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Become digitally disruptive: The challenge to unlearn

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INTRODUCTION “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”

This life lesson from Winston Churchill has been vindicated time and again in business. Organizations that don’t take the time to rethink or unlearn old habits may soon find themselves out of business.

Avoid being left behindAn MIT study found that the rate at which companies drop off the S&P 500 rankings has accelerated in recent years. In 1958, a company could expect to stay on the list for an average of 61 years. These days, the tenure is just 18 years.1 Why is that? It’s widely accepted that technology is among the most potent accelerators of the rate of change. All businesses are, to a greater or lesser degree of effectiveness, digital businesses. Digitization is the irresistible force driving (and enabling) businesses to rethink their response to markets and reshape their operations. Failing which, Gartner predicts, 20% of market leaders will by 2017 be overtaken by a disruptive digital business that was created after the year 2000. 2

There’s simply no upside to remaining fixated on ideas that once worked, but no longer do.

Change starts at the edgeChange is never easy to put into practice, but we believe the technology trends outlined in this vision make it a necessity. The impact will be fundamental, requiring businesses to rethink their business models, employee and customer relationships, risk decisions and partnerships. We also believe change is most beneficial when driven from the edge of the organization, by our customers and the employees who work with them.3 At Avanade, we call it customer-centric innovation.

1 “Technology Is Wiping Out Companies Faster than Ever,”MIT Technology Review,” September 10, 20132 https://www.gartner.com/doc/2636049/predicts--seizing-digital-business, quoted by research firm Blanc & Otus on

http://blog.blancandotus.com/2014/04/10/xtc-examining-the-change-changing-the-relationship-with-risk/3 The Institute for Innovation in Large Organizations, “Sensor-Based Monitoring in the Workplace – Opportunities and Challenges,” October 2014

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Are your current habits prohibiting future growth?

Make a resolution now to challenge yourself and your organization to become a truly digital business.

Four trends shaping the changeWe challenge you to think about investing more in digital enablement for your employees, to work and operate in ways that deliver on your customer experience promise. The digital business requires a digital workplace to serve the digital customer.

Get ready to unlearn some time-honored principles that simply don’t work anymore. The following four trends will shape and accelerate the digital workplace and customer interactions:

1. Borderless platforms: Today a new class of business ecosystems based on technology platforms is reaching out beyond organizations’ borders, nudging businesses from me-centric engagement models to we-centric collaborative models and challenging traditional notions of control and power.

2. Data currency: Savvy organizations no longer only want meaning from data; they are extracting value and manufacturing new revenues from it. These “digital disrupters” are giving their customers what they really want— more meaningful outcomes, not more products or services.

3. Shift to individual centricity: It is no longer enough to be customer centric. Delivering tailored digital experiences requires catering to the behaviors, wants, needs and intentions of individuals (employees and customers).

4. New workplace: Battle for brains: As companies make their way in the new digital reality, demand for digital skills is outpacing supply. Rethink and regroup: The next generation of talent is not necessarily only human; it is a dream team of humans, data, algorithms and intelligent software.

Some of this may sound like science fiction, but it is taking shape all around us. Being digitally disruptive is about taking the next step of growth and avoiding the path of good to great to gone. Challenge us to show you how.

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BORDERLESS PLATFORMS:Going beyond the wall to liberate organizational potential

As humans, a common instinct when building something is to build something else around it. Is it made out of bricks? Great! We’ll surround it with more bricks and stack them as high as we need to, for protection. Dismantling walls to extend reachWe also tend to carry this impulse over into the companies and systems we build. Interoperability is fine, as long as nothing can threaten our security or control.Meanwhile, around us a hyper-connected economy is taking shape, limiting the growth potential of the old ways of doing business. The only way to play a meaningful role in this world is to join in by leveraging a new class of technology platform that extend the reach of the organization and its ecosystems beyond self-made “borders.”

