Why Your Digital Transformation Needs a Human Upgrade
By Robert Tuttle
In the race to amplify your organization’s tech capabilities, don’t forget that employees need amplifiers too. Relying solely on humans to manipulate and interpret data is no longer an option, thanks to the increasing complexity and scale of information. But to move your company forward to its next level of sophistication and success, any digital transformation initiatives must occur in parallel to human talent transformations. The software platforms your employees utilize every day must be designed and built to be extensible and adaptive to the increasing capabilities of machine learning and AI.
We’ve attached various names to the design of such a system, most recently calling it platform engineering. At its core, though, it’s about centering the user toward a more seamless, intuitive experience that equips your employees with ‘superpowers’ for deeper, more meaningful insights.
It’s important to keep in mind that data in and of itself has no direct value. Its significance only emerges when AI systems analyze it to compile, structure, and deduce useful information. Meaningful insights then come from evaluating it in the larger context of human experience, enabling the formulation of conclusions and guidance for subsequent actions. In order to maximize this human-digital partnership, communication between the two must be transparent and trusted, expressed through the software user experience.
Superpower-ing your systems creates new user interaction patterns that can result in reduced learning curves, more optimal decision making, shorter time on tasks, fewer critical errors, broader management scope, and greater scalability of workloads realized as a force multiplier.
Individualized attention
One-size-fits-all simply doesn’t work in an AI-centric world, even beyond the UI layer. For example, a user operating in a planning or analysis role often needs a higher level of abstraction and a lower amount of data and information density than a user monitoring or executing a discrete task or workflow where the details matter.
Designing and enabling systems that complement and empower human users requires a form of “digital empathy” to be encoded into their software. The human user must feel confident to delegate the processing and interpretation of data and information to the AI when the certainty of an outcome is high, and the AI must gracefully revert and defer to the human when certainty is low or unknown. It is within these contextual handoffs between humans and digital systems that the user experience can stumble if not considered and designed for as a whole.
So what superpowers can the right system bestow on your employees?
Augmented Intelligence
Enabling more creativity from employees
In terms of information processing and task management, a super-powered internal system can create scalable workflows through progressive automation systems. Using machine intelligence to observe repetitive processes performed by humans, the system can then generate recommendations for delegating parts of the workload to machines. Running millions of scenario simulations, handling large-scale data input, and performing organizational tasks can be offloaded to AI tools, allowing for more valuable, higher-order roles for humans. Your employees can spend more time on strategic thinking and developing insights, rather than tactical data manipulation.
Data Whisperer
Identifying meaningful patterns amid mountains of data
By improving the signal-to-noise ratio for employees interacting with large amounts of data on a daily basis, you equip them with the ability to coax out hidden truths and insights. This gives them an intuitive grasp of complex data relationships, the ability to find order in chaos, and a talent for predicting trends from subtle cues. Technology becomes both a microscope and a telescope for the user.
To achieve this from a design perspective, ensure that data entities within the same view are correlated and connected, since representing multiple primary information domains within the same screen can lead to cognitive overload for the user.
Clairvoyance
Transparency that builds trust
Black-box solutions are destined to falter, due to compliance issues, integration challenges, and scalability concerns, among others. Fostering a symbiotic relationship between human and machine intelligence, particularly in mission-critical workflows, bestows employees with a ‘third eye’, allowing them to see directly into the inner workings of AI’s decision-making processes. As AI tools foresee a user’s needs and intentions to guide future actions, the user gains confidence in the system and its methods, allowing them to take full advantage of their superpowers in the service of business objectives.
Improved workflows aren’t the flashiest product in your lineup, but they’re the gears that run the business. Taking the time to design employee systems that are human-centered, intentional, and intuitive will positively impact your company’s bottom line for years to come.
With over 25 years of experience as a creative technologist, applied futurist, and award-winning classical clarinetist, Robert blends art and science to craft digital and physical experiences. He has led technology strategy, R&D, solution architecture, and full-stack MVP software development engagements for some of the largest and most recognizable companies in the world, including Microsoft, AT&T, and General Motors. Before joining argodesign in 2021 as Technology Director, Robert held long-term technology leadership positions at frog, United Devices, and Dell. Away from work you can find Robert performing regularly in professional orchestras and as a soloist and chamber musician in his hometown of Austin, Texas.
