Smart Machines/Robotics — Implications For HRM/HRTech — Where Do I Begin?

Hi, I’m Naomi, Your HR Tech SmartyPants Robot

Last week I was privileged to deliver a presentation to the top women execs at ADP about the future of HR and HR technology.  Sounds straightforward enough, but it wasn’t.  My presentation wrote itself, and it demanded that I title it: ” A Tale of Two Futures.”

One of those futures I described as extrapolative, and one I described as discontinuous, all of which I’ll describe in a later post.  But the place to start this discussion and series of posts on the impact I believe smart machines and robotics will have on the world of work and on the workforce, not to mention on the HR profession and HR departments, is with the highest level business planning HRM considerations that I’ve been writing/speaking/consulting about since the mid-1980’s.  [Note: For those of you who have worked with the IP I’ve licensed across our industry, the next section should be familiar.]

Until recently, one major thread running through within this business planning process, which connects HRM planning to organization planning, went something like this (clearly this is a massive over-simplification, and my HRM object model notes here go on for many, many pages):

1. What is the nature of the work that must be done to create our products/services?
2. What are the KSAOCs (knowledge, skill, ability and other deployment-related characteristics — my very own term — which humans may possess and which are) needed to do this work?
3. Would we be better off (in terms of costs but also quality, risks, time to market, environmental impacts, and many other factors) doing this work within our organization or buying the results of this work from a 3rd party?
4. For that work which we think is best done by a 3rd party and purchased as results, what are the best mechanisms/sources/terms and conditions/etc. for purchasing this work as results?
5. For that work which we think is best done within our organization, will we be better off (again, in terms of costs but also quality, risks, time to market, environmental impacts, and many other factors) using legal employees (legal here isn’t referring to the specific legal requirements of any particular country — that comes later — but rather the broader definition of employee, which is always defined at the country level) versus contingent workers?
6. For that work which is best done in-house but via contingent workers, what are the best mechanisms/sources/terms and conditions/etc. for contracting with and onboarding effectively(yup! the old days of leaving all of this to procurement are long gone, and we know now that HR must be involved deeply in the whole life cycle of these workers) the necessary contingent workers?
7. For that work which is best done in-house via legal employees, what are the best sources/terms and conditions/etc. for hiring and onboarding effectively the necessary legal employees?
8. …. tons more but that’s enough for now.

Now this same business planning process looks different in some very important ways (again, a massive over-simplification):

1. What is the nature of the work that must be done to create our products/services?
2. What are the KSAOCs (knowledge, skill, ability and other deployment-related characteristics — my very own term — but with a definitional change to make clear that these KSAOCs are independent of their delivery mechanism, which could be human or not) needed to do this work?
3. Would we be better off (in terms of costs but also quality, risks, time to market, environmental impacts, and many other factors) doing this work within our organization or buying the results of this work from a 3rd party?
4. For that work which we think is best done by a 3rd party and purchased as results, what are the best mechanisms/sources/terms and conditions/etc. for purchasing this work as results?
5. For that work which we think is best done within our organization, will we be better off (again, in terms of costs but also quality, risks, time to market, environmental impacts, and many other factors) using legal employees (legal here isn’t referring to the specific legal requirements of any particular country — that comes later — but rather the broader definition of employee, which is always defined at the country level) versus contingent workers versus smart machines versus humanoid robots?
6. For that work which is best done in-house but via contingent workers, what are the best mechanisms/sources/terms and conditions/etc. for contracting with and onboarding effectively(yup! the old days of leaving all of this to procurement are long gone, and we know now that HR must be involved deeply in the whole life cycle of these workers) the necessary contingent workers?
7. For that work which is best done in-house via legal employees, what are the best sources/terms and conditions/etc. for hiring and onboarding the necessary legal employees?
8. For that work which is best done in-house via smart machines, what are the best sources, terms and conditions/etc. for acquiring and onboarding (yes, there are some very minimal onboarding steps needed, e.g. human involvement in “feeding the beast” in the way that IBM’s Watson requires knowledge owners to educate it, but more about that in a later post in this series) the necessary smart machines, most of which effort is best left to procurement because these smart machines are mostly categorized as “plant & equipment?”
9. For that work which is best done in-house via humanoid robots, what are the best sources, terms and conditions/etc. for acquiring and onboarding (and here there’s much more of an onboarding story than with merely smart machines, e.g. showing our new best friend around the facility, assigning it to a team and to specific tasks, ensuring it has the necessary security to access facilities as it moves around doing those tasks, etc.) the necessary humanoid robots?
10. …. tons more but that’s enough for now.

I’ve been thinking about all of this a lot, and from as many angles as my Talmudic training suggests, and I’ll be writing a lot more in this series.  But for now, this is probably enough to send jolts through every HR professional and HRM object modeler among the mishpocheh.  Indeed, the robots are coming, and HR had better think about what role the want/need to take where R2D2 is concerned.