Unlock the human potential with LaFutura

Join La Futura task force and contribute to the new paradigms on work models.

The inception of this endeavour started 4 years ago: I was in Saudi Arabia and I sparked a first reflection called, the man and the machine that later evolved to a book chapter.

This is the past.

Let’s look to the future.

The challenges humanity is facing

Working patterns

• Work productivity tend to increase if interconnected tools are implemented, however, there is still a substantial path of convergence ahead, in terms of a user-centric computing model that is adaptive enough into a preferred user interface considering the work context. We a are still far away of: “I make my user interface”.
• Driven by cost pressure, companies are disinvesting in office space and encouraging the workforce to work from home, however, there are signals that not all the work can be done virtually with impact on creativity and relationship networks.
• Reduce cognitive overload by determination of what, when and how information should be presented (format, time, syntax).

Talent skills and inclusion

• Greater ownership over information can improve assessment formative power for a range of the next generation of digital skills to be achieved via adaptive training.
• Shifting social norms and affecting the collective mindset can be more effective towards combat bias that solely focusing on diversity and inclusion training.

New societal normal

• The level on uncertainty related with economic sifts can bring from an irregular adoption of advanced technology and automation to social polarization, populism, government protectionism or the rising of alternative economic models gather interest.
• Are we going to move towards total information awareness, where privacy is gone in exchange of security and automation emerges or are we be organized by creating new “tribes” that emerge with profoundly different views of the society?

There is nothing new on the “new normal”

Change is multidimensional and interconnected

Solely understanding the technological impact on humans and how soon we might be outcompeted is not enough. As such, this task force aims to expand the analysis spectrum to these areas, which present a more complete and diversified understanding of the challenges to be addressed. We are proposing the creation of these working groups to enhance the vision of the future of human potential.

• Job creation or workless future & social protection – as economies become increasingly automated, their general ability to create new jobs needs to be redefined, or to pursue a new welfare model which people will not have a job and economic growth is redistributed. On the other hand, organizations & governments need to be aware of where talent is headed and how they can shape the workforce and ensure a just transition.
• Productivity, and well-being – productivity and satisfaction vary by experience, role, and society context. Not all the work can be done virtually, and there is still a considerable amount of effort to maintain a work-life balance, and the ability for workers to cope with distributed demands for near-immediate availability, out of what had been considered the “working hour period”.
• Human augmentation – people and technology cooperation to enhance the way work is performed, considering human centered design for human capabilities – cognitive and physical augmentation – and intrinsic limitations.
• Virtual universe, twin worlds, and physical spaces – recreation of immersive collaborative work environments that convey a sense of real-world presence, the rise of avatars. The impact on office spaces redesign and collaboration in a hybrid environment and the downstream changes on urbanism and cities regeneration with diminishing presence of buildings.

And last and probably as important is the aspect of diversity and inclusion. I lived in South Africa for 4 years and when I studied the country history, I discovered the meaning of the coat of arms. The motto of the coat of arms, written in the Khoisan language of the San people (a tribe), means: “diverse people unite or people who are different join together”.

• Ethics, privilege, and being inclusive – which is related with influencing the shift in social norms and affecting the collective mindset might be more effective towards combating barriers for people to openly participate in the labor market.

Contribute to what the human potential might become to be

The task force will be organized by these domains. Join the one that you fell you can contribute the most.

Joining the task force will not only expose you to work with a global diversified talent network, but it also helps to be part of a working group that promotes inclusive divergent thinking and ultimately, will address the unique challenge to understand the relationships between the forthcoming societal construct and to explore strategies to enable a future of prosperity.

• You can contribute to a change in society.
• You can influence governments and decision makers on public policies design.
• You can make people to become ready to address the labor shift.
• You can sponsor the workplace a better place, by creating a symbiosis with technology.

Don’t try to predict the future, be the change and make the future happen.

I look forward to work with all of you.

More information at: LaFutura – Global Trend Network

Realizing Human Potential in the COVID-19 Context

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the incomes of self-employed people have been affected and companies are starting to retrench workers, on the other hand, it is necessary to support workers especially on net new core competencies, is what makes somebody adaptable in the face of changes, as work from home created new job opportunities and at the same time, a considerable threat to existing ones. In some circumstances companies may not see the need to physically locate themselves in the region anymore with remote working becoming more prevalent, and amid rising protectionism. In Brazil and USA there is already a movement on decreasing office space capacity and in Southeast Asia, “near-shore” operations are quickly becoming a reality. The Japanese government is supporting to help its companies shift their production out of China and back to Japan. Supply chains are also going to be redesigned.

From the graduate starting out on a career, mid-career worker looking for new job opportunities or trying to stay employed in a new role, there is a new mandate to ensure that people gain accurate and up-to-date information about their options based on available labor market data, individuals’ goals, aptitude, career program and, government and employers.

This requires public sector, educators and the private sector to collaborate on developing and strengthening an educational framework to enable ongoing learning and training opportunities for workers at all stages of their careers.

• Every individual should gain accurate guidance about their options on personal development, based on data. A promising model is for example, Singapore’s SkillsFuture initiative.
• The extent to which the existing and future working population acquires the right skills within the workplace, is one of the most critical variables to engage with new opportunities in a constantly shifting labor market.
• A smart learning environment that is designed towards learning at all stages of life and at the dame time to ensure employability – “get a job”; enables adaptive access to reskilling, upskilling; put individuals at center-stage to take ownership of their own learning paths and accelerate job opportunities with personalized mentorship, will contribute to employability and self-realization.

