Category Archives: Automation

Almost three quarters (74%) of people surveyed by PwC are ready to learn a new skill or completely retrain to keep themselves employable, seeing it as their personal responsibility and not employers, to keep their skills updated.

The findings are from PwCs latest report,Workforce of The Future: The Competing Forces Shaping 2030, which includes finding from a survey of 10,000 people across the UK, Germany, China, India and the US. Their views reinforce a shift to continuous learning while earning, so employees can keep up with technologys impact on jobs and the workplace.

The report examines four worlds of work in 2030, to show how competing forces, including automation, are shaping the workforces of the future. Each scenario has huge implications for the world of work, which cannot be ignored by governments, organizations or individuals.

The majority of respondents believe technology will improve their job prospects (65%) although workers in the US (73%) and India (88%) are more confident, than those in the UK (40%) and Germany (48%). Overall, nearly three quarters believe technology will never replace the human mind (73%) and the majority (86%) say human skills will always be in demand.

The reality of life-long learning is biting amongst todays workforce no matter what age you are, says Carol Stubbings,partner and joint global leader for People and Organization at PwC. The report found that 60% of respondents believe few people will have stable, long-term employment in the future. People are shifting from a qualification that would last a lifetime to thinking about new skills every few years, matched with ongoing development of personal skills such as risk management, leadership and emotional intelligence.

While respondents to the survey were positive about the impact of technology, with 37% excited about the future world of work and seeing a world full of possibilities, there is still concern that automation is putting some jobs at risk.

Overall, 37% of respondents believe automation is putting their job at risk, up from 33% in 2014.And over half (56%) think governments should take action needed to protect jobs from automation.

Anxiety kills confidence and the willingness to innovate, comments Jon Williams, partner and joint global leader for People and Organization at PwC.

With a third of workers worried about the future of their jobs due to automation, employers need to be having mature conversations now, to include workers in the technology debate. This will help them to understand, prepare and potentially upskill for any impact technology may have on their job in the future. The shift is nothing less than a fundamental transformation in the way we work, and organizations must not underestimate the change ahead.

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Workers Believe Personal Skills Will Remain in Demand Despite Automation - CFO innovation ASIA

The fear of technology killing jobs in the restaurant industry maybe widespread, but Fatburger CEO Andrew Weiderhorn said automation is boosting the burger business without shrinking the labor force.

Certainly automation is something that moves business forward. Weve seen it increase our sales. It really hasnt decreased our labor at all, he said.

However, Weiderhorn said automation has resulted in the reallocation of labor.

We have more orders--maybe less people taking orders but more people cooking the food--so it really hasnt cut our labor at all, he said.

On the other hand, Weiderhorn said there is a real issue when it comes to labor costs.

Everyone must have known what they were getting into when they voted in favor of their politicians wanting minimum wage increase. And everyone wants their employees to make more money, he said. But if in the restaurant industry, your labor costs are 30% and youre going to increase it from $10 to $15a 15% increase, now youre going up to 45% and so consumers are going to have a price increase because a restaurant operator cant afford that bottom line.

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Despite this, Weirderhorn said the company, which currently has 200 stores globally, saw sales rise significantly last quarter. He plans to take the company public within a few weeks and will trade under the symbol FAT.

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Automation boosts business without killing jobs, Fatburger CEO ... - Fox Business

Too simplistic? Quite possibly, nevertheless the conclusions from some new research out of Oxford arefood for thought (my emphasis added):

A new research paper from the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment provides the first evidence that automation played a major role in voters concerns in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

The paper, Political Machinery: Automation Anxiety and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, authored by Dr Carl Benedikt Frey, Dr Thor Berger and Dr Chinchih Chen, all of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, looked at whether groups in the labour market that have lost out to automation were more likely to opt for radical political change. Pitching automation against a host of alternative explanations including workers exposure to globalization, immigration and manufacturing decline the research shows that electoral districts with a greater exposure to automation were substantially more likely to support Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.

The authors found that a 5 percentage points increase in the share of jobs in which workers have lost to automation in the past is associated with an increase in the share voting for Donald Trump in 2016 by roughly 10 percentage points.

Dr Frey, Oxford Martin Citi Fellow and Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, said the data provided the first hard evidence of the impact of automation on political outcomes.

Our study suggests that automation has been the real cause of voters concern, he said. The prime victims of recent technological change want anything but the status quo. The populist rebellion in America, Europe, and elsewhere, has many causes, but workers losing out to technology is seemingly the main reason.

