelligent digital processes, might in the past have appeared to be a not be reduced to a distinction between you need to think differently about the bureaucratic shuffle of blueprints between “low tech” and “high tech.” The automobile organization of work. different functions and departments industry has been a high-tech industry now more closely resembles a spirited for many years. Companies like Ford and conversation between communities of 7 experts. Teams of software, instrument and mechanical engineers and marketing professionals rapidly iterate through new approaches, assimilate customer feedback New thinking and old in work design and preferences, and submit new options in a matter of days, rather than months. Companies may no longer have a formal to search for the “one best way” to Digital files containing their designs are work-design department, but executives, organize work. A legacy of scientific distributed at light speed to other groups, managers, and engineers are constantly management, that goal remained the including test engineers, who assess their making choices among the different central pursuit in many industries well 8 implications for cost, weight, durability, ways to translate business objectives and into the 1980s. and integration with other control systems. market conditions into processes, tasks and jobs. Their choices are influenced by Toward the end of the twentieth century, Speed is not the only thing that’s changed. both business and technological factors, companies began to seek more flexible In the realm of design, companies now but cumulatively those choices have a approaches to work organization, such as rely on engineers to master the intelligent powerful influence on the performance lean manufacturing and socio-technical tools, and on algorithms to interpret of people and processes. Think of it like design. Both lean and socio-technical massive volumes of data and to evaluate the design of a racing yacht: the designer approaches start from the assumption the manufacturing implications of a design may not sail the boat, but his or her that successful implementation of a new change. In some instances an “app” is choices about things like the size and technology requires a mutual adaptation considered a team member. shape of the keel, the hull and the sails of technology and people. The same have a huge influence on what the yacht basic technology, for example, can be is capable of doing. Carrying the analogy implemented in very different ways— a step further, the “work” of sailing a with very different work-design racing yacht has changed a great deal outcomes. Consequently, instead of as a result: contemporary America’s Cup seeking “one best way,” companies boats use sensors to monitor the wind began to organize their work processes and adjust the carbon fiber wing that’s by considering the broader context of replaced the fabric sail; crew members business and organizational culture scan LED screens as much as they do alongside task and technology. the physical horizon; and data captured Proponents of these approaches call during a race is reviewed repeatedly in for “smarter systems” that combine the preparation for the next heat. right technical solutions with the most effective and engaging methods of 9 For decades, work organization was organizing human skills and judgment. guided by the legacy of scientific Avant-garde thinking has incorporated management—so-called Taylorism. the “entanglement perspective,” which Industrial engineers, for example, views human beings and technologies focused on standardization, repeatability as inseparable: each has the capacity to 10 and process control. This led companies augment and extend the other. 16 | Accenture | Copyright 2014 Accenture. All rights reserved. ©