Dennis Barker
There's always lots of talk about the changing role of the CIO and what the job will involve in the future. These days there seems to be agreement that the CIO's biggest role — especially as it relates to IT outsourcing — is going to be that of chief business services officer. IT, after all, is a business service now, and the CIO is in charge of it.
Christina Torode at SearchCIO nicely summarizes this development in a piece on three trends shaping the IT organization of tomorrow. As more and more services are outsourced, managing all of those service providers is going to be a big part of the CIO's role, or of someone in his or her department. This service manager "will combine business and technology skills and probably will report to the CIO," Torode writes. According to a research report she draws from, "The Future of Corporate IT," data analytics experts will also be in demand and be an important part of the services team.
But I think there will be another skill required of CIOs and anyone in charge of the provision of services: Managing the IT worker of tomorrow. That is, the robots.
Go ahead and laugh. But I'm thinking about two very real trends here, and if they converge, this prediction won't seem so far-fetched.
The first is the mandate that businesses keep lowering their costs of doing business. Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, wrote on Fortune's blog the other day that even startups in the early stages are expected by their funding boards to have developed a strategy for driving down their labor expenses. This insistence on lowest-cost labor is part of what he calls the U.S. "war on jobs."
Pfeffer points out that North American businesses have lowered their labor expenses through layoffs and outsourcing. The outsourcing part, as we all know, has had positive consequences for IT service providers based in lower-cost locations. Hence, India Inc.
But then what happens? As The Economic Times reported this week:
"After years of scorching profitable growth, Indian tech firms are being asked by top outsourcing customers [Walmart and Home Depot] to reduce rates for back office and software work by up to 15%, threatening to erode their high profit margins...."
So, prices are low, then prices creep up, then buyers want prices to go down. I'm sure some smart people have spreadsheets that predict where the wages paid by outsourcing providers will be in 10 years. But don't you wonder: Where does the labor expense push-down end? Does it reach some natural bottom limit? As the guy used to say on the used-car TV commercials, "How low can you go?"
Eventually, and it won't be in the next few years, but it will happen: IT companies will adopt the use of robotics. "But," you say, "robots can't write software!"
Not so fast there. Some Google technicians have recently been showing off "robot engineers that can program themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can reason about programming and mimic the decisions made by a human engineer."
Granted, there are massive challenges in building an android that can write elegant code. AI has proven very difficult to understand and implement. So, it's going to be a while before your coding partner in Guadalajara is a robot. It's not too much of a time stretch, though, before we could see call-centers staffed by robots. Automated voice-response systems are already a part of life. IBM is working to endow Watson with more sophisticated human-like language-recognition capabilities.
But the thing that really got me thinking about robots this week is the news out of Mexico, where a team of scientists has built a low-cost humanoid-type robot that they claim is the "most advanced" in Latin America. Mex-One cost about $100,000 to build but, its designers say, it is as capable as bots produced in Japan for much, much more.
Low-cost labor, low-cost robotics. Somewhere down the line, the two will meet.
If the CIO of the future wants to stay employed, he or she will have to know how to manage business services, and he or she will also have to know how to manage the teams helping to deliver those services: the robots. The evil, evil robots.
