Westpac tech chief warns of automation career carnage without structural change – The Australian Financial Review

Westpac CIO Dave Curran says workers face career carnage from tech disruption unless they are enabled to re-skill on the job.

Westpac's most senior technology executive has warned workers aged over 35 risk being left in the blocks by the wave of automation and new technologies, unless management philosophy in large organisations adjusts to adapt to the changing world.

The bank's chief information officer, Dave Curran, will outline his thoughts on the tech-led changes to Australia's workforce and corporate structure in an address to a Trans-Tasman Business Circle lunch in Sydney on Tuesday, and he will warn that it is not feasible to continue on with the same business structures in place.

In a copy of his speech, seen by The Australian Financial Review, Mr Curran says most businesses are working under very outdated leadership models, which leave workers unable to learn and change their expertise in a way that will be useful once technology has overrun their existing roles.

"One of the great conundrums of today is that we've got 21st-century technology smashing into 20th-century business process and, to make it worse, those processes are still working under 19th-century governance," Mr Curran says.

"We're living in a digital revolution. How we work is changing. It's being driven by social, mobile, analytic and cloud-based technology. We've been talking about robotics and AI for quite some time, and they have arrived."

Mr Curran likens the inaction of many organisations to the changes happening around them to an old analogy about boiling frogs. The wisdom goes that a frog dropped in boiling water will immediately leap back out to safety, but a frog sat in water that is slowly heated to boiling point will eventually boil to death.

He said the vast majority of organisations were still requiring staff to work from nine to five, from Monday to Friday, even if their customers had long since migrated to a predominantly digital service model, where they wanted to interact with the business at any hour of any day.

He warned that workers, particularly aged over 35, would find themselves bereft by the impending changes. He said millennials were more adaptable to tech-led change, but the "VCR-era" workers, which is the majority of Australians, were largely unprepared.

"For the current workforce, we learned from the previous generation and expected our skills to last our career. Enter the digital revolution, and that expectation no longer holds and we are now in a difficult position," Mr Curran said.

"Our skills aren't going to last especially when you also consider we will live and work longer than we expected."

Mr Curran said many digital transformation and technology change programs struggled because the executives leading them often in their 50s felt personally threatened by the changes that would happen if they succeeded.

Westpac was seeking to address the impending skills carnage by changing its work processes to become agile and its performance management structure to reward achievements that didn't come from simply following hierarchical orders.

It has also established inhouse training systems to upgrade their skills particularly technology on the job.

"The worst days of my working career are the days that people are made redundant while at the same time we're hiring. We need to get to a point where our people are taking charge and wanting to upskill," Mr Curran says.

"Right now much of the workforce is hanging on by its fingernails ... we're falling asleep at the wheel.

"One of two things will happen. We will either create new jobs and keep everyone employed, or the shift will be so profound we will have to rethink our fundamental work practices and things like four-day weeks become a possibility."