Its hardly the first time that I have asked this question, but what will be the political consequences as the process of technologically-driven job destruction moves further and further up the food chain, shattering the expectations of those who never thought they would be on the wrong side of creative destruction?

Speaking of which, theres this from The New Republic (again, my emphasis added):

The waning of the yuppies particular brand of ostentatious upward mobility, and the rise of its aesthetically scruffier hipster cousins, demonstrate the ongoing erosion of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich have called the professional-managerial class. The Ehrenreichs coined the term in 1977 to refer to the constellation of college-educated, white-collar, and creative workers (doctors, lawyers, journalists, artists, academics, and so forth) that hovered somewhere between the ruling class and the traditional working class. More than 30 years later, in their 2013 essay Death of a Yuppie Dream, the Ehrenreichs reported that the once-ascendant PMC was on its last legs, fractured by decades of technological advances, job outsourcing, and attacks on labor. Increasingly, its members have either peeled off to join a tier of exorbitantly compensated CEOs and supermanagers or suffered the collapse of their chosen professions, from the decline of newspaper journalism to the elimination of tenured academic jobs.

In this bleak new landscape, strivers havent disappearedthey have simply reoriented themselves around a new set of values that bolster their class position in less noticeable ways.

And they will probably continue to do, but whether they do so in a way that fits into Americas traditional free market(ish) model is an entirely different matter.

But its only 2017: Much of the article merely discusses changes in consumer choice:

This new elite is typified by the brownstone-dweller traipsing through Whole Foods with a yoga mat peeping from the top of her NPR tote.

But, it wont stop there, particularly as squeezed salaries and eroded job securitymake that trip to Whole Foods ever more daunting.

See the rest here:

Automation and the Voters - National Review

Automation is widely discussed in the financial services sector, but it isnt exactly considered sexy anymore. Emilia says it is still the technology that has changed the industry the most.

Automation is one of those subjects people love to talk about. It doesnt elicit confused faces or cautious questions, because people generally already know what it is. Yet, it still has the greatest potential to change the financial services industry, even more than it already has. Firms may have elements of automation deployed throughout their technology stack, but there is still so much room forevolution.

A report from FIS titled The Hunt for Growth, published in June, which surveyed 1,000 buy-side and sell-side firms, shows that there is strong demand for further trade automation, better data management and focus on digitization. The findings note that 59 percent of surveyed buy-side firms anticipate highly automated trade execution in the next three years, while 53 percent of sell-side firms are planning to meet that demand. This automation is not confined to transactions but the whole trade life-cycle, including middle- and back-officeprocessing.

John Avery, director, client and industry engagement, derivatives utility at FIS, says much of this demand is around regulatory compliance and the need to cut costs. The biggest challenges firms are facing are around regulation, the global political climate and of course cost-cutting which is still in place for many in the industry, Avery says. But we see that being committed to technology, those who are best prepared to meet those challenges with technology can continue to do well. He adds that demand for automation, to reduce manual input so employees can focus on more value-added tasks, reinforces thatmessage.

Its not just down to a desire to change, of course. Regulatory reform is encouraging many firms to look at market segments in different ways, and at using resources more intelligently as a result, on a firm-wide basis rather than just in response to specific issues. Part of this is through investment in technology to further cut costs. What is interesting is that there are some firms that want to take advantage of regulatory change, Avery says. They will either de-emphasize or enter certain markets, but as long as theyre invested in technology they are confident they can leverage these changes and even free capital to invest in stronginnovations.

The FIS report shows how important automation still is for financial services. How fast and widespread automation within a company will be, however, greatly depends on their innovation strategy, and while more than half of sell-side and buy-side firms believe in the importance of automation, there are still barriers that prevent them from implementing thesesystems.

In the same way, automation is the driving force behind so many of todays much-hyped technologies. What is artificial intelligence and machine learning, but a way to automate data processing and analysis? Isnt blockchain just a way of automating all the back and forth that counterparties have to do for certaintransactions?

Automation is so widely accepted in the financial services industry, but when phrased in certain ways, can inspire fear that robots will replace people. The same people who express that fear also complain that much of the grunt work in finance is manual. If that pressure is relieved and the skilled people in all areas of the financial services industry are freed up to focus on their core work, who knows where the industry willgo?