Microsoft points the wayMicrosoft is a great example of a company reaching beyond its own limitations and comfort zones to leverage the good in the wider world. A few big shifts in the last year alone include:

• a cloud partnership with IBM; • connectors in Office365 for rival CRM vendor Salesforce.com; • giving Windows 10 away for free; • opening the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to Linux; • open-sourcing the .NET programming environment

It is a reinvention to rival any before it. The company has moved from running a closed ecosystem to embracing competitors and interoperability, an evolution as exciting for this shape-shifting giant as it is for the rest of us.1

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1 “A milestone moment for Microsoft: .NET is now an open-source project,” GigaOm, Nov. 12, 2014

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Platforms that enable and enforce opennessAs with Microsoft, the rest of us must open up and tap into new commerce opportunities that are only possible with digital. A dogged focus on our own industry, knowledge and resources is no longer enough. With the rise of mobility and cloud, most organizations’ platforms today struggle to: meet new levels of demand; respond quickly: and be accessible to a multitude of devices.

Rethinking closed platforms offer companies a way to go beyond their own industries, to learn, share, become inspired, innovate more quickly and break through the growth ceiling.

Case in point: Amsterdam’s shared platform improves urban lifeIn the Netherlands, the city of Amsterdam teamed with energy network company Alliander, telecom operator KPN and city-affiliated agency Amsterdam Innovation Motor (AIM) to create a cross-industry public-private business ecosystem. The partners built a shared platform for projects to improve urban life while reducing environmental impact.2

Amsterdam, a participant in the CityService Development Kit (CitySDK),3 actively pursues the open API economy through the adoption of open-standards software platforms—essentially striving to create “programmable municipalities.” Building borderless platform ecosystems in this case demonstrated the benefit of bringing together mutually supportive organizations across industries to create differentiated offerings and create value that they cannot provide alone.

The power of weBorderless platform-based businesses are different from others in that they allow outsiders to create value for the enterprise. It’s a shift from a me-centric business to a we-centric collaborative model that challenges traditional notions of control and security. In a recent TED Talk, online activist Jeremy Heimans summed it up: “Old power works like a currency and is held by a few who guard it closely, keeping lots in reserve to spend. New power is more like a current. It’s made by many, is open, peer driven and is most forceful when it surges.”4

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2 “Cross-industry ecosystems: Growth outside the box,” Outlook, Accenture, February 20133 “Inside Amsterdam’s efforts to become a smart city,” The Kernel, Jan. 4, 20144 “What new power looks like,” TED Talks, June 2014

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Heimans also explained as follows in the Harvard Business Review: “The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.”5

Look to the cloudHybrid clouds will be the building blocks powering borderless enterprises. They will allow for the control and protection of key data and enable the organization to publish and consume data at scale, while more easily integrating with other organizations. It truly is the best of both worlds: giving organizations access to publicly available building blocks in the platform with the ability to choose where—on public or private clouds—workloads need to run at scale.

To help accelerate the adoption and ROI of hybrid clouds we’ll need the know-how of a new generation of workload architects. Avanade, along with Accenture and Microsoft, recently announced the Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure, to help facilitate and manage hybrid cloud workloads. It delivers new technologies to migrate and manage applications between private and public clouds in a controlled, seamless and automated way from a single console.6

Transform to ward off disruptionThere’s a stick to go with this carrot too. According to IDC, industry-specific platforms will disrupt a third of the top 20 market leaders in most industries by 2018.7

The time is now for organizations to start thinking about and investing in their platform transformation. There is a limited timeframe to lock in preferred partners and build sustainable ecosystems that become the foundation of the future.

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5 “Understanding ‘New Power,’” Harvard Business Review, December 20146 “Accenture and Microsoft launch new hybrid cloud platform to accelerate enterprise-wide adoption,” Microsoft press release, Dec. 8, 20147 “IDC Directions 2014: Profiting from Platforms and Predicting Materialization,” quoted in Mobiquity

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DATA CURRENCY: Digital disruptors deliver meaningful outcomes

In 1849, over 300 000 people came to California from all over the world in the hope of finding gold. One hundred and sixty-six years later it feels like a gold rush all over again, only this time we’re after data. Borderless cloud platforms pump the stuff out, along with tens of billions of devices and sensors feeding the Internet of Things (IoT) with information. Ongoing advances in processing, storage capacity and affordability fuel the rush for data, and enterprise vaults are stacked to the ceilings.

