Ahead of the Chief Data & Analytics Officer, UK event Georgina Owens, Director of IT Services,  who will be speaking on From Human to Robot, the Automation Revolution. Georgina gives us insight to the story so far!

Once upon a time there were very large mainframe computers that would work through the night and process hundreds of thousands or millions of instructions to transform the paper based processing typical at the time.

These computers required teams of programmers who would use coding sheets to document the structure of their programmes that would run the programmes on these very large mainframe computers.

This was a time when computer resources were precious and programmers had to meticulously plan how they could get the maximum performance from their code running on the computer, using features like overlay where the programmer planned which parts of the program needed to be in storage at any time as the storage resource was the most expensive.

Computers would work through the night crunching data, updating and creating files to be transferred between organisations that would speed up the world of commerce.

Fast forward twenty years and computing had progressed so rapidly with the effect of Moore’s law on the power of chipsets and the reduction of the pricing of memory as well as the type of business processes that could be delivered from a computer had altered beyond recognition.

Then we had PCs that had graphical interfaces running applications for front office staff allowing them to provide immediate information to their customers.

New technologies appeared in retail with the introduction of bar codes and scanning speeding up the process of shopping whilst streamlining back office stock control and supply chain management. In every industry the introduction of server based computing with infinitely more processing power and storage was opening new possibilities for automation every day.

The people behind the computers had new languages to learn and new approaches to design had to be developed. Suddenly there were many computers networked to each other across many disparate locations.

These development in technology also delivered all sorts of new challenges to resolve, for example synchronisation of data, performance across networks, managing levels of software across diverse platforms.

The desktop personal computer became a standard tool for every member of the office, the retail shop and the workshop. All used it to communicate with other colleagues no longer having to rely purely on the phone.  They could store and share documents that could be edited by another person leading to multiple versions of the same document stored in many locations and all slightly different leading to challenges around integrity and currency of information, If you consider the evolution I have described this has taken place over 20 years which compared to the original industrial revolution is lightening fast.

Now, we move into the digital era and consider the changes in the IT ecosystem. A teenager can contact amazon and create their own data centre with enough servers to set up a small to medium size business. They can create an app in their bedroom on an ipad  and publish it to be available for people to start using overnight.  Within industry robots replacing machines continues to expand and improve but now the robots are coming out of the factories and into the back office taking over the jobs of people who we never could have imagined would have been replaced.

What do these changes mean to our society and the business model of the future? Will machine learning really be able to replace people who programme and can computers learn from their environment and teach themselves to evolve. Will the replacement of low value back office tasks by robots actually create a huge boost to business and enable companies to recreate themselves into far more productive organisations generating greater profits that will benefit everyone who they employ and their families.  How should we implement the benefits of AI and robotics – do we add an automation tax? Allow everybody one paid day a month to do community work?  Over the next 18 months we will look to governments and business leaders to participate  in the debates whilst we drive for some solutions.

Author:

 Georgina Owens, Director of IT Services, Perform Group.