Inspiration

This ode to automation was inspired by podcast I heard a few weeks ago, focusing on the history of the humble spreadsheet. Microsoft Excel, todays most widely-used spreadsheet program, was conceived as a means to automate and replace the manually intensive task of writing down numbers on a sheet of paper. This also shows the ephemeral nature of automation. We went from celebrating the computerized spreadsheet to figuring out ways to phase it out completely, in a few shortyears.

The definition of automation is ever-changing, evolving alongside the technology and processes it augments. In the future, its likely that todays brave new frontier of automation might seem as quaint as Excel is starting to seem today. Perhaps then, there will be odes to AI appearing in the pages of this magazine by columnists who look at what were covering today with something akin tonostalgia.

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An Ode to Automation - http://www.waterstechnology.com

As coal-fired electric power plants close across the U.S., they take with them coal mining jobs, to be sure. And while those job losses have generated considerable political heat, a no-less important employment shift is under way within power plants themselves.

Gone are many of the mechanics, millwrights, and welders who once held high paying jobs to keep coal-fired power plants operating.

As maintenance-intensive coal-fired power plantschock full of rotating equipment and leak-prone pipes and valves, not to mention conveyer belts and coal ash handling equipmentare retired they are being replaced to a large extent by gas-fired units that make full use of sensors, predictive maintenance software, and automated control systems.

As a result, the extensive use of analytics and automation within natural gas-fired power plants means that staffing levels can be cut to a fraction of what they were a decade ago.

Recent announcements confirm the trend.

On August 1, Michigan-based DTE Energy revealed plans to spend almost $1 billion to build a 1,100-megawatt gas-fired power plant. When the station enters service in 2022, it will replace three existing coal-fired units that currently employ more than 500 people. Job openings at the new gas-fired plant? Thirty-five full-time employees, says a DTE spokesperson.

In late June, Louisiana regulators approved a plan by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. to build a 994-MW gas-fired combined cycle power plant. The $872 million plant and associated transmission assets are slated to enter service in 2020. Job openings when it comes on line? No more than 31 people to manage, operate, and maintain the plant.

The lower headcount required at new gas-fired power plants like those in Michigan and Louisiana is the result of automation and advances in control system technology.

What changed is the evolution of technology, says W. Dale Claudel, vice president of power generation for Entergy.

Entergys plant in Lake Charles, La. will use two Mitsubishi 501G air-cooled gas turbines coupled with a Toshiba steam turbine. Claudel says that a single control room operator will be able to launch the plants entire startup procedure with the proverbial push of a button.

Once switched on, the plants automated systems are designed to synchronize generator functions, set ramp unit output, monitor firing temperatures, measure and adjust air emissions, all functions that previously required human oversight or intervention.

(Entergy Louisiana has a relatively small amount of coal-fired generation that will continue operating even after the Lake Charles unit is built.)

Whats more, in a conventional power plant outfitted with a boiler, multiple field operators would trek into the plant to visually inspect equipment and burners that were installed on multiple levels of the structure to ensure they were ready for firing. With the new plant, Claudel says that automation will monitor the combustion process, eliminating the need for many of the field operators required to walk the plant prior to startup.

A recent benchmarking effort by Black & Veatch used data from a commercial database of North American gas-fired power generating plants to offer insight into how gas-fired power plants are staffed.

Phillip L. Webster, P.E., associate vice president and project manager of Energy, Power Generation Services at B&V says that the firms research shows that a gas-fired combined-cycle power plant with a 565-MW generating capacity needs around 27 full-time personnel. A plant configured to yield nearly 300 MW more generating capacity requires only six additional people.

So even though the second gas-fired unit is more than 50 percent larger than the first in terms of generating capacity, the number of employees needed to run the plant is only around 25 percent more.

The roles just dont need to exist, he says.

One big reason is that new gas-fired power plants are equipped with sensors that provide constant data streams that are used to monitor turbine performance and feed predictive maintenance algorithms. Predictive maintenance means that maintenance outages can be scheduled well in advance of an equipment failure, and reduce almost to zero the need for in-house maintenance staff.

Software minimizes the effort of the operations and maintenance team, says Shin Gomi, a marketing vice president with Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Americas. The operational reliability of an advanced gas turbine may approach 99 percent, he says, and operating efficiencies are edging toward 65 percent, nearly double the efficiency of most coal-fired units that are being replaced. Expenses for operations and maintenance, fuel, and employees all can be cut with gas-fired power plant technology.

