Monthly Archives: June 2017

June 14, 2017 by Ryan Hagemann and Nicholas Ciuffo

Previously, we discussed the historical tensions inherent in the First Industrial Revolution, and how the rapid pace of technological change contributed to emerging social tensions. In the short-term, the growing pains were significant, as more and more people began moving to cities and experienced firsthand the costs associated with the advent of a more industrialized economy. However, there were also long-term costs that resulted from the inaction of early 19th century policymakersspecifically, the rise of ideologies that eroded peoples trust and confidence in liberal institutions. The Niskanen Centers Will Wilkinson expressed this sentiment well in a post-election blog on the need to revitalize liberalism:

Liberal norms and institutions are under constant corrosive pressure from natural, deep-seated illiberal tendencies that weve only recently managed to suppress and/or harness at all. These latent atavistic instincts cannot be effectively neutralized in general or in advance because they constantly find expression in novel, unpredictably powerful guises as our culture, economy, and technology evolves.

As our technology evolves, it is inevitable we will continue to encounter corrosive pressure from illiberal tendencies that speak to peoples fears, rather than their aspirations. While we cannot possibly prepare for all future scenarios that might degrade our institutions, there are a number of issues that we can begin addressing that may yet help ensure we avoid the same pitfalls experienced during the First Industrial Revolution.

The Issues the Robots Cant Solve

There are a number of tangential policy areas that will have an impact on how quickly and easily people adapt to the changing technological landscape. Some, like ensuring a robust social safety net and education reform, have been focal points of attention. Others, like the cost of housing, have largely flown under the radar. All of them, however, are important to the broader conversation of automation and the future of work.

Reforming Housing Policies

Impediments to economic growth arent solely tethered to dwindling returns from productivity gains. For example, some believe that restrictions on the supply of housing in dense urban centers where total factor productivity is high (in particular, Silicon Valley) has led to significantly lowered aggregate economic growth. Urban enclaves on the coasts are a significant source of economic activity. By some estimates, U.S. cities with populations exceeding 150,000 contribute to almost 85 percent of GDP. These are the areas with the most potential for high-income earnings, but high costs of living can have a significant deterrence effect for citizens seeking to capitalize on those opportunities. As Greg Ferenstein recently noted:

In one of the most productive cities in America, San Francisco, average rent has rocketed past $3,500 a month, mostly because anti-skyscraper residents have made it illegal to build apartments in half of the city. Getting a permit to build a tall apartment complex can take upwards of 10 years because neighborhood groups have broad regulatory authority to delay construction.

As a result, talented engineers are fleeing the city, and their dreams for creating the next Facebook or Google are going with them. Not everyone needs to live in San Francisco, but its much easier to build high-growth companies in places with a dense concentration of talent. The fewer people who can afford to live in big cities, the less innovative America will be.

If fewer people can afford to take advantage of the network effects in major metropolitan areas, their ability to take advantage of better paying jobs is at risk. Every lost opportunity for an individual is also a potential loss for society, with fewer people participating in, and contributing to, the innovation economy. Diminished potential for innovation could stymie economic growth, while exacerbating social tensions. Much of the modern housing issue in American cities echoes those of early 19th century Britain. As Robert C. Allen wrote in a 2007 Oxford University working paper:

As British cities expanded, growing labour demanded bid up the price of housing and land, and much of the income gain was transferred to urban landowners. Faced with a rising cost of housing, workers responded by reducing their consumption: the result was overcrowding. The were limits as to how far this process could be pushed, and those limitations meant that rising rents translated into a rising share of income spent on housing.

According to a report published by the Californias Legislative Analysts Office (LAO), a major roadblock to meeting housing demands in Californias most sought-after coastal neighborhoods (Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa AnaAnaheim) has to do with resistance from existing residents. Fear of negative impacts on their home values combined with perceived negative complications related to increased development contribute to hostile attitudes towards developing land for residential purposesthe Not In My Backyard, or NIMBY, effect.