Doing something with all that data?Rather than blindly hoarding data and go to the trouble of ingesting, correlating and transforming it to suit their systems, companies need to take the next step and start basing decisions on it. But the reality is that most enterprises today struggle to fully exploit the data they capture.

These decisions must be guided by the outcomes customers demand from the products and services that companies offer. And they need to be aided by self-learning intelligent software platforms that can reveal hidden opportunities in feedback data. To achieve this, organizations must invest in data that can inform new outcome-based business models. And they must use borderless cloud platforms to extend their enterprise ecosystems wide enough to gather the insights that drive decisions.

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Successful companies are making an early transition from a data economy to one prizing outcomes. Microsoft made its fortune selling software licenses, but is now investing heavily in cloud infrastructure and embracing a service revenue model. At the same time, the company is experimenting with outcome-based models (tying revenue to efficiencies delivered by an enterprise application1). It is even giving Windows 10 away for free. For Microsoft, data—or its usage—is fast becoming the new “currency.” And this currency is accepted across industries, by all customer segments and in many workplaces.

Data from the edge drives better decisionsHow do we get from capturing data to seeing outcomes?

By deploying or engaging existing sensors at the point of interaction with the world (the edge of the enterprise), companies can capture data and learn how customers and employees use their products and services.

By way of example, retail stores are installing motion sensors in mannequins to better understand shopping behaviors.2 And Avanade worked with supermarket chains to implement Kinect sensors in store aisles also to understand customer behaviors, thereby enabling outcome-based decisions such as changing product placement. But that’s not all. Product placement data is gold to consumer packaged goods companies. By selling it to them, retailers are creating further disruption in the market—creating new revenues as well as perfecting product placement.

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1 “Digital Ubiquity: How Connections, Sensors, and Data Are Revolutionizing Business,” Harvard Business Review, November 20142 “Somebody’s watching me: Camera sensors to be placed in retail mannequins,” RT.com, Dec. 14, 2013,” RT, December 14, 2013.

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Power generation automation enables efficienciesAnother Avanade client, a manufacturer of power generation equipment, is transforming its business model by embedding sensor-enabled automation into its generators. The sensors are online and publish data at regular intervals to Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud platform. Intelligence in the platform allows equipment to switch on and off based on data about grid load and power output, coupled with external weather data. The manufacturer’s services department further uses the real-time information to proactively schedule maintenance, rather than risk finding out something isn’t working when it is needed the most. Finding new and improved revenue opportunitiesThe new monetization opportunities can be revolutionary or an improvement on existing ones, for example enabling a better ROI through a higher sales increase, based on optimized costs. A government agency that Avanade works with is looking into developing a smart parking solution that collects parking lot usage patterns of its monthly pass holders to predict and sell likely vacant spots at predetermined times to other parkers. This will create new revenue through better space utilization without impacting existing revenues and may actually build brand loyalty. The data is collected through sensors, geo-presence and license plate recognition, and overlaid with the city map.

In the future, pairing such deep-learning software with rapidly evolving natural speech services like Cortana and Siri will enable customers to “order” their choice of available parking spots and pay for it in the same way we order take-out at a drive-through.

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Workplace sensors identify productivity improvementsA lot of the attention around IoT has been on wearables and sensors in the consumer space. However, sensor technologies are finding their way into the workplace too. Some companies, like Bank of America, are experimenting with sensors to understand the collaboration needs of their workforces, evaluating which spaces lead to more productive discussions and amplify the natural ways their people connect across teams and business functions.3

To address concerns about data being collected in this way, organizations need to be open about what data is being collected and how it will be used and shared. In addition, people must have control over their data. Companies should also factor in the privacy, ethical and—where applicable—legal ramifications.

It’s about more than just collecting more dataThe success of using data to drive outcomes will depend on how quickly companies can put the feedback loop from the edges of the enterprise to work. The journey from capturing data to delivering outcomes is complex and requires a variety of tools, methods and skill sets. Enterprises that take this journey will be rewarded with new revenue streams and better customer value.

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3 “Tracking sensors invade the workplace,” The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2013.