With gas price volatility greatly reduced and gas supply greatly enhanced through hydraulic fracturing technology, long-lived gas-fired technology can be planned for by cost-sensitive utilities that historically have limited options available to them to enhance shareholder value.

The extent of automation and digital equipment in new gas-fired power plants also means that operators need to have different sets of skills. Gone are the specialized millwrights and boiler operators.

They are being replaced, Entergys Claudel says, by people who understand operations as processes and who are able program, troubleshoot, and tune the ultra-efficient turbines.

IEEE Spectrums energy, power, and green tech blog, featuring news and analysis about the future of energy, climate, and the smart grid.

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A Georgia Tech professor of robotics argues automation is still creating more jobs than it destroys 9Apr2013

Hot fields in the United States include embedded engineering, control engineering, and robotics 20Jul

Jobs site Indeed: Full stack developer is best career; machine learning engineers earn more 22Mar

In a corner of Nebraska, a power plant continues a 60-year history of innovation as it aims to burn hydrogen for electric power generation 11Jul

Clean coal technology suffered a setback when efforts to start up the gasification portion of an IGCC plant in Mississippi were halted 30Jun

Methane Monitor increases speed and cuts costs of detecting greenhouse gas leaks from the air 29May

Methane rules and the Paris Accord expose friction within the GOP and the Trump administration over climate and energy policy 15May

Enviro Powers small steam turbine could cut homeowners electricity bills by 30 percent 18Apr

A mathematical rethink suggests that carbon dioxide will warm Earth more in the future than it does today. But better satellitessuch as those Trump wants to scrapare needed to reduce climate uncertainty 17Apr

The sweeping attack on climate action that President Trump demanded in his executive order is likely to prove but short-lived relief for coal miners who cheered him at the EPA 29Mar

NASAs new geosensing satellites may be on the chopping block. The timing could hardly be worse 9Mar

Injection wells that dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling operations can trigger earthquakes. Stanford releases a free tool to predict the risk 7Mar

Over budget and behind schedule, a clean coal facility may be a relic before it can become fully operational 28Feb

As coal industry jobs are lost, likely not to return, some in coal country have turned to coding 15Feb

Deregulation actions by congressional Republicans may undercut innovative sensor technology by quashing methane detection at oil and gas sites 13Feb

DOE report says renewable power generation jobs surpassed those in fossil fuels, and are growing faster 26Jan

Petra Nova, the world's biggest CCS project, started up last week, and other sites show that it's not just for coal anymore 16Jan

Analytics from Berkeley-based WattTime precisely match new loads on a grid to the power plant that will serve them, providing estimates of carbon intensity that are up to 45 percent more accurate than regional averages. Such tools can guide cleaner charging by electric vehicles, and yield a bigger carbon reduction bang from energy efficiency measures and renewable power projects. 26Dec2016

Some of the work of the U.S. Department of Energy's advanced research wing fits fine with Trump's priorities, but analysts worry the next generation of solar tech could suffer 5Dec2016

Aluminum-based device produces industrially useful compounds 20Jul2016

Excerpt from:

Automation Is Engineering the Jobs Out of Power Plants - IEEE Spectrum

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story originally ran in the News and Tribune's "Progress" publication earlier in 2017.

SOUTHERN INDIANA Despite what you may have heard, manufacturing is doing just fine in Indiana and the United States as a whole in terms of output, anyway.

National manufacturing production was at one of its highest points ever in 2015 even when adjusted for inflation, according to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Similarly, Indianas manufacturing GDP was at it highest in 2015 since at least 1997 making up 30 percent of the states total GDP, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Despite this, the country has lost 7 million manufacturing jobs since employment peaked in 1979. Indiana also had fewer manufacturing jobs in 2014 with 349,425 workers than it had seen in the pre-recession years.

That, says Michael Hicks, is due to automation.

Hicks is the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University. His centers 2015 study, authored by him and Srikant Devaraj, estimates that 88 percent of the United States lost manufacturing jobs are due to the replacement of humans by technology.

That sounds quite accurate, actually, said Uric Dufrene, the Sanders Chair in Business at Indiana University Southeast.

Trade, another oft-cited reason for fewer manufacturing jobs, has resulted in the loss of many especially in the textiles industry but Hicks and other economists such as Dufrene say automation has overshadowed the effects of a more global economy.

