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Instead, the real value of software automation is about moving employees up the value add chain, reducing the time they spend on simple tasks and increasing the percentage of the time they get to engage with higher order strategic thinking.
Put more simply, software automation doesn’t undermine talent; it unleashes it.
In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously wrote that software was eating the world. By this he meant that every industry that hadn’t been impacted by technology yet, would be. Havas Strategy & Innovation SVP Tom Goodwin built on that thesis earlier this year when he opened an essay for TechCrunch with a paragraph that would go viral on Twitter and LinkedIn:
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.”
As we seek to understand the nature of that something interesting, it’s important to recognize that disruption isn’t happening just on the industry level, but across every function inside the enterprise.
Marketers struggle to define where traditional ends and digital begins as users demand their video content wherever they are - be it TV, web, or mobile. Modern sales organizations are flush with SaaS tools that better help them identify leads, cultivate prospects, and close deals. HR has never been so replete with platforms that transform the hiring process from guess work to real skills testing. If each of these areas reflects something different in the specifics of what processes software automates, they share a net result of a completely new way or working.
Jessica Mah founded Indinero after noticing that accounting and financial management were still carried out like they had been for years. When she first began the company 5 years ago, she focused on only “tech savvy” companies who she thought wouldn’t be intimidated by a software solution for something that had always been handled. Meanwhile, accountants and other financial services professionals she met were wary, thinking that they would be automated out of the job.
Instead something very different happened. First, the very idea of a “tech-savvy” company began to go away. Whether it was a law firm or a PR company, software simply touched too many parts of the day-to-day work for companies to function without a base level of technology understanding.
Second, the financial professionals who were worried that they would be automated away instead found themselves using more of their time for higher-skilled, more value-add work. With less time on the basics of bookkeeping, they were able to spend more time thinking strategically about things like how to save their clients money or increase revenue.
This reflects a common pattern of enterprise technology adaptation: Employees get used to using new technologies such as mobile and social in their “consumer” lives, and wonder why they don’t have similar tools to increase efficiency and reduce mundane processes in their work lives. They go out and find technology that seems to match, start experimenting (often on their own dime), and bring in their closest teams to use it. Eventually, these adaptive technologies get kicked up the chain and become a common part of the company’s functioning as a whole.
This pattern has directly influenced the pricing of B2B technologies like communications tools Yammer and Slack, who sell individual seats bottom-up and directly to employees rather than spending all their time trying to get top-down, org-wide deals through IT. This has even led to a new term making waves in Silicon Valley: B2C2B. The acronym reflects the idea that today’s B2B platforms aren’t selling to a business as a whole, but individual employees (or Consumers) within those companies who can decide for themselves how a new technology makes their lives easier.
This is a powerful new paradigm, allowing new technologies to diffuse through the enterprise on the basis of the impact they make, rather than how good their sales pitch to senior executives is.
As companies in every industry fight to attract and retain the best employees, we anticipate that software automation will be increasingly seen not as a challenge but as a boon to human capital. It will be a force that enables teams to spend more Time-On-Talent - doing the high-skill, intellectually intensive work they’re uniquely qualified through insight & experience to do.