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SHIFT TO INDIVIDUAL CENTRICITY: Equip your employees to deliver the right experiences

The secret of enduring success for any business, no matter the industry, is its relationships.

Consider banking. Forty years ago the primary interaction with your bank was local—near your work and your home. You knew your banker and, at best, they truly did care about you. Fast forward, and the notion of knowing your customer or banker has changed significantly—technology has seen to that. What was once a very human-centric business no longer feels that way.

A return to customer centricityBanks and other companies across many industries are once more trying to become customer-centric. Putting customers at the center of their experience with your organization and being consistently on-brand and accessible across touch points provides a distinctive brand differentiation.

It’s not easy to do, but success is rooted in a company’s culture and the tools employees have to deliver the right experiences within the right context and at the right time.

For example, a bank in Europe is investigating ways of handling all inbound communications more effectively, so no consumer touch point with the bank seems out of alignment with other channels.

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In short, the bank is shifting from being channel-centric to customer-centric, and providing employees with the tools necessary to deliver seamless experiences.

But it’s not enoughAs many enterprises have started their digital journey, customer centricity is key, but on its own it will not go far enough. Digital business requires going one step further to focus on the individual at every interaction. Understanding the customer is good, but knowing the individual is better as it enables businesses to build and maintain the loyalty and relationship they need to be successful.

Nespresso gets it right with a new platform that streamlines its technology and processes across the 41 countries where it operates. This helps the company to create a single, interactive platform across channels for a more personalized and enhanced customer experience, focusing on their touch points.1 Like the bank in our previous example, Nespresso provides workers with the right tools needed to deliver individual experiences. This may start in the store or on the phone, but will eventually extend to all touch points and be tailored to the worker (baristas require a different toolset from a call center representative).

In essence, as the company moves to being individual-centric, it enables workers to know customers’ favorite flavors, proactively selling them new pods, or even machine maintenance.

Know how the individual worksWhat this means for workplace applications is a growing imperative to learn how the individual employee works.

1 “Multichannel eCommerce Solution for Profitable Customer Relationships,” Accenture, 2013

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Microsoft, for example, is moving in this direction with productivity tools that “anticipate and prioritize what matters most” to the individual. With the release of Windows 10, they are moving closer to the goal of universal apps that deliver consistent experiences across multiple devices and form factors.2

This requires putting the individual at the center of everything. From this viewpoint, productivity becomes an experience that is unique to an individual and is consistent across the numerous devices that person uses over the course of the day. Productive work is happinessWe’ve lost sight of the true meaning of being productive and the happiness it brings to the committed, well-equipped worker. Productivity is not just about earning customer loyalty; it’s also about the relationships you have with your employees, about giving them the tools they need to do their jobs in the digital age.

Consider intelligent digital assistants like Microsoft Cortana and Microsoft Graph, and how your workers will use them. While today, people are used to digital assistants within their phones, companies are moving to integrate those experiences across other mediums. What about software intelligence? It can give your workers the ability to quickly sift through the mounds of data they will increasingly find on their desktops, streamed in from devices all over the internet.

2 “The next chapter of Office on Windows,” Microsoft Office Blog, February 4, 2015

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Intelligent airline reduces flight cancellationsDelta Airlines is a great example of a company using software intelligence and the Internet of Things with the individual in mind. Delta found in a survey that its customers were most irked by flight interruptions, so it set out to avoid cancelling flights. In doing so it went from the worst airline in the industry for flight cancellations to the best in three years—canceling just 0.3% of its flights in 2013.3

Using machine data from multiple avenues, including vibration monitors on cooling fans to determine when they are broken, Delta focused on plane maintenance. It built analytical software and instruments to help monitor the health of airplanes and predict which parts will soon fail. In addition, with better intelligence about airplane and workforce capacity, Delta can now plan interventions such as proactively sending empty planes or refreshed crews rather than delaying flights for repairs. The airline is truly at the beginning of a transition to provide better experiences for workers and customers.

The individual: Front and centerTo keep the individual front and center, companies need to invest in digital workplace initiatives like those implemented by Nespresso and Delta. It’s clear that opportunities exist to deliver unique experiences with the potential to enable new business models.