Its not expected to get much better, either, with a 2015 study from the Boston Consulting Group predicting that 1.2 million advanced robots will be introduced to American industry by 2025 as prices for the technology lower. Of course, automation isnt just about robots. It presents itself in subtler ways, too. Radio frequency identification, for example, cuts down on the number of people needed to find parts in a warehouse, Hicks said.

Automation in Southern Indiana

So how is automation affecting manufacturers in Clark and Floyd counties, where 17 percent of all jobs in the area stem from their business?

Dufrenes answer to that question is that automation is probably not affecting a lot right now in terms of overall employment, that is.

The area is seeing a boom in manufacturing because of places like River Ridge Commerce Center, where theres 6,000 acres of land set aside just for industry. Dufrene thinks incoming manufacturers will make up for whatever jobs are lost to technology.

Hicks has a different point of view. While he said Southern Indiana is an attractive place to locate a factory, he believes that the area will eventually begin to follow the national employment trends.

At some point, even Dufrene says that's possible maybe when River Ridge is fully developed.

Its hard to go out that far, he said.

Automation has, however, affected the types of manufacturing jobs that are available in Southern Indiana.

A different kind of factory worker

Bob Owings is the owner of Owings Patterns in Sellersburg and the chairman of One Southern Indianas Metro Manufacturing Alliance.

When his father started the business over 40 years ago, pattern making was a much different industry than it is today. Much of the work was done by hand and took hours.

As technology evolved, so has Owings Patterns.

Now, the business employees design plastic molds on computer software, another worker programs a machine to create that mold, and even more employees, called CNC operators, control those machines with their own computer.

Robots might have replaced some manufacturing jobs, Owings admits, but not all of them.

Theres 15 people designing that robot, he said. Theres another guy programming that robot. Theres two or three guys maintaining that robot. And oh, theres still a guy operating that robot. So really automation may have created five to seven jobs. It creates a different type of job.

Hicks agrees that some jobs are being created by new manufacturing technology. Many of those jobs, however, require extra education. The days of low-skilled workers making a middle-class salary?

Theyre done with, he said.

That doesnt mean there are people lining up to take those jobs even though the average one in Clark, Crawford, Floyd, Harrison, Scott and Washington counties pays $65,398.

Manufacturers in the area have reported problems to 1si with finding the skilled employees they need to fill their jobs. There are several programs and groups in the area dedicated to filling this gap.

Region 10 WorkOne and Ivy Tech in Sellersburg work together on manufacturing education programs for adults. Prosser Career Education Center in New Albany also has manufacturing classes for both high school students and adults.

Finally, Greater Clark County Schools was recently designated a Ford Next Generation Learning community, meaning all students curriculums will eventually be designed around careers that might include manufacturing. The school system is also the fiscal agent for a $7.7 million grant from the DWD for Clark, Floyd and Harrison county high schools that involves preparing more students for manufacturing careers.

Tying everything together is 1si, which hired a director of talent and workforce development in January to be the employer voice for the areas initiatives.

Hicks is skeptical of most workforce development initiatives. Too often, he said, theyre focused on employers' immediate needs. The jobs that need filled now could be obsolete in a few years.

Its better to teach students how to be adaptable, Hicks said. Dufrene added to that argument, saying that investing in a strong K-12 system and a basic STEM education is important, too.

The shiny side of automation

Automation, for all its affect on the labor market, isnt necessarily a bad thing, Hicks said.

For one, it helps businesses like Owings Patterns thrive.

We have been required to embrace technology and automation to increase our efficiencies, Owings said. We expand our business and expand our opportunities by using technology and automation.

And in the case of Owings Patterns, that has meant hiring more people. Twenty-five years ago, the business had five employees. Now, it has 25.

No one should want factories to be the way they were in the old days, anyway, Hicks said. With higher skilled employees comes better pay and better working conditions.

We are not afraid of automation, Owings said.

Excerpt from:

Automation changing jobs nationwide and in Southern Indiana - Evening News and Tribune

In a few years, robotic farming equipment will be able to plow and prepare soil while human farmers sleep.

That is what Hokkaido University professor Noboru Noguchi and his team are aiming for as the nations farmers age, with no successors in place.

The improved use of robotics in agriculture will not only reduce manual labor but will enable aging farmers to continue working and focus their time and energy on areas that require their knowledge and experience.

The related technology has been advancing in recent years. Machinery that allows a driver to sit back while it plows the field in straight lines is already on the market.

