Bacon and Bears - Leadership, Travel & Self-Improvement
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Photography

BLOG

Zero Person Company

9/1/2018

0 Comments

 
My current organisation, along with almost every large company in Australia, has embarked on a huge digitisation and automation program, and in turn reducing labour across the business by as much as a quarter. So what the hell then is digitisation and automation?
Essentially process improvement by a fancier name. Earnst & Young have a great paper on it, which makes me think that E&Y, KPMG and the like just dreamt it up, branded is with something new and whacked the concept out to the market. It’s like spruiking the best private fire brigade in the business whilst your subsidiary offers discount Molotov cocktails.
​
Picture
Digitisation is the natural progression of everything technology: the only people that fill out forms any more are the people that want the product i.e. you and me. Great examples of digitisation are things such as barcodes that enable you to scan almost anything and it will tell you all the vital details. No more looking things up on a database, it’s all done for you. Another would be paying by credit card instead of using actual money – why carry around all those notes and spare coins when one card does it all? When you think about it, it’s everywhere.
  • You want groceries? Well how about you walk into the store, you pick it out, you process it at the tills by scanning barcodes, you pay for it and you leave.
  • You want a credit card? You fill out the form on-line via your laptop, tablet or mobile phone, the system will process it and give you an answer based on some business rules.
  • You want to pay a bill? You phone the company, you type in all your personal access information, you key in your credit card details, the payment is processed, accepted and confirmed on the spot.
  • You looking for a hotel in the countryside? You used to have a sign posted near the road and maybe a brochure or two down the pub. Now you can see the hotel on-line along with hundreds of others, you can advertise to anywhere even looking at local area regardless of erven if they’re reading the news – bang, up pops an advert. Not only are you targeting those looking for holidays, but people booking even a flight to anywhere nearby could be advertised to. All enabled digitally.
Picture
The human only needs to deal with the crap that can’t be met with the business rules, which they’re trying to automate to reduce the amount of work that person has to do. A prime example would be driving, which up until about ten years ago was pure fancy. And yet! Accidents on the roads caused by humans means huge slow-downs in productivity (kinematic wave equations for traffic illustrate those magic traffic jams for no reason whatsoever), yet if all cars are talking to one another, they could all go at the maximum speed limits. In the corporate world it’s generally the automation of moving data from one system to another, especially if the company is large and old.
​
So there you go, down with the human, long live the technology! No humans mean no labour costs, no sick pay, no pension plan, no weekend rates and no one getting pregnant. An employer’s dream! And that’s where the universal minimum wage comes in. Maybe. But it will all be down to the individual and whether as humans we cock the entire thing up or we march towards progress making our lives less burdensome, enabling us to take up more activities to waste time. Whilst I would welcome the automated car (I could get some reading done, how wonderful), I have a friend that has spent hundreds of dollars automating the lights in the house. I’ll keep the switch for now, putting my book made of paper down and get off my ever increasing wobbly-bottom to turn it on. But progress is coming, look out behind you!

Image references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spit_Out_the_Bone
​https://nationalpost.com/news/world/swedish-lutherans-urge-use-of-gender-neutral-words-for-god
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Writing and writing...

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    July 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Photography