Thinking Tomorrow, Today. The Smart Organization Way…!!

Saying that technology is about machines is untrue and incomplete. Actually, It’s all about humans. Technology helps us realize our true potential, connect better with ourselves and with others too, both at an individual as well as at a group level. Extension of ourselves, it enables us to perform what we can do best and more efficiently. This is what Steve Jobs also believed in – Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them”.

The big question has always been that why a human should be left to do the drudgery and mundane work when a machine can perform that efficiently. It is not a good sight to see human beings being engaged in jobs that not only involve risking their lives but also compromising their dignity. Because that is so obvious and palpable, we feel disgusted about it. Appalled, we prayed if we had machines and rather humans doing such jobs.

Technology has come a long way through helping improve the quality of life of people and being their hands and legs.  It is enabling people to do jobs effectively and efficiently allowing people to do what they can do best. That’s the true demonstration of the natural human progression (or evolution) that constantly force us to stretch our thinking, questioning ourselves and our intellectual prowess.

For a long we have been witnessing human beings engaged in the same repetitive mundane jobs in various industrial sectors. Being one milestone, computerization testifies that we strive to make our life easy and wish to focus on quality work only. With computers, our productivity shot northwards as we have been true to our capabilities. From the productivity as well as human wellbeing perspective, slowly and gradually humans were replaced with equally or more efficient machines across sectors. This was the phase of the 3^rd industrial revolution. Mechanical robots had already made their way on the assembly lines of the large and small manufacturing industries.

Discernibility demanded that the same disgust be invoked when we witness humans engaged, though non-life-risking, but in non-value-adding and time-taking jobs across sectors. The human potential is vast and it is imperative for organizations to train, harness and deploy them suitably to improve their morale and motivation resulting in improving their productivity. For human beings, the happy and the most productive state is when they are deployed to do what they are best at. Unquestionably, that is the best state for the organization to be in as well.

Another leap in the direction reinforces the argument that if a robot can mechanically be the hands and legs of humans; why can’t they be the brain too, to whatever extent possible. Agreed, that emotional and complex decisions seem distant possibility for a robot today; the other manual, time-consuming, rules-based tasks are not only easy but be more efficiently done by a robot. And here kicks in the Robotics Process Automation (RPA) which they say will take the robot out of a human.

Organizations, big or small, having multiple operations and complex processes should leverage RPA as this is the tool that can improve operational efficiency that translates into increased productivity. Higher levels of accuracy, speed, 24×7 availability and scalability are some key immediate benefits that organizations adopting RPA can reap. No longer a realm of large organizations only, SMEs can leverage RPA now to their advantage as it is extremely affordable and easy to deploy as suggested in the white paper published by the PwC in 2016 – Given the inevitable disruption caused by RPA, business leaders should focus on a few key implementation principles: automate as much as possible, focus on front end processes, maximize productivity, and aim for 100% auditability.