In today’s fast-paced, rapidly changing digital world, all customer and employee experiences are up for grabs. Start thinking about shifting from the customer to the individual and recognize that to become individual-centric, your workers need to be digitally enabled.

3 “A World Where Flights Aren’t Canceled,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2014

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THE NEED FOR DATA TRANSPARENCYThe personalized customer and employee experiences delivered so expertly by digital businesses require companies to collect and analyze petabytes of personal data on their users—including habits, preferences and even geolocation. This creates a heavy burden of expectation on the enterprise to safeguard consumer and employee data and otherwise behave ethically in collecting, using and sharing it. If this trust is violated, consumers will quickly seek alternatives and employees will lose faith in the business they work for. Privacy, security and transparencyThe consequences of a breach of confidence may not always be as expected or easily quantifiable. It may not even be immediately obvious, but in the final analysis there is almost always fallout. Recent data breaches at large enterprises have involved high-profile leaks of personal details. It is not only customer data that gets impacted by these breaches. Employee information is also at risk.

Enter the ethicistData collection and sharing is core to a digital business, infinitely more so than in traditional businesses. So enterprises need to think beyond traditional corporate roles to deal with the implications of its misuse, which range from privacy and security infringements to a lack of transparency.

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It is in this context that we see an emerging role for digital ethicists, whose purpose is to focus on these areas and to advise executives on ethical considerations. The crux of these considerations is not to deny the user control over what data is collected and how it is used.1

“As smart machines start to interact with people and represent people’s actions, [enterprises] need to make sure those actions are ethically acceptable to us,” says Frank Buytendijk, research vice president at Gartner.2

The need for the human element continuesBut data-related mishaps can also play out in other ways.

Consider Uber, which has a market-based pricing model. Where there is high demand for the service, a pricing algorithm initiates a price surge. The need for human oversight arose when the surge was unwittingly used during the December 2014 hostage event in Sydney, as people were trying to get out of harm’s way using Uber’s service. Because the software made unsupervised pricing decisions, Uber lifted the pricing surge.

Thus the need for the human element continues in today’s digital world, a topic discussed in more detail in our chapter on “The new workplace: Battle for brains.”

1 “Digital Ethics or How to Not Mess Up With Technology,” Gartner, Sept. 23, 20142 “CIOs Need to Embrace Digital Ethics,” IT News Africa, Aug. 25, 2014

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Manage the digital riskThis digital risk cannot be mitigated; it needs to be accepted and, more importantly, actively managed. This may involve forming a cross-functional business council with a focus on ensuring the enterprise is and remains transparent nature. This competency and capability will come naturally to individual-centric enterprises. It’s simply a question of asking the right questions, assessing the situation and making sure ethical lines are not crossed. Walt Disney theme parks provide a good example with their MyMagic+ armband and finger-printing of visitors. While collection of data is important to improve experiences, companies must take care to disclose what they are collecting and how they are doing it, and inform consumers.

Whose problem is it?Many consumers use products and services willingly and may even have agreed to the terms and conditions, but they may not be aware of the unintended consequences. And yet the full onus should not fall on them–ethics places the obligation on the enterprise and the workforce. Gartner suggests companies need to foster a culture in which ethical debate is considered normal, necessary and constructive. A senior executive leader needs to assume responsibility (beyond a data czar), and the influence and daily effects must be felt at every level of the organization.

Maintaining trust and transparency is now a foundational component of being a digital business.

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THE NEW WORKPLACE:Battle for Brains

A recent University of Oxford study1 concluded that over the next 10 to 20 years almost 50% of jobs in the U.S. will be taken by computers.

With that being the case, you may well ask what jobs we humans will be doing. We can’t answer that, other than to say chances are they haven’t been “invented” yet.2

Digital times, digital measuresAs the pace of new technologies in the market picks up, so does their adoption and proliferation across industries. Most companies today will acknowledge that they are digital businesses operating in a digital economy. The savvy know they must provide higher-value services, with software and data at the core of their differentiation.

IT, in turn, knows it cannot make this happen without new skills. Beyond the need for data scientists, software engineers and experience designers, there is a need for whole new functions, such as data anthropologists.