So-called growth control policies also play a role in limiting the development of housing in Californias coastal communities. According to the same LAO report, two-thirds of California cities have growth control policies. Policies such as limiting the number of homes built in a given year or limiting the height of buildings, place a physical limitation on the ability of developers to meet the demand for housing in these highly sought after regions.

Policy reform in this space will be complicated due to the hyperlocal nature of housing policy. The power to reform restrictive zoning laws is often in the hands of those who directly benefit from manipulating the housing supply through such mechanisms. Implementing housing policy reforms at the state level may decouple zoning regulations from local politics aimed at restricting housing supply.

New Approaches to Education

Regardless of how the future of work unfolds, investing in Americas talent today will be essential to reaping the economic benefits of the world of tomorrow. Pursuing policies that incentivize STEM education programs in primary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions will be essential in maintaining an innovative workforce that will be equipped to deal with rapid technological change. Perhaps more importantly, however, a reassessment of the role of certified education in society is needed. That means focusing on different means of accrediting the workforce, outside of the traditional four year university.

Baileys article cites an excellent report by Michael Mandel and Bret Swanson. It correctly identifies the potential of the information technology and digital sectors to radically transform physical industries in the coming years. They argue that it is necessary to upgrade our education and workforce development systems to dramatically expand the number of Americans who can help create, and thrive in, the digitally-enabled economy. Reducing the cost of higher education while boosting collaboration between higher education and industry leaders and improving the relevance of curricula are also cited as important public policy goals. Promoting more skills-based certification and training programs, especially through apprenticeships and trade schools, are necessary to ensuring workers are better prepared (and at a cheaper cost) for the emerging jobs in the digital economy.

Consider Germany, where according to The Wall Street Journal, roughly half of high-school graduates opt for high-octane apprenticeships rather than college degrees. Through a system of collaboration between employers, educators, and the federal government, students in Germany are afforded the option of developing in-demand skills via an apprenticeship arrangement with an employer. Apprentices participate in a dual-training program where they split their time between on-site training and in-classroom instruction. Funding for this scheme is low-cost to the state. Federal agencies provide public funds for the development and promotion of apprenticeship schemes, whereas the majority of the costs involved with training and educating an apprentice is the responsibility of the employer.

Heeding these calls can help fundamentally alter the future of work for future generations. Of more immediate concern, however, is the largest growing sector of the active labor market: older workers. According to a report produced by the New America Foundation in partnership with Bloomberg, one quarter of the workforce will be 55 or older by 2024.

Investments in opportunities for lifelong-learning programs will be necessary to enable those most at risk of being displaced by automation, thus allowing the older generation to participate in a new economy shaped by technological advancement. Incentivizing lifelong education for this at-risk population through income tax credits or grants will be necessary to inspire and motivate those who might otherwise be reluctant, unwilling, or unable to adapt to the changing nature of work.

Traditional education policy has focused on delivering resources for young students to obtain an equitable education regardless of where they live or their economic background. This same line of thinking will need to be adapted to provide an equitable education regardless of age. Providing resources for local community colleges and universities to offer new and innovative curricula, such as online MOOCs or apprenticeship learning, will provide diverse and affordable pathways for older workers to pursue new opportunities.

Social Safety Net Provisions

Although, the United States has fairly robust social welfare programs, they can certainly be improved. A report published by the Executive Office of the White House points out that domestic spending on active labor market programs amounts to just 0.1 percent of GDP. The Organization of Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) average, by contrast, is 0.6 percent. Some tout the need for retraining programs or incentivizing employers to invest in their workforce through a Worker Training Tax Credit.

While training or retraining our workforce to be productive in an economy powered by automation is a possible solution, there is potential to leave out segments of the population that are educationally disadvantaged. It is important to consider policies that will enable this segment of the population to transition into new work or to better plan for leaving the workforce.

In an interview with the MIT Technology Review, economic historian Joel Mokyr notes that in the modern capitalist system your occupation is your identity. Policies should help enable Americans to maintain their ability to function as productive members of society during their transition from low-skill labor to new jobs powered by automation. This can be achieved by improving the social insurance system.

