All the Noise about Automation

All the noise about Automation going on these days, mainly heard from the top IT services companies as a reason to for slow growth, staff reduction.....

Do we recollect the same group of people, defending computerization when it first started arriving some 15 to 20 years ago, it was the time when trade unions and many other non trade union activists and also members of general public opposed computerization, since their argument was computerization would result into job losses.

The argument put forth by the IT services companies was computerization would create jobs not only in the direct IT services sector but also in the end-use sectors where the voices about job losses are originating.

Many of us would remember media interviews by some industry leaders claiming how the computerization created jobs, one of the very active one, claimed it with quantitative data saying how so many more jobs are being created basis computerization.

The same leader(s)/IT-Industry-forum went on propagating in the media, saying "the global IT services market is X billion dollars and India is perhaps doing x/10 or x/20 (or some such figure) and hence sky is the limit", we have an un-tapped market that is 10 times the size of what we serve now and it is going to be the case for years to come...............etc.

So the recent noise about Automation, what is automation that is being discussed these days it is actually computerization of a "slightly" more "complex type" compared to the one we had 15 to 20 years ago, even the computerization then and automation now both are automation.

The computerization then replaced paper and forms, and the automation now replaces some kind of computerization which has been now there for 15 to 20 years, which is a natural evolution towards a more mature scenario, and be in computer or any other industry or engineering discipline this kind of evolution is natural.

Also a lot of the automation, i.e. advanced computerization, that replaces basic computerization has been happening gradually, like the ERP-platforms eliminating the need for "writing code" each time there is a similar process to be automated or the evolution of coding-studios and coding suites which automate code creation and whole lot of other tools - were in fact automation of a greater degree compared to tools of the 80's and 90's. Even all that was automation, so did it result into job cuts ?, or is it that since all this automation/tools evolution happened gradually over 2 decades and the impact was slowly digested - no one cried - job cuts due to Automation ?

We never said then, it would take 300 engineers to write some piece of code in Fortran/COBOL for an enterprise application, and now that we have an ERP system we could do it with 20 or 30 engineers, so there is a job loss of 300 - 30 = 270, The fact is with the basic tools like Fortran/COBOL we never imagined to create applications at the scale of what an ERP could do , hence we saw the whole game differently we saw need for 30 engineers and hence 30 jobs created, the 270 so called lost never existed and the 30 added so much user-value - to automate the whole enterprise.

The appropriate automation like ERP created a market much much larger than one which would possibly exist by creating a value which could be delivered by what a Fortran/COBOL could possibly create.

The hypothesis I would like to put forth in the present context is "we have not been able to create enough or appropriate automation for offering more value to end-users which would actually create a totally new market", hence the slowdown in jobs in the IT sector, and then all the blame game in the name of automation as a basis of head-count reduction.

It would take a whole new mind-set to think, what can automation do next for the end-user ? - and that very answer would create jobs -

Discussion/Debate - welcome