An interesting set of observations from Silicon Collar
While analysts are predicting doom and gloom from automation to other sectors, they themselves continue with a labor and paper intensive model based on dated, static tools like Magic Quadrants and Waves which were designed in previous decades.
Ditto for many academicians who believe MOOC (massively online open courses) will not affect them significantly. Ray Lane, introduced in Chapter 1, who sits on a couple of university boards, does not agree:
“I am not talking Carnegie Melon, which had close to 20,000 applicants for a class of 1,500, or Stanford which is probably twice that. They'll be fine. Stanford could charge $100,000 a year and people will pay it. It's not price sensitive. But way too many other universities are creating their own content, they're teaching in their own classrooms. So at 3,000 sites in the United States, there's a teacher creating a class in physics and teaching physics. We are moving to shared, digital models like a Khan Academy, Coursera or Udacity."
Guess who is excited about such knowledge work automation? The very consultants from Deloitte Consulting, TCS, and others who did the reengineering and ERP projects, many of them disasters, in the first place. And if knowledge automation is so promising, why are these consultants not adopting it for their own people-intensive operations? Similar to the accountants we discussed in Chapter 7, these firms depend on pyramids of young consultants.
Perhaps, the medicine of all these pundits should be taken with a heaping spoonful of "Doctor, Heal Thyself!"