One such proposal, recently floated by Rep. Ro Khanna, is to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The Niskanen Centers Samuel Hammond has written in support of Rep. Khannas proposal, arguing that:

major disruptions to work on the horizon, with more and more routine jobs being automated by robots and artificial intelligence. The result will not be a lack of jobs, but rather a challenging period of transition to new jobs that leverage uniquely human capabilities like caring and emotional intelligence.

As Hammond has previously noted, expanding the EITC, in contrast to worker retraining programs like Trade Adjustment Assistance, can be a powerful incentive mechanism for both workers and firms to aggressively seek each other out. Mitigating the potential negative effects of automation on Americas labor force will require a thoughtful combination of expanding or augmenting current social nets while being open to policies that will benefit older workers participating in the workforce.

Conclusion

Robots probably arent going to eat all the jobs; at least not anytime soon.

Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon policymakers and technology analysts to start grappling with the potential outcomes of a more automated society. Arguing for doing nothing simply because the gains from automation could outweigh the potential costs ignores the inherent uncertainty of future events. If the labor displacement effects from automation are far greater than we anticipate, the unraveling of institutional trust could lead to unintended consequences that actually forestall future progress, while producing greater market uncertainty.

A dynamic economy that embraces innovation is, on net, a good thing. We shouldnt forestall a future of limitless possibilities for the contentment of the present. But that isnt an excuse for ignoring the many practical hurdles that exist between the present and that future. When Bailey and others argue that their opponents lack of imagination blinds them to how people will use technology to conjure millions of occupations now undreamt of, it fails to acknowledge those roadblocks that currently exist, and which may be erected in the future.

None of this is to suggest we should back off innovation and digitization of the economy. Quite the opposite: if anything, we should aim for more innovation and digitization of the economy. What we cannot do, however, is simply hope for the best. We need to focus on how best to mitigate the risks associated with automation of the economy, and soon.

More here:

21st Century Automation: Policy Responses - Niskanen Center (press release) (blog)

Los Angeles Countys Human Resources Department serves 108,000 employees.

About six years ago, we embarked on a transformative effort with a simple goal: Automate all things HR, Human Resources CIO Murtaza Masood told Techwire.

The department wanted to automate as many activities as possible and enable employees to handle many of their own activities, even on Web-based and mobile apps.

The entire effort is centered on a CGI Advantage enterprise resource planning system.

We tie the processes and interactions together and gain insights into where the workloads are coming from, where the growth of certain types of transactions and processes are coming from, and then look behind the curtain and make managerial decisions based on that, Masood said.

Adobe Eforms is used for employees daily HR transactions, while Documentum is our business process engine, Masood said.

The department spends about $14 million a year on IT, and about 100 employees in HR and the Department of Internal Services work on the project daily.

More recently, the county has launched an application withNeogovto create a cohesive applicant tracking system that unifies applications, testing and recruitment processes. The program was guided by the department to maintain compliance standards.

We partnered with them so they enhanced their product to meet our needs, Masood said. Being our size and being that we are governed by a very specific set of civil service rules, we felt that no product on the market met our needs to enable our compliance.

The unified retention and recruitment system went live in May and has already won two awards.

The system includes communication methods to schedule interviews and exams. It also includes a public-facing appeals site, where applicants can lodge complaints and seek corrections if they feel unfairly treated.

Next, the county hopes to digitize all employee records, making them transferable across all departments.

This article was originally published on Techwire.

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Los Angeles Turns to Automation to Streamline HR - Government Technology

TechCrunch

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SoftWear Automation raises $4.5 million to build robots that sew ... - TechCrunch

BENGALURU: Tech Mahindra has undertaken a slew of measures to reposition itself as a digital transformation company amid continuous downsizing by IT organisations in India.

The IT services giant is reskilling employees through a three-tier internal training programme structure and collaboration with online education companies such as EdCast, Pluralsight and Coursera, among others.

