Digital Business Today: Where is it heading?

Editor's Notes

• #3: Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will. Despite having an increasingly clear understanding of the skills needed in a world where humans work side by side with machines, 49 percent of our respondents told us they do not have a plan to cultivate them. AI, robotics, and automation have gained a rapidly expanding foothold in the workplace, faster than many organizations ever expected. While organizations are increasingly using these technologies to automate existing processes, true pioneers are radically rethinking work architecture to maximize the value of both humans and machines— creating new opportunities to organize work more effectively and to redefine the human workforce’s skills and careers.
• #4: DIGITAL competency is in high demand, but so are soft skills, according to the 2019 Emerging Jobs in Malaysia Report by LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network. The findings underscore the demand for jobs which require hybrid skills, primarily to help organisations in Malaysia navigate their digital transformation journey. LinkedIn analysed millions of unique, user-input job titles from the last five years, and found that while the top five emerging jobs are all related to technology, many of them require management and communications skills. Their actual roles are varied and diverse, reflecting a labour market that values talent with a hybrid set of complementary skills. “Our Emerging Jobs Report highlights the reality that new jobs are emerging more rapidly than at any other time in history. Traditional roles have evolved into hybrids that did not exist five years ago. While the top emerging jobs for Malaysia are all related to technology, many of them require soft skills such as management and communications skills, making them hybrids of new and traditional roles,” said Feon Ang vice president of Talent and Learning Solutions for APAC at LinkedIn.
• #5: Framed another way, these are the skills that employees could consider the most worth learning in 2019. LinkedIn Learning editor Paul Petrone wrote in a blog post this week that 57% of senior leaders on the platform today say soft skills are more critical to their businesses than hard skills. At the same time, there are definitely spikes in job postings recruiting for prospective hires with specialized training and skills revolving around A.I. and cloud computing. That’s just the reality of the business world today. But LinkedIn suggests that digital workplaces are producing new needs and uses for “old” skill sets. Podcasts are a prime example of a digital medium growing exponentially relying on a number of established verticals, from audio production to marketing.
• #6: Start cultivating the right skills before you make a change Typically, when we think of data scientists, we think of people who excel at crunching numbers and can handle large sets of data. But a data scientist is also someone that genuinely loves learning and helping organizations improve through data-driven decisions. To get started, you’ll need to develop any missing hard skills, which may include statistics and analysis, machine learning, and understanding Hadoop. But you’ll also need to possess excellent critical thinking, persuasive communication, and problem-solving skills. There are many resources around the web to help you get started, as well as online courses and data science bootcamps that can help boost your skills in no time. The important thing to remember is that, as a data scientist, you must continuously develop new skills and always be on the lookout for new challenges and opportunities. Proving that you are someone who can constantly teach yourself new skills will also come across when the time comes to interview for a data science position and send a positive signal to the company interested in hiring you that you have what it takes to succeed in a constantly evolving role. According to Paul Petrone, editor of LinkedIn Learning, this year's list reflects a change in employers' priorities. "Interestingly, the newcomers to our list were uniquely human traits: Among soft skills, creativity and adaptability joined the list for the first time, and among hard skills, people management was a new addition," he tells CNBC Make It via email. "While digital skills like cloud computing and artificial intelligence topped the list of hard skills companies need most, the emergence of these three new skills suggests that employers recognize the importance of embracing modern technologies as well as recognizing those things technology can't do: connect with other people, engage in out-of-the-box thinking and quickly adapt to new priorities or problems.” By paying attention to in-demand skills like these, workers can make sure they remain in-demand among employers.
• #7: Careers in this century may follow an upward arc, with progression and promotion at various times—but they will look nothing like the simple stair-step path of generations ago. In the 21st century, careers are no longer narrowly defined by jobs and skills but through experiences and learning agility. The ongoing transformation of work, the need for people and organizations to constantly upgrade capabilities, and shifts in employee preferences demand new approaches to learning, job design, performance management, and career development. Instead of emphasizing the need for specific titles and experience, organizations are shifting towards a focus on the skills that a potential employee may bring. At tech companies like Facebook, this is especially true. "Skills really matter the most,"Janelle Gale, Facebook's vice president of human resources, tells CNBC Make It. The United States is currently experiencing one of the tightest labor markets in history and many say that the country is currently facing a skills gap. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. currently has over 7 million unfilled jobs. This tight labor market has led many companies to become more open-minded when considering candidates. Companies including Google, Apple, IBM and Bank of America no longer require applicants to have a college degree. Instead of emphasizing the need for specific titles and experience, organizations are shifting towards a focus on the skills that a potential employee may bring. At tech companies like Facebook, this is especially true. "Skills really matter the most,"Janelle Gale, Facebook's vice president of human resources, tells CNBC Make It. Her advice for workers interested in landing a job at an organization like Facebook is to focus on skills and apply — even if your resume does not exactly match the job description. "We actually value skills over experience in the grand scheme of things," she says. "Apply if you have the relevant skills even if you don't have the right experience, because we're looking underneath the surface for what's really going to matter here and that's what skills you can bring to the table."