Most disruptively, a new class of “digital talent” will form the foundation of the digital economy and will be a key asset for enterprises looking to stand out. That’s right—the next generation of workplace “brains” to compete in the job market will likely be a combination of data and algorithms (i.e., intelligent software), otherwise known as a robotic workforce.

1 “The Future Of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs To Computerisation?” Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Sept. 17, 20132 “In 10 years, your job might not exist,” The Washington Post, Jan. 5, 2015

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Blend and compete In this context, competition to recruit and retain talent will be greater than ever. However, no spaces will be reserved for underperformers, and smart companies will do everything in their power to make the transition to a digital future in the hope of raising productivity. In the process, humans will be crowded out of many traditional jobs. However, companies can remedy this and raise their own value by finding the right blend of human and “digital” talent (robotic and machine intelligence).

The digital economy is in effect a sharing economy—where physical and virtual worlds blend, and humans and machines alternately compete and cooperate, augmenting each other’s capabilities and sharing workspaces and job functions.

One of the first steps to making it happen will be the implementation of a digital workplace—an essential enabler of the tools to help make the shift to a smarter data-driven enterprise that frees up critical “bandwidth” (human talent) to do higher-order tasks. Of course, these tools need to be based on borderless platforms and open ecosystems that can expand an organization’s potential.

Skills like experience designers, analytics, machine learning, data scientists and natural language processing will be key to plug the talent shortage created by the digital workplace. At the same time, these skills will complement intelligent machines and assure the continued relevance of humans at work.

In the near future, it won’t be surprising to see companies reinvent their HR departments as HMR departments—human/machine resources.

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Managing complexity and riskThis scenario is not without significant risks. Companies need to start thinking about additional complications like security and ethical elements.

In addition, with the increasing avalanche of data from new and existing machine-originated streams, employees need to learn which of these can be ignored and which need to be captured, analyzed, shared and prioritized. This is almost impossible without the aid of more software and smart algorithms. Companies will further need to implement an apprentice model, with employees teaching and guiding the software intelligence. The leaders focus on outcome-based businessAs more automation from smarter machines enters the workplace, companies will require employees to augment their own roles via automation. This will enable the shift to a more outcome-based business and economy, greater individual centricity, new monetization models and a better return fueled by data.

Rio Tinto, one of the leading mining companies in the world, has been implementing a mine of the future3 and completely redesigning the mining process as it transforms into a digital business. The company implemented autonomous monster trucks, drilling systems and rail systems that have traveled several hundred thousands of miles and hauled more than 100 million tons of material. Each of the smart machines generates a tremendous amount of sensor, network, GPS, radar and application data, which needs to be analyzed, visualized, correlated and presented to operators thousands of miles away.

3 “Rio Tinto Rolls Out Ambitious, Autonomous, Mine of the Future,” Oct. 9, 2013

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To achieve this digital transformation, the skills requirement was vast and went beyond the traditional mining, mechanical engineering and geological skills. It is also a significant transition for the operators and workers overseeing the machines and making decisions as before, but supplemented by real-time data.

Rio Tinto is an extreme example for a particular industry. A less extensive skills reboot within an industry not traditionally thought of as “industrial” can be found in Tierra Antigua Realty, a U.S.-based real estate business. The company is one of the first of its kind to get regulatory approval to fly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for commercial purposes. It will use the drones to take high-resolution photographs and videos of higher-end properties as part of its sales collateral, and will have to take new skills on-board to program, manage and control these smart machines.4

Democratize the learning curveThe shift to an enterprise digital workplace can be costly and resource-intensive. However, developments under way can help address these challenges. For example, Microsoft is releasing Azure Machine Learning (ML), a learning system for the masses that provides predictive and artificial intelligence elements via the cloud and is programmable.

All businesses must prepare a digital workplace in which to produce the high-value outcomes and monetization models both enforced and enabled by the speed-up of the digital future. In doing so they must find the right blend of human and digital talent, and prepare for and manage the transition.