Atul Kunwar, chief technology officer, Tech Mahindra told ET that some 90,000 of their global IT staff are being trained internally for digital transformation courses."We have around 30 people in the reskilling department whose purpose is to look for new courses. We push our staff for courses keeping in mind the direction the industry is going."

Kunwar felt automation is inevitable in repetitive jobs and reskilling is a priority. "Today, education has to be self-driven and the organisation's role is to provide access. Areas such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), data analytics, Internet of Things and machine learning (exist), wherein the current workforce can train themselves in a slew of courses that are out there for future prospects."

The company is open to increasing investment in the internal startup programme, though Kunwar pointed out that a breakthrough application is still awaited. ET had reported that Jagdish Mitra, who heads the Growthfactories initiative for startups, said they have reached out to venture capital firms and equity players to get external fun ding for three startups that had been created internally.

Tech Mahindra is also in the process of expanding the BPO and telecom operations in Ireland. "Ireland is a very important destination for us. We plan to expand research and development in BPO and telecom area. We have even set up a new 50-member telecom technology centre in Dublin and shall scale that up too," said Kunwar.

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Tech Mahindra reskilling employees amid automation - Economic Times

For IT admins, the maintenance of networking, storage and compute is an overwhelming task -- especially as data center technology becomes more complex. Fortunately, automation can ease the burden of tedious and time-consuming management tasks, leaving room for admins to focus on other projects.

Data center operators can use automation practices and tools in a variety of a different ways, from network configuration to server documentation. Explore these five ways IT infrastructure automation can ease your day-to-day routine.

While traditional networks relied heavily on hardware, modern networks incorporate more software and automation to reduce manual deployment, configuration and management efforts. Automation can also reduce human error, thus improving security and network uptime.

Network provisioning traditionally requires admins to manually configure each device, but software enables them to automatically provision network resources across workloads and thousands of devices. With automation, admins can associate specific network and security policies with applications and devices that can follow them as they migrate. Admins can also enable the network to identify specific traffic types and then prioritize resources accordingly and implement policies to automatically change bandwidth.

Network automation, however, is a challenge to implement in most enterprise data centers. There are a limited number of suppliers with products that can help begin to automate manual processes. Also, a lack of clear architecture and universal standards makes it difficult for enterprises to jump on the network automation bandwagon.

As data center complexity increases, policy-based management has become an important skill for data center management. An admin, for example, can apply multiple policies to a single VM to meet needs around security, performance, availability and disaster recovery. These policies drive IT infrastructure automation and reduce manual effort.

Two especially common areas for this kind of automation are VM availability and applications. Admins can create availability policies for web servers that require a minimum number of VMs, for example, or policies that allow those VMs to run on local (rather than shared) storage to cut costs. Admins can also tag VMs to categorize them as being part of a certain application and then apply automated policies for disaster recovery, replication and more.

Hardware and applications aren't the primary reasons behind system downtime -- rather, it's due to system administrators' mistakes. This is partially because many admins still use command-line interfaces (CLI), which don't provide much of a buffer between what an admin types and how the system responds. As an alternative to this risky method, admins should drive IT infrastructure automation through a library of scripts. Unlike the CLI, running a script will always produce the same outcome and leave no room for human error.

Orchestration systems also help avoid downtime by provisioning script outcomes, patches, updates and code rollouts. Admins can find these features in DevOps orchestration systems, such as Chef Automate and Terraform. Organizations with hybrid cloud deployments should consider orchestration tools, such as Electric Cloud and Platform9, to automate these tasks across different cloud platforms.

Documenting and taking inventory of each detail of your data center's hardware is extremely tedious, but automation can eliminate some of the frustration. However, automating the documentation process via scripts is most valuable for smaller organizations with limited IT deployments, since the process can get complicated when too many diverse systems are involved.

Use custom scripts, such as Windows Server PowerShell, to perform system inventories and capture server configurations -- but first verify that the scripts work and collect the information you need. You can sometimes update an existing script to add more inventory or write new scripts from scratch. To prevent "unintended consequences" -- or a change in one system that disrupts other systems -- use change management features, such as Microsoft's Desired State Configuration, to bring hardware and software components back to a known configuration.

