A research proposal that was once held back by the skeptics of the digital transformation in the workplace

In 2020, I submitted the following research proposal for funding. The project never saw the light of day.

I share the first sections of the proposal as submitted.

Objectives

The overarching objective of this project is to extract, analyze, and explain the online perceptions and public responses to the inevitable workplace digital transformation for which employees need upskilling and reskilling that is not unilaterally offered through workplace training or through traditional education outlets, such as higher education and college.?

To reach this objective, we will pursue three sub-objectives:

1. Extract workers’ perceptions about the future of work and the workplace digital transformation so that we can identify grassroots information about the challenges they face;
2. Generate a corpus of knowledge on the questions that are being asked online and the challenges that are being highlighted by people who are going through the digital transformation at work to inform individualized training and skilling in the traditional education institutions or in their workplace;
3. Provide recommendations for curriculum developers and policy-makers in higher education institutions and learning and development teams in varied industries and governments in their quest to help current and future employees better adapt to the digital transformation in their organizations.

Originality, significance, and expected contribution to knowledge of the proposed research.

This research is original and cutting-edge because it will

1. bridge an existing gap in the literature on the 4th industrial revolution, because in spite of growing scholarship on the? needed competencies for the future of work, there is a dearth of research on people’s attitudes in regards to the inevitable changes accompanying the digital transformations;
2. explore organic online conversations in which workers share their worries, their needs and their challenges openly with their counterparts who are going through similar digital transitions or attempt to get insights from experts in the field of digital technologies and future of work;
3. systematically explore the phenomenon of informal learning online within the context of digital transformation (this context refers to the exploitation of platforms to analyze data from customers and users and to realign business processes and create better value propositions).

This proposed research is significant because while the decision to implement digital transformation in organizations and in governments is top-down, its success depends on fostering the process bottom up, adopting a grassroots transformation, starting with understanding the stance and response of those who are directly concerned with this transformation, their adherence to it, the core of their resistance to change if any, and their readiness to actively engage in it.??

This proposed research is at the heart of two future challenge areas 2018-2021 identified by SSHRC: “Working in the digital economy” and “Humanity+”. The knowledge it will generate will contribute to the success of digital transformations in both organizational and societal contexts. The research will allow the researchers to pinpoint issues and factors to address when creating content and learning experiences to train, upskill, or reskill current and future workers who need to adapt to the digital augmentation of their workplace environments and to collaborate with machines and through them to enhance performance.

The proposed research in the context of relevant scholarly literature.

Organizations learned tough lessons from companies such as Kodak and Blockbusters that ceased to exist when they failed to sync the digital changes in the external environment with the internal dynamics and processes of their organization. Toys R Us closed its doors in most countries because it persisted in the traditional supermarket business model instead of updating its model to better adapt to the increasing number of consumers using social media (Fenton, Fletcher, & Griffiths, 2020).

Today,?the survival of many organizations?depends on their plans to leverage cutting-edge technologies?such as artificial intelligence (AI) to transform their workplace into augmented environments where humans and machines collaborate to reach better business performance.?Digital transformation for organizations has become inevitable (Daugherty & Wilson, 2018; Naffi, Davidson, & Jawhar, 2020), and yet workers’ online perceptions and public responses to this change have not been documented.

Stone (2019) defines digital transformation as “the development of a unified platform, consisting of systems and processes exploiting digital technologies in a manner that fundamentally changes how the organization collects and uses data to positively influence customer interactions” (p.21). Ebert and Duarte (2018) define it as “adopting disruptive technologies to increase productivity, value creation, and the social welfare”.? Despite the urgency to set in motion their digital transformation, many organizations still fail the transition, let alone improving their performance and productivity. The few who succeeded had five characteristics in common: leadership, capability building, empowering workers, upgrading tools, and communication (McKinsey & Company, 2018). Indeed, Westerman (2018) states that organizations that focus solely on technology don't capture the true value of digital transformation.

Technology should be considered?as?a means to an end not as an end in itself, as the enabler of innovative and better strategies.

Fenton, Fletcher, and Griffiths (2020) confirm that

“it is not the technology itself that creates or drives strategic digital transformation. It is the application and exploitation of these technologies (…) by the people in an organization that creates successful transformation” (p.24).