But unmanned farm machinery would require accurate positioning systems. To date, such machinery has used a combination of GPS, supplied by U.S. satellites, supplemented with data sent from ground-based stations to improve accuracy.

Depending on the lay of the land, however, the machinery occasionally strays up to 10 meters from the plotted path due to GPS systems not always providing completely accurate data.

But on June 1, Japan put its second quasi-zenith satellite, Michibiki No. 2, into orbit to improve the accuracy of the countrys GPS. Two more navigation satellites are set to be launched by the end of 2017 to provide accurate and constant data.

The quasi-zenith system ensures one of the planned four satellites will be above Japan at any one time. When the four Japanese satellites are in operation, the margin of error is expected to be narrowed to a few centimeters.

The agricultural ministry, meanwhile, adopted guidelines in March for autonomous farming machinery. The rules ban self-driving units on regular roads and limit who can enter farmland where the machines are working.

The guidelines prompted leading farm equipment manufacturer Kubota Corp. to start selling advanced self-driving tractors on a trial basis on June 1.

For now, the guidelines cover the use of self-driving machinery under on-site human supervision. But a team of researchers at the Graduate School of Agriculture at Hokkaido University is developing a tractor that can be controlled remotely.

The team is working on a robotic system that automatically observes the surrounding environment, recognizes obstacles and avoids them or halts operation if necessary.

During a recent trial, a team member maneuvered a prototype tractor via a tablet computer. The tractor was equipped with GPS receiver as well as various sensors and other devices. A buzzer went off when it recognized an obstacle and it stopped automatically.

Team leader Noguchi said a planned tractor, capable of autonomously harvesting, leveling ground and flooding rice paddies at night will become available within a few years.

Beginning this autumn, the university team will conduct verification tests on a fully unmanned tractor in a 950-hectare area of land in Hokkaido, taking into consideration actual restrictions such as the use of radio waves and traffic laws.

To put agricultural robots to work, it is important for the people involved, including researchers, engineers and farmers, to allow a process of trial and error to play out, Noguchi said.

Noguchis team is going a step further in a project that will allow farm machines to analyze weather and soil data so they can predict disease and pest infestations. Further, the ability to predict crop yields would enable refined operations such as distributing more fertilizer where needed.

The use of such detailed data can help avoid the wasteful use of fertilizer and agricultural chemicals, improve the efficiency of operations, enhance the safety of agricultural products and contribute to the protection of the environment.

To be sure, automation cannot take over all farming operations.

Shigeru Someya, a large-scale rice grower in Kashiwa, Chiba Prefecture, said that while advances in agricultural equipment have made farming more efficient, it has led to a situation where farmers no longer take good care of paddies by themselves.

Ive been taught that rice grows (best) when they hear the footsteps of human beings, Someya said. Looking over (rice paddies on foot) is indispensable.

The key to the future of Japans agriculture may be combining the knowledge of farmers like Someya and farming technology artificial intelligence that analyses and learns from a huge volume of data, and the introduction of robots.

Link:

Japan's farming industry poised for automation revolution - The Japan Times

Joe Fuller, VP & CIO, Dominion Enterprises, Joe Fuller is CIO at Dominion Enterprises (formerly Trader Publishing Company), the Norfolk, VA based media and marketing company which operates Homes...More>>

In an old parable a frog is placed in tepid water whose temperature is gradually and slowly raised to the boiling point. As the water gets warmer, instead of recognizing peril, the frog falls into a calm stupor and is boiled to death. If youre a CIO, the water youre getting comfortable in is called automation.

Elon Musk recently predicted that automation will eliminate so many jobs that governments will be forced to pay a universal basic income to each and every citizen, regardless of their work status. McDonalds stock just hit an all time high after announcing that it will replace human cashiers with kiosks in 2500 restaurants. Amazons Jeff Bezos has over a thousand people dedicated to their Alexa artificial intelligence platform. Mark Zuckerberg recently told graduating Harvard students that millions of jobs are about to be replaced by things like self-driving cars and trucks. The consensus is clear: automation is going to drastically reduce certain types of jobs. What does this mean for the CIO?

Lets look at where you are. I bet you jumped on the virtualization bandwagon as soon as you realized how much time and money could be saved compared to traditional rack-and-stack systems administration. You probably embraced agile development and you have at least experimented with DevOps. You may have deployed automated patch management. You might even be exploring ways to automate by pushing computing jobs to public cloud providers and beyond cloud providers. Your CEO and CFO partners have certainly encouraged you to automate, which has sped up IT delivery and reduced IT costs. With automation, youve probably improved your groups performance without cutting staff or spending more on IT. It seems everyone is winning with automation, so wheres the rub?