• #10: Consider a data scientist in 2010. Key skill sets were knowing logistic and linear regression, and conversant with base SAS and MS Excel. Now, if we bring this data scientist of 2018 without any significant upgrades on tools and technique, he/she can face hard time finding data scientist job. With good certainty it can be said that even though the data science stream will stay up and running for long term, the roles and responsibilities of these jobs are up for big changes. People who have challenges upgrading to these new roles and responsibilities will face strong setbacks in progressing in career. Given the young workforce in data science field, skill set match is not a concern over short term as most of the people working in this field have recently picked up knowledge in latest tools and technique. However, as the field gets old so does the workforce and skill set mismatch within data science domain is definitely possible if this workforce is not able to upgrade their skill set while managing their daily jobs.
• #11: Data science for humans: the consumers of the output are decision makers like executives, product managers, designers, or clinicians. They want to draw conclusions from data in order to make decisions such as which content to license, which sales lead to follow, which medicine is less likely to cause an allergic reaction, which webpage design will lead to more engagement or more purchases, which marketing email will yield higher revenue, or which specific part of a product user experience is suboptimal and needs attention. These data scientists design, define, and implement metrics, run and interpret experiments, create dashboards, draw causal inferences, and generate recommendations from modeling and measurement. Data science for machines: here the consumers of the output are computers which consume data in the form of training data, models, and algorithms. Examples of the work products of these data scientists are: recommendation systems which recommend what shirt a customer might like or what medicine a physician should consider prescribing based on a designed optimization function, such as optimizing for customer clicks or for minimizing readmission rates to the hospital. Depending on the engineering background of these data scientists, these work products are either deployed directly to the production system, or if they are prototypes they are handed off to software engineers to help implement, optimize and scale them.
• #12: Under duress, leaders and their teams often lose confidence in their ability to make decisions, which leads to operational inefficiencies, performance setbacks and competing operational goals. Strategic focus loses out to chasing any way to make a buck. Chaotic leadership teams miss opportunities to predict and mobilize for change. They will end up reacting to change instead, which leaves them without strategic focus. Change is not optional, and the challenges organizational leaders confront are complex. Add to the complexity the fact that business changes and challenges occur suddenly and simultaneously, and it is no wonder chaos ensues. 
• #13: “Digital disruption” – a buzzword that’s not just imprinted on every CIO’s mind, but is here to rule and how! A wave of change is looking to redefine the very way businesses function, changing the outlook of digital strategists and technology leaders world over. Users right from changing their preferences of using mobile apps and switching to virtual assistants to consumers preferring to shop in augmented reality, the speculations about Digital is out rightly bold yet exciting.  The Rein of Digital Disruption, like an undercurrent is already on…. Point 6: In the rise of the digital giants, such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon, these companies are shifting the dynamics of how people purchase things, where they go for information and indeed how they make some of the more critical decisions in their lives. Little is more common than the act of purchasing items for our own benefit. And yet, the use of conversational user interfaces, such as Amazon's Alexa, to buy items or to give us daily briefings begins to alter the very lifestyles of people day to day. Within the business community, Google has already revolutionized how we categorize and retrieve information or market ourselves. But few would have thought 10 years ago that Google would revolutionize transportation, and yet the Google car has many businesses asking themselves what the future of their car fleets might be. And even in education, we find that we have altered what it means to be literate. In the past, those who could read extensively were considered literate. Now, it is those who can search. The mundane nature of search has risen to be the foundation of information discovery and research today. Think about doing laundry, visiting your grandmother, dining with a client, getting to another city, baking a cake or riding a bicycle. Mobile apps and payments, smart agents (such as Amazon Alexa), and digital ecosystems (such as Apple HomeKit, WeChat Utility and City Services) will make the digital giants part of many activities we do as individuals. The physical world is coming "online": Cars, items in the home (such as appliances) and assets in the workplace (such as hospital equipment and industrial assets) will all get connected. Point 3: New audio-centric technologies, such as Apple's AirPods, Google Home and Amazon's Echo, are making access to dialogue-based information ubiquitous and spawning new platforms based on "voice first" interactions. By eliminating the need to use one's hands and eyes for browsing, vocal interactions extend the utility of web sessions to contexts such as driving, cooking, walking, socializing, exercising, operating machinery and so forth. As a result, the share of waking hours devoid of instant access to online resources will approach zero. Point 2: Many brands are finding that their mobile apps are not paying off. These apps are not delivering the level of adoption and customer engagement that companies expected. The number of apps available in the Apple/Android app stores is so high — at least 2 million in each store — that discovery is a huge impediment to adoption. The cost of application support, not only in maintenance, upgrades and customer care, but also in marketing to drive downloads, throw into disarray the original ROI calculations. Brands are investing to build presence in consumer messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger and iMessage, to reach customers in the apps where they spend a high percentage of their time. https://www.gartner.com/binaries/content/assets/events/keywords/cio/ciode5/top_strategic_predictions_fo_315910.pdf