From Looking Digital to Being Digital: The Impact of Technology on the Future of Work Chapter 3: Choice Points on the Road to Being Digital We offer detailed examples of the choices faced by a cross-section of companies as they seek to leverage the digital technology and the new work practices we just described. Companies can push decision-making to Edge-centric number of companies, valuable insights are the front lines (edge-centric decision- decision-making traveling from the edges to the core and making); they can make those decisions from edge to edge. For example, a decade in real time (real-time adaptation); ago leading-edge practices focused on they can recombine human labor with Ten years ago, analysts challenged the providing customer service representatives advanced robotics in novel ways (human US Department of Defense to distribute with greater information about clients and digital recombination); and they can “power to the edge,” that is, to empower so that they could be more responsive deploy a continuous, iterative process “individuals at the edge of an organization to their needs. Today, a newer and more of experimentation and adjustment to provide access to available information radical form of decentralization is taking (experiment-driven design). Pursuing any and expertise and to eliminate procedural place, giving individuals who might be 14 or all of those practices is a matter of constraints.” Since then, technology has far removed from the corporate center a choice that deserves careful consideration. evolved to such an extent that power—or level of “situational awareness” that was at least information—has indeed moved previously restricted to managers further 15 to the edge in many organizations. Not up the chain of command. only that but the authority to make decisions is moving to the edges along with that information. And, in a growing 23 | Accenture | Copyright 2014 Accenture. All rights reserved. ©