Were worshiping at the automation altar and unconsciously shunning the good IT people we have fostered our whole careers

As CIO, theres a big insidious problem warming up your kettle as you leverage automation. Youve encouraged your people to seek efficiency and automation and drive lower expenses. You and your team can point to hard dollars saved whenever one of these automation mini-projects goes live. Our company has seen its digital operations grow at about a 25 percent annual clip since 2009 at the expense of traditional operations. But weve actually reduced our operating expenses through automation and the normal influence of Moores law. During this time, weve reduced staff slightly through attrition. We havent been too worried about that because the automation really does seem to eliminate the need for bodies. But theres a big problem sneaking up on us: were losing our mojo.

What do I mean by losing our mojo? Were worshiping at the automation altar and unconsciously shunning the good IT people we have fostered our whole careers. These people are creative. They are brilliant. They love to solve problems. They love to build and re-build to make things better. They hate when things break but they love fixing things when they break. They prefer the command line to a GUI interface. And were losing them. They get that automation is a good thing and embrace eliminating mundane tasks. They know that reducing power consumption by 45% in the data center is good for everyone. They like being the Maytag repairman when its their turn to be on call. But they are bored. They are scared. They are confused about where the industry is going and concerned they too will be obsolete like loading an operating system on a stand-alone server. They have been looking for jobs that offer more challenge, but the reality is that your shop is pretty much the same as IT shops everywhere.

If youre like me, youve looked into the future and seen incomprehensibly massive Amazon, Microsoft and Google data centers in the deserts of the world manned by a handful of security guards who replace the cameras and the water hoses every now and then. You dont see the engineers who designed the systems or the R&D team working on the Gen 7 data center that doesnt even need those water hoses. They are barren, hot places that no humans daydream about working in.

Ive painted a bleak picture but take heart. As CIO, you have the power to place humans into this picture and have everything be OK. But you have to change. Your organization must keep chasing automation but you dont have to. You must delegate those tasks to either specific people or to specific times for you and your people. In other words, you have to stop spending all your time thinking tactically about automation and devote time to thinking strategically about innovation. You owe it to yourself and your IT team to check the box on automated operation but demand more of yourself and your team on the strategic front.

How do you do this? Talk to your team. Ask them about their fears. Ask them what they think you all can do to help move the business forward through innovation and not just automation. Go to summits and seminars and encourage your folks to do the same. Take time to allow show-and-tell when everyone gets back. Sponsor hackathons to develop on the latest AI technology. Buy the newest gadgets for your executives and help them actually use them. Solicit new product ideas from every corner of the business (not just IT) and have the ideas be submitted via short, entertaining videos. Identify IT trends and specifically give your IT teams projects related to those trends that are not specifically tied to cost reductions. Embrace the after-hours activities of your team and find ways to let them share the neat things they are doing outside work.

Automation has been a great boon to IT in the last 10 years and it has made us less expensive and more reliable. But we cant lose our greatest asset our smart people. You as CIO are responsible for shifting time and resources to nurture them so we continue to provide maximum value to the businesses we serve. Dont let us get comfortable in this automation pot and suffer the frogs fate.

Read more here:

You're the Frog and Automation is about to Boil You - CIOReview

In todays IT community, automation is quite a buzzword. We hear about it a lotfrom marketing and sales force automation to workload management automation and the automation of software related to business processes. But why is it so important?

Essentially, automation is about taking the traditional computing resources of the business to the next level. Its about taking manual and labor-intensive processes, and changing them so that they no longer require detailed human intervention. Using principles of technology advancement like machine learning and sophisticated algorithms, vendors can offer companies the ability to automate all sorts of key tasks and processes in all kinds of interesting and useful ways.

Who needs automated tasks?Just about any system administrator can benefit from the principle of automation. Automating tasks frees up time for key people to turn their attention to other important aspects of running a business.

For example, in a virtualized network environment, someone who was spending their time getting after every detail of virtual machine performance and workload management could instead be looking at the big picture and how to scale the system efficiently, while automation software takes care of those other little details in the background.