While the transformation may streamline an organization and make it more profitable, its negative effects on workers are well documented (Collinson 2019). If their concerns are not addressed, real risks of failure emerge, especially in the context of digital transformation where the change is continuous and exponential. To succeed in their digital transformation, organizations should focus on the people who are central to this transformation and the ultimate beneficiaries or victims of it (Collinson 2019)

Many predict that soon millions of workers could be at risk of undergoing a major transformation of their duties or even losing their jobs due to artificial intelligence advances (Dormehl, 2019). Despite the fact that new jobs will be created, these jobs will require knowledge and skills that the current workforce does not have (Daugherty & Wilson, 2018). In this context, a significant number of?workers will need to develop new skills or even be transitioned out of companies to different jobs in the next few years (Brende, 2019; Deloitte Global & The Global Business Coalition for Education, 2018). Organizations have done little to rethink their training strategies to respond to this urgency (IBM, 2019). Some universities are trying to adapt their programs to such needs, but the pace of change in the industry happens much faster than their ability to meet the demands (Aoun, 2018, Seldon & Adiboye, 2018).

Such exponential and rapid changes create a context where workers’ current individual, collective, and organizational state is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (Fenton, Fletcher, & Griffiths, 2020). Consequently, many workers worldwide feel pressured (Workfront, 2019) and turn to online communities, fora, and influencers, and engage in conversations on social media in an attempt to gain the knowledge they need to survive the inevitable change. While these interactions are yet to be documented, digital transformation and the future of work as a search term or as a topic reached peak popularity many times in Google searches in the year 2019 (Google, 2020a; Google, 2020b), where the abbreviation “AI” dominates.

While AI has existed since 1950, it was only around 2012 (Schuchmann, 2019) that the digital revolution kicked off thanks to the convergence of considerable advances in computational power, the surplus of data, and new AI models. Suddenly universities, governments, start-ups, and tech giants all started investing heavily in AI.? Since then content and predictions about disruptive technologies and the future of work in an AI era exploded on social media platforms. This led to a good deal of excitement, but also confusion on the topic of digital transformation as “the word “digital” means different things to different people” (Stone, 2019, p.12).

Perceptions of the impact of digital transformation are polarized on social media. On the one hand, many associate AI with science fiction stories such as the?Terminator franchise?or Isaac Asimov’s?Robot series, where technology’s prime goal is to control or even exterminate human existence.?Others are influenced by worldwide experts who relentlessly warn against AI and?technological domination (Demetis, 2019). Tesla founder Elon Musk said on several occasions that?AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons?(Clifford, 2018) and that it can become?an immortal dictator (Holley, 2018). The late Stephen Hawking warned about AI ending mankind despite the fact that AI gave him a better voice (Rutschman, 2018). James Barrat, author, speaker, and filmmaker actively alerts about an intelligence race, not between big tech companies, but between humans and machines and the winner will take over our future (Solstice, 2018). Further,?AI’s ethical problems are yet to be addressed, and?establishing an AI code of ethics is complicated, to say the least (CIFAR, 2019; Peters, 2020).

On the other hand, many are excited about how disruptive technologies are improving our daily lives. The advancement in artificial intelligence directly impacts the area of ambient intelligence, which includes “semantic web and agents, ambient assisted living, electronic and mobile healthcare, taking care for elderly, medical applications, e-learning, smart home, and smart cities”, and aims to improve the subjective human experience (Gams at al., 2019, p. 83). Researchers and students are working on teaching robots how to feel empathy (Snowdon, 2019; Yalcin, 2020). Google AI?stories are about how AI is helping people solve problems such as spotting early signs of diabetic retinopathy, detecting cancer, saving bees, tackling unsafe drinking water, and more (Google, n.d.). Many professional journals and organizations share online the beneficial implication of AI in varied fields including?education (Marr, 2018; Seldon & Adiboye, 2018),?cybersecurity (Columbus, 2019),?delivery (CNN Business & McFarland, 2019),?coaching (Msv, 2019), ?management (Forbes Insights, 2018),?marketing and sales (Chui, Henke, & Miremadi, 2019),?health care (Kriwet & World Economic Forum, 2020),?music?(Marr 2019) and?agriculture (Allen, 2019).

In the midst of this division between the proponents and the opposers of digital transformation in general and the deployment of AI in particular, a gap exists in the scholarly literature in regard to how the working population, more specifically active social media users who are in fields unrelated to disruptive technologies, construes this inevitable digital change and its impacts on their work and life.? For example, research exists on topics such as the use of social media by workers to share knowledge (Jarrahi, 2017), the impact of digital transformation on employee productivity (Oliver, 2018), the adoption of technology (Murdoch & Fichter, 2017) proliferates, but there is a scarcity of research on understanding the first-hand workers’ perceptions of the digital transformation. Tech leaders cannot drive the transformation nor transform businesses alone. A collaboration between the tech teams and the people working within the organizations is essential (Westerman, 2018). These people should be willingly on board.

This proposed research aims to investigate, through a content analysis approach of organic online conversations and of the own words of the concerned workers, the factors that hold people back from adapting and engaging in the transformation in order to generate recommendations to address them.

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