There was a time back in 2016/2017 when the whole world seemed abuzz with news that robots were about to take over the world, an outcome that would leave many of us humans out of work with little or no hope for re-employment with our current skillsets. There was a veritable saturation of articles on the new, digital world of work, with many a research organization performing expansive studies about the kinds of jobs that were going to be most at risk. The call at the time was for organizations to be better prepared for digital transformation and to identify opportunities for revenue diversification by means of digital revenue streams.
It has all gone a bit quiet on this front since then, which does not mean to say that the way we do things will not change dramatically in the future. No, this situation simply reinforces the fact that such dramatic change more often than not comes by more gradual evolution, that is, unless you happen to be in the presence of a pandemic, in which case things can change very quickly.
An outcome of the pandemic is that many organizations that did not heed the above call and that were still all analog or that were only marginally digital or virtual are now out of business, some shuttering their doors for the last time. With hindsight being 20-20 and all that, this might be easy to say, but the reality for the employees of many such organizations remains as harsh as those writing those new world-of-work reports might have suggested.
From an organizational perspective, the solution has never been as “simple” as performing digital transformation because the implied assumption is that the digital technology is flawlessly able to carry out the roles formerly occupied by humans and beyond. Indeed, few if any of the reports mentioned that humanity was still very much alive in all those emerging, job-stealing technologies like robots, artificial intelligence and drones, that they were all potentially infected with a fatal flaw, much like how H.G. Wells’ Martians succumbed to bacteria in The War of the Worlds. The flaw? Human error.
Human error is today unfortunately seldom raised as the digital transformation risk it is, being present in everything from robots, artificial intelligence and 3D printing, to drones and beyond. My recent Journal article, “Human Error: A Vastly Underestimated Risk in Digital Transformation Technology” aims to explicitly raise the issue of human error in digital transformation technologies.
Editor’s note: For further insights on this topic, read Guy Pearce’s recent Journal article, “Human Error: A Vastly Underestimated Risk in Digital Transformation Technology,” ISACA Journal, volume 3, 2020.