Humans and Technology are Both Increasingly Important
IT executives in Financial Services face an impossible challenge. They know the money isn't there to replace legacy technology, but they still need to innovate and remain competitive. They also know they have a regulatory responsibility to test recovery and resilience - even for legacy technology. This makes it difficult to move fast, so they prioritize and focus hard on agile development to quickly deliver value.
Just over half of IT spend is focused on development, but less than a third of all change events are fully automated. That means over two-thirds of all change events occur with direct human involvement. Today’s cutting edge will be tomorrow's legacy. Whilst old monoliths will be replaced with more modular solutions there will always be a mix, and people will continue to be vital to the success of enterprise change.
Job Transformation, Not Eradication
When it comes to Financial Services, Computer Weekly predicts that a big trend will be the transformation of existing jobs, rather than the eradication of those jobs altogether. There have been many developments in the past that threatened to eradicate human jobs altogether, only for those jobs to change due to the influence of technology.
According to research by Goldsmiths and Automation Anywhere, the adoption of automation in the right way can really help to make work better for people. For example, they found that “augmented organizations were 37% more likely to prioritize a culture of continuous learning and improvement, 41% more likely to encourage and foster professional development, and 31% more likely to prioritize high ethical standards.” This shows that humans and technology don’t have to be at odds, and the technical augmentation of human workers can benefit them in a multitude of ways.
Data is the Answer
Data is key to this transformation. Having access to the right data at the right time allows people to do more, because they are not bogged down in manual tasks. The technology that drives the production of that data is even more important - the faster you can provide data to people, the better decisions they can make. The reason we have analysts, the reason, in fact, we have CIOs is that somebody needs to make a decision with all that data.
B2C apps are already good at removing all the noise and connecting people with each other or with the data they need quickly. Airbnb and Uber, for example, don’t cut people out but instead connect them directly to what they need. Enterprises should take a similar view both internally and externally when it comes to automation.
People are the Future
So, counter-intuitively to what some CIOs may claim, greater automation does not mean fewer human beings. It means more. Yes, automation will impact jobs - of course it will. But when the functional and transactional are automated then the only thing left is people.
At Cutover, we believe passionately that the more automated our world becomes, the more we realize that what remains is people. And if those people have access to the right data, there’s no problem they can’t solve.
Want to learn more about how people will remain essential in an increasingly automated world? Read the recap of our event “Humans vs Machines” that we held on October 11th at Rise London.
Cutover is a work orchestration and observability platform that enables you to orchestrate humans and technology at pace.