When you operate a data center in a Linux environment, there are a variety of options to customize and enable IT infrastructure automation. For example, CFEngine enables admins to automate large-scale configurations and can automatically fix system errors and configuration inconsistencies as it finds them. Its many features include package update automation, remote execution, patch management, configuration management and much more.

Automate for increased IT productivity

Automation can help to manage multicloud environments

The effect of automation on the IT skills gap

More:

IT infrastructure automation lessens the load for data center teams - TechTarget

The holiday shopping season is right around the corner, and warehouses and distribution centers will soon be bustling to get online orders out the door. And if past Black Friday sales figures are any indication, holiday order fulfillment numbers could reach an all-time high this year.

According to data from Adobe Digital Insights, Black Friday 2016 set a record $3.34 billion in online sales, a 21.6% increase over 2015. As more orders come into the warehouse, the burden of fulfillment falls to warehouse management and staff, who must deal with a higher number of SKUs and larger, more complex orders.

The challenges of the holidays take a profound toll on warehouses that employ manual order fulfillment processes, requiring staff to run up and down the aisles to pick products and pack orders for shipment. During times of routine volumes these operations are labor intensive and time consuming, and the strain only multiplies during peak season. For companies struggling to keep up manually with holiday demand, it may be time to consider warehouse automation.

Below are three ways that automation can streamline warehouse operations and ease the burden of holiday order fulfillment:

Companies with automated warehouses typically have both a Warehouse Management System (WMS) and a Warehouse Control System (WCS), often two discrete applications working together to manage inventory and move products. Recently however, more companies are turning to a Warehouse Execution System (WES), which combines the functionality of WMS and WCS into a single application. A WES offers the inventory management, storage optimization and traceability features of a WMS, and the automation control components of a WCS. It provides a real-time view of material handling equipment and personnel to all levels of an organization.

A WES is especially useful for fulfilling large, complex holiday orders with multiple products. In such cases, products within a single order may be dispersed throughout the warehouse, requiring numerous movements to retrieve everything. With control of material handling equipment, such as an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS), and oversight over inventory, a WES optimally marries products to customer orders regardless of complexity while minimizing the number of movements needed to fulfill the order. With fewer moves, orders are more accurate and get out the door faster, keeping holiday shoppers happy and the warehouse running smoothly.

Companies typically hire temporary warehouse staff to accommodate the holiday surge in customer orders. With a WES, they dont need to rely as heavily on additional resources because it makes processes more efficient and coordinates automation so fewer associates are needed. This allows companies to extend the workday beyond normal shift hours, lightening the next days workload and getting ahead of manual tasks to meet heavy holiday demand.

By significantly reducing the need for temporary staff, companies save money and resources. The ability to handle everyday activities as well as increased warehouse activity during peak times is a fundamental part of an automated systems design.

Warehouses are not the only players in the supply chain that struggle during the holiday season. Carriers also stretch their resources and put fleets to the test. Theyre not only transporting a higher volume of orders, but meeting tighter delivery timeframes. And as always, the timeliness of deliveries is critical to customer satisfaction.

Warehouses can do their part in accelerating time to delivery through automation. A WES has built-in order planning processes which allow shipment planners and dock coordinators to determine inventory and transportation availability and compare them to order demand. With the speed and accuracy of an automated system, companies can prepare orders in the proper sequence often just hours before a truck arrives. In a more conventional operation, this process needs to be done much further in advance and the space needed to stage these orders increases. Conversely, an automated system reduces the truck dwell time during the order fulfillment process.

The challenges of holiday order fulfillment will not ebb with time but only increase as more people turn to ecommerce to complete their shopping. More than likely, this year will deliver a new record for peak online sales and holiday order fulfillment. Therefore, growing companies with manual warehouses that are worried about keeping up should consider automation in 2017.

Dave Williams is Director of Software and Solutions Delivery for Westfalia Technologies

The rest is here:

3 Ways Automation Can Ease Holiday Order Fulfillment - Multichannel Merchant (blog)