4 “How one real estate agent plans to use his drone to help sell homes,” The Washington Post, Jan. 6, 2015

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THE ROBOTIC WORKFORCE: YOUR STAFF WITH SUPER POWERS

The automatic flour mill developed by Oliver Evans in 1785 embodied one of the first completely automated industrial processes. Since then we have seen machines replacing the human workforce at an increasing pace. Computer-aided design and manufacturing, along with 3D printing, are now standard in any type of mass automation. And with processing power continuing to rise while prices drop, we are at a tipping point: Smart machines and software are not just being used by humans anymore; machines are talking directly to machines and improving themselves in the process. For an organization to be successful in the rapidly digitizing economy, it must embed machine learning into business processes.

Possibilities beyond machinesWhat does this look like? It is important to understand that a robotic workforce goes beyond physical machines (i.e., robots), and constitutes a wider view that includes advanced machine and human interactions. The most consumer-friendly of these are intelligent personal assistants like Microsoft Cortana and Apple’s Siri. But these types of interactions also include new machine intelligence like Microsoft’s Project Adam, whose goal is to enable software to visually recognize any object. Most humans can recognize a dog; enthusiasts can recognize a good number of breeds. But imagine the possibilities if you could point your mobile phone at a dog and interact with far greater data sets than that of the casual dog lover.1

1 “Microsoft Research shows off advances in artificial intelligence with Project Adam,” Next at Microsoft, July 14, 2014

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Microsoft is quickly bringing more of its research ideas to market, as is clear from the announcement of HoloLens—a headset that lets its wearers augment their world with apps, games and other information, blending physical and digital experiences through augmented context.2

The possibilities are virtually limitless. With more data and this type of physical and virtual interaction, energy workers at a plant could upload pictures of broken machines and receive automated instructions and parts needed for their repair. Or, if we push the boundaries further, cameras watching a production line could identify damaged or missing items before they get packaged for shipping.

Rise of the blended workforceIt is also important to understand that we are far from “general purpose” artificial intelligence-capable machines; the intelligence will be confined to a particular, narrow scope. Enterprises need to think of it as a necessary part of a sharing economy, distributing workloads among a blend of people, machines and algorithms. It can get under way today, using tools like natural language search. Some companies are even experimenting with haptic technology–tools that vibrate, buzz and communicate through your skin. General Motors is looking at introducing specific seat vibrations for an impending collision.3 Microsoft recently announced a smart scarf that also sends information in a more tactile way.4

2 “Watch Microsoft’s HoloLens in action,” The Verge, Jan. 21, 20153 “Soon Your Tech Will Talk to You Through Your Skin,” Wired, Dec. 22, 20144 Microsoft Researchers Get Wrapped Up in Smart Scarf, MIT Technology Review, Jan. 21, 2015

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Enterprises can tap the power of intelligent machines to improve efficiencies, productivity or even safety--consider new types of safety alerts for workers on a factory floor. It is about bringing together structured and unstructured data in a seamless way, in a cohesive, blended organization. This workforce will become empowered to do more with less, in essence giving them super powers to drive productivity and insights. Humans don’t go away; they blend inWith software being the new nerve center for the enterprise, people are freed up to concentrate on critical business issues and innovation, or to decide on which course of action artificial intelligence should take in certain instances, or indeed to override machine functions. For example, Google’s engineers tweaked the algorithms of the self-driving car for it to be more assertive in certain driving situations (e.g., leaving less space between itself and the car in front of it on a highway than is recommended in urban or residential streets). Humans need to be in control to decide which approach or course of action to take in individual instances, overriding the machine if so desired. Humans are and always will be necessary to make a blended workforce work. It is time to start thinking about how to enable the blended workforce in your organization.

About Avanade Avanade helps customers realize results in a digital world through business technology solutions, cloud and managed services that combine insight, innovation and expertise focused on Microsoft technologies. Our people have helped thousands of organizations in all industries improve business agility, employee productivity and customer loyalty. Avanade combines the collective business, technical and industry expertise of its worldwide network of experts with the rigor of an industrialized delivery model to provide high-quality solutions using proven and emerging technologies with flexible deployment models — on premises, cloud-based or outsourced. Avanade, which is majority owned by Accenture, was founded in 2000 by Accenture LLP and Microsoft Corporation and has 23,000 professionals in more than 20 countries. Additional information can be found at www.avanade.com.

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