For a look at how diverse automation benefits can be, think of someone who is running software or even mechanical hardware processes in a manufacturing business. If theres a software process leading to production tagging, quality assurance or some other area of a business process, automation can again take that work out of the human managers hands and perform it automatically, so that the human worker can go do other things.

Automation tools.Some of the best automation tools have to do a managing applications in an enterprise environment. A tool called Zapier helps to integrate apps easily, and monitor automated data that flows between them. It helps to provide pre-built processes that can be repeated without reinventing the wheel.

Other tools like IFTTT help automate the process of using applets for Java-based web development. The scope of applications for these types of tools is profound by connecting this type of automation to Apple, Android or other platforms, human managers get the power of adaptive automation assistance in their back pockets.

Another tool called Stackify also helps human users in a variety of ways. Stackify can help solve application performance issues, find hidden exceptions, or help to synchronize business activities where data resolution is ultimately important.

For example, think about a reservation or booking system or a ticketing system that uses a variety of applications. Companies will be trying to assess how data flows between these applications when scaling. They want product support, and they want an engaged model for fixing bugs and glitches.

In these types of cases, using Stackify Retrace can help make problem-solving more proactive. Its not just a question of providing notifications when somethings wrong its an overall analysis of the applications as theyre developing, to catch any issues. A principle called DevOps combines the words development and operations it makes the development process more fluid and agile. It helps to automate some of the processes of bringing applications into full swing. These are the kinds of processes that Stackify supports to offer developers and others more automation assistance.

Companies that are not familiar with this kind of functionality should be thinking about how to integrate automation into business processes. Whether its a product or service business, and whether the process relates to manufacturing or customer connections, numerous types of automation can really improve business outcomes.

AJ has lead many automation projects and has consistently managed to provide value through removing manual work out of different processes. In his spare time, he likes to cover tech and automation related topics and share his know-how.

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The rise of automation: Why coding is becoming a job for everyone - SDTimes.com

ACME The people responsible for shaping the future of transportation have gathered this week at the annual Center for Automotive Research Management Briefing Seminars.

The five-day conference attracts major players in the automotive industry from around the globe. Speakers include Michigan Lt. Gov. Brian Calley and the director of Ministry of the Economy of Mexicos Trade and NAFTA Office. But executives from BMW, Toyota, Tesla, General Motors, AM General, Bosch, Mazda, Volkswagen, IBM, Nissan, ExxonMobil and Lear Corporation took center stage, along with experts from dozens of development companies and suppliers.

Governors Hall at Grand Traverse Resort & Spa was filled with business people in dark blue jackets and black pantsuits, all of them focused on one thing the future of the automobile. Transportation is big business on a global stage, and the industry is in the midst of a technological upheaval.

Gasoline and diesel displaced horsepower a century ago. Electricity now is pushing fossil fuels off the worlds roads. At the same time, computers are in the early stages of removing humans from the drivers seat. Thats the gist of this weeks meeting in Acme electricity and automation.

As seen here today, highly automated driving is no longer a dream, but a reality, said Continental North America President Jeff Klei.

He spoke Monday afternoon outside the resort, where two cars a Cadillac ATS and a Chrysler 300 fitted with autonomous technology created by Continental and Magna International completed a 7-hour, 300-mile journey, 92 percent of it without any human driver input. The cars began in Detroit, drove through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel to Ontario, returned to the U.S. on the Bluewater Bridge, then cruised northwest to Acme.

Klei referred to the technology installed in the cars as a cruising chauffeur. Technically, that level of automation is called Level 3 or conditional automation. The designation means the vehicle can drive itself in certain environments, such as on a highway. Human control is required at toll booths and in complicated situations like busy city streets.

Levels 4 and 5 are designated as fully automated, technologies in which a human driver never is required. Level 4 is limited to a certain geographic area, such as on a proving ground or within a certain pre-mapped region. Level 5 would allow a vehicle to travel anywhere.

Current technology cant provide full automation, Ryan Eustace, vice president of autonomous driving for the Toyota Research Institute, told the crowd in Governors Hall.

Theres a lot of top-down human awareness that needs to be built in, he said.

He described the constant stream of unknowns on the road pedestrians, animals, broken water mains, traffic cops, accidents, poorly-marked detours as the social dance of driving.

It will be years, he said, before the eventual goal of an automated car that cant crash (because it warns the driver or automatically intervenes to prevent a crash) becomes reality.

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Experts talk automation in Acme - Traverse City Record Eagle