It’s a business adage that any investment has to be justified by a return, but that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Some spending, whether capital or expenses, is “recurring” in that it represents ongoing spending committed by past projects. “New” spending is what has to be justified, and that includes increases in spending to expand capacity, modernize, and so forth.
Information technology spending has traditionally been broken down into two components, “budget” and “project”. In the heady days of IT investment, the project portion was actually larger than the budget portion, but this hasn’t been true for over thirty years. In the early 1990s, the two were roughly equal, and over time the balance has steadily shifted toward the “budget” category because fewer new projects could be identified. That means that the majority of applications of IT to enhance worker productivity had already been implemented.
But had they? Examination of past trends in IT investment show that there are two gaps in the “we-ran-out-of-projects” theory. One gap is that new IT paradigms have, in the past, invigorated IT spending for a period of time. Each of the past paradigm shifts brought IT “closer” to the workers, meaning that they changed the mechanism by which information empowered workers. The second gap is that IT empowerment has focused on office work. Improvements to non-office worker productivity has been addressed primarily through what’s called “automation”, which includes legacy things like assembly lines and more modern things like industrial robotics. Now, IT is being used increasingly to address “automation improvements”.
The easiest place to find new IT projects would be in filling that first gap, creating a new paradigm to support the office or white-collar workers. The problem here is that “bringing IT closer” to a worker that’s already sitting at a computer is clearly a challenge. Thus, the target for further empowerment of white-collar jobs would logically be workers who aren’t always sitting at the computer, the “mobile worker” or the WFH or “hybrid” worker. We saw, during COVID lockdowns, an increase in IT spending and IT projects aimed at enabling WFH, and that has ebbed since as WFH issues have been addressed and workers have started to move back to the office. Thus, I believe this sort of empowerment would have to focus on mobile workers.
Filling the second gap is more complex for a number of reasons. First, IT alone can’t empower workers whose jobs rely on actually producing a product, moving it around, selling and servicing it. Whether we’re talking about manufacturing or warehousing, industries that support product creation and handing need machinery, and it’s the machinery that’s really being “empowered”. Simple assembly lines move stuff from worker station to worker station. Modern ones move parts into position and even attach them, and so take over more complex tasks. It’s automating these complex tasks that creates an opportunity for a form of IT, what we often call “IoT” or “industrial automation.”
My own work on empowerment revealed something interesting, though. There’s a class of worker that falls somewhere between the office and industrial applications, a sort of “gray collar” worker, and that’s field service personnel. These workers are mobile, usually more mobile than any white-collar mobile workers are. They are not supported by traditional automation because they go to a variable place to do their jobs. Maybe they install things, repair them, adjust them, diagnose them, but their jobs are usually considered “skilled”, and their unit value of labor is actually an average of 2.4 times as high as that of the average office worker, a worker we’ve been “empowering” all along.
Mobile workers and my gray collar types both need what I’ve called point-of-activity empowerment, and that represents what might well be another of those IT paradigm shifts. The traditional office empowerment we’ve seen is really about redefining the job to fit it to the tools. That’s possible because of the kind of output the job produces. Point-of-activity empowerment is about defining the tools to work within the constraints of the job, to support how work must be done. Some of the goals can be supported by adapting current technology, and others require something new.
Sales and support people are examples of mobile workers, and they’re clearly doing things that can be related to field service people’s jobs. Users tell me that “mobile workers” need to have information that’s customized to their activity, and that usually means presenting it in a way that adapts to what they’re doing. Salespeople, for example, would like to have call-on schedules that reflect all of the factors that might play in, such as the schedules of the people being called on, the distance between them, and so forth. They would also like to have their phones play them (text to speech) their notes on the next call to be made, information gathered on the company they’re calling on, etc. This all could be done with fairly traditional software.
Field service people have goals that extend from this scheduling, but still include it. Often what they’re looking for is active support in finding the thing they’re supposed to be installing/servicing, verifying connections or settings, and so forth. The difference between these requirements and those of our mobile-worker-salesperson is that the system has to obtain contextual information in order to present things optimally. Where is the worker, relative to the destination? What do they see versus what should they see? Is the state of the system, as a signaled change is being made, conform to expectations?
The field service empowerment process, then, is real-time linked. Real-time linkage IMHO is an application of “digital twinning”. You create a model of the system your target employee is a part of. You populate the model with sensor data that lets you place all the system’s elements in the real world and maintain accurate knowledge of their state as it pertains to the goal of empowerment. You then use software to both instruct/assist the worker, and to set controllable elements, as needed to achieve your goal.
The important superset of the digital twin is the metaverse, in its own most-general model. Just last week, Nvidia and Microsoft announced a collaboration on Nvidia’s Omniverse Cloud, designed to provide a PaaS platform to develop and deploy an “industrial metaverse” which is an application of my digital-twin metaverse concept. However, this initiative is still a bit presentation-intensive, and I think that the real need is in the other direction. Visualizing via AR/VR is one possible way to reflect a digital twin into the real world, but remember that when you use AR/VR, you’re engaging a human. That means that the framework is useful in instructing/assisting the worker, but not so much in offloading worker tasks.
Still, I think there’s a relationship between a true and general industrial metaverse model and the broad model needed for point-of-activity empowerment. I also think that the gray-collar mission of field service I’ve introduced is a better application of the Nvidia/Microsoft partnership than many (perhaps most) of the true industrial examples. In gray-collar missions, you can’t presume the environment can be fully controlled, so you have to give the worker a very rich set of details on what’s there and what’s expected. Given that the visual sense is our most powerful, AR/VR would be the way to do that.
How much IT spending could a broad empowerment strategy justify? In business IT, my model says that somewhere near $400 billion in incremental spending could be justified. Not only that, the application of contextual computing and digital-twin metaverse to the consumer space would add in another $480 billion, again quoting my model. Note that this spending is the total spending that the benefits would justify given average IRRs, so it would be divided up between hardware, software, and services, with the latter including and likely especially the cloud. Still, this should be enough to get a lot of players interested, if they’re willing to put in the development and/or integration effort needed to assemble all the parts into a glorious and productive whole.
