Where does your body end and the digital begin?
Many of us do not have a clear answer to this yet. While the movement of digital began quite early in the seventies, digitalism is a religion today, 50 years hence. Covid-kaal has pushed this new religion deeper into our psyche, so much so that every breath and every step you take in the modern day is a digital one. Digitalism is the new ‘ism’ in our lives for sure.
What’s more, it seems to seamlessly embrace and include both segments of the early ‘isms’ that divided the world into two, capitalism and communism. Think about it. How many of you are on WhatsApp? That answers it all. You are one among the 300 million in India who are on WhatsApp. And then let’s sub-slice the WhatsApp mass of people amidst us into the now banned TikTok (120 million), Instagram (88 million), Facebook (280 million) and Twitter (13 million) clusters of social media. Add to it the e-commerce vehicles of Amazon, Flipkart and more. Add every app of the social and utility kind as well, and you have a veritable goldmine of ‘isms’ of the digital kind to talk about.
Apps and their killer applications of every kind apart, digital and zero-touch is the new mantra for the new world ahead of us. The physical is passé. The physical is considered “not-so-safe” even. I want to check into a hotel in Delhi, and this is what I do today. I look for a room on my phone. I find one, I check on prices, compare more than one in the same location, book a room, pay for it online, and get a confirmation back. I land in Delhi, there is a car waiting for me from the hotel. The driver checks my temperature and seats me in my compartment within the car.
He drives to the hotel with a mask and music. We reach the hotel, I walk through the glass doors that recognise my barcode booking seamlessly, and I follow the online map to my room. The elevator is unmanned. I reach my room, open the door with my e-key on the app and there I am in a cocoon of my own. Everything has gone digital. Human interfaces considered very important are all done with for now. Hotels are going to gradually discover the merit of less-touch and less-interface sooner than later. As humans lose jobs, digitalism and its many avatars will gain traction and profit.
As airports, airlines, hotels, restaurants, cafes, the retail trade of every kind and lots more adopt the new protocols of the electronic and digital, people are going to progressively become less important to businesses than machines, mechanisation and the electronic protocol. The animated businesses of yore, manned by smiling faces and handshakes, go zero-touch and non-human. Now the key question is a simple one. Is this going to be a temporary reaction to the environment of fear of the virus that seems to govern our lives for now? What happens when all this is done and dusted with? What happens when the virus has gone or has been very quickly and efficiently dealt with by a vaccine or a complete cure by and large?
The logical business answer seems to say it all very simply. Water will find its own level after the Covid-19 virus has been dealt with. Decisions by every business to automate, create zero-touch interfaces and quickly remove the human being from the front-end of it all, will be taken on spreadsheets that dictate the bottom line. Whatever looks economical will be adopted by the savvy. People then become back-end resources and machines front-end resources. The world turns turtle. In the old days, machines and systems and processes were the back end. Today, it’s the right reverse.
So where did my job go? People will need to do a quick audit of the kind of jobs they hold. How front-ended is your competence? One needs to very quickly do a crude and rude competence check as well. Compare what you do at your job to what a machine does and can do. Do a quick, cruel but real audit. Can a machine actually replace you at optimal cost? Can the machine offer what you offer at a more acceptable level as far as the user of your service is concerned? The answer to that question will tell you what you must do to reorient your job, career, domain and more.
Corporate organisations and managements will do this assessment all the time, albeit behind the solid curtains of confidentiality. Today, more and more are being pushed to do this, even if they don’t want to do it. At the sensitive end of the jobholder, I think it is time to take the front-foot approach and do this assessment proactively to be prepared and to be caught with the right foot forward. To corrupt an old aphorism, there are three kinds of people in the world. The one that sees change and changes. The one that sees change and waits for change to change him. And the third is the one who sees change and wonders what happened. Which one do you want to be?
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)