For educators, priorities for change and business model evolution, should include the following scenarios, coming from a training provider to future of jobs for every individual.

Adaptive Learning

Leveraging on forecasts of future skills requirements for existing workforce, social protection schemes and skills reconversion, integrated with about the degree of fit of candidate, cultural affinity, new operational models, technological evolution, career and performance management, adaptive learning can predict next wave of required training or to update a learning path at the individual level.

Mentoring and Employability

Automated career aspiration path, matching with job market status, person skills and existing learning path. Mentoring support in career progression activities. Accelerate employment by matching candidate profile with personalized recruiter outreach, integrated with employment government agencies.

Digital Credentials

Enables education providers and learners to control and share the credentials that can be trusted and verified. One has the appropriate knowledge, and experience that are necessary and sufficient for being a professional in a certain field or practice, a pre-requisite to perform a role and to be able to practice one’s profession.

Virtual Nomadic Campus

Cross reality environment designed for learning, visualization, social collaboration, knowledge capture, with real-time interaction in physically simulated virtual environment, using immersive technologies.

Smart Cities Operating System

One important element of implementing a smart city is the city become the platform and the platform is able to learn and have an embodied cognitive replica. A platform that apart from:

• The connectivity provided by the ICT infraestruture;
• The applications that can be used to request, use or monitor services;
• The underlying data in the city data lake – enabling understanding about the interactions produced, the patterns and the behaviors, how to optimize traffic flow or waste management.

Have the ability o manage with formal and non-formal forms of human and machines interaction – operational technology and the pervasive communication infrastructure – nevertheless, still requires a number of considerable advancements, in particular, in the domain of understanding human behavior [1] as an important data source of the city planning and service evolution.

 

City OS framework

Cognitive cities may be constituted with [2] many richly interacting adaptive components that include human beings and other entities with sufficient awareness – sensors – reconfigurability, learning, autonomy and cooperation capabilities at materialized in a City operating system. However, the value of the City OS is if it scales across multiple cities in an ecosystem. In this sense, the objective is to create a Smart City operating system, an “universal-platform” for cities. While they acknowledge the competitive nature and that each city has its own character, identity, tax system or unique capabilities (healthcare or education) there are more commonalities than there are differences. Apart of common services like energy or waste management, the approach is how the ecosystem City OS, connected to other cities can evolve, for example in areas like traffic management, mobility as a service, safety, once the algorithms will be trained in larger data sets or sharing a common capability like person digital identity or resilience (cyber-attacks, geopolitical conflicts, diseases, resources shortages).

References:

[1] Cognition Digital Twins for Personalized Information Systems of Smart Cities: Proof of Concept – Jing Du, Qi Zhu2, Yangming Shi, Qi Wang, Yingzi Lin and Daniel Zhao

[2] Cognitive cities and intelligent urban governance – Ali Mostashari, Friedrich Arnold, Mo Mansouri, and Matthias Finger

Digital Banks – Providing Banking Platform as Service

During the course of last two weeks, I was involved with a series of workshops with the IT department of a bank that operates in more than 30 countries. The workshops objective was to define a digital banking transformation roadmap.

During many years, for those that are involved in BPM projects have discussed the meaning of what is the definition of end-to end processes. One of the classic examples in the banking industry is when the account opening process ends. It ends when the account number is created or it ends when all the channels which the customer can consume financial services and execute operations are available and operative?

Today, opening a bank account trough a friction-less process is not a common desire. The wish of any customer that belong to retail banking is how it can construct the Bank of Me, how it can incorporate using the bank mobile app making transactions with 3rd parties, like a youngster paying the school fees, do social banking (transfers, borrowing from Facebook friends). Corporate banking, oriented to trading operations, which to integrate supply chain operations between, customers, suppliers, road haulage companies, combining the flow of documents, status of merchandise movement and money transfers.

Five years ago, under the new e-CMR regulation, there was the possibility in road freight to eliminate the famous paper based system (that still exists) and exchange information digitally between all the involved stakeholders – buyer, seller, transport company and banks [1]. The CMR is a document that underpins the legal transport contract between a seller, a transport company and a buyer. It ensures the goods were shipped and received accordingly, on which banks rely to wire the money between the involved trading parties. Without such a document, financial transactions are halted, supply chain document reconciliation is blocked, as well as financial close activities. Now, that piece of document travels physically in the truck. Some long haul trucks return to logistics head quarters every 15 days – because they need to optimise cargo utilisation, a key KPI for business viability – this means only when the physical CMR arrives to the logistics back office, payment processes between buyer and seller can start (digital copies are ignored, due fraud and contractual implications between the parties involved). In such kind of transactions there is room for optimisation and automation, but unless companies do not embrace the concept of open systems architecture is very unlikely that operations will suffer from the tangled syndrome.

The era of Open Socio-technical Systems

Fred Emery defined and evolved the concept [2] and defined such kind of systems as:

“Is a purposeful system composed of an interrelated social component (people, culture, norms,) and technical component (technology, tools, materials) which is embedded in a greater context, an environment, which the system is influenced by and also influences.”

Later, Merrelyn Emery [3] evolved the concept to “Socioecological” means:

“people-in-environments,” which is expressed by the concept of the open system […] expresses the transaction of system and environment, all components of which are governed by laws which are able to be known. “

Gartner [4] defines in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service:

“integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is a cloud service that provides a platform to support application, data and process integration projects, usually involving a combination of cloud-based applications and data sources, APIs [5] and on-premises systems”.

Gartner single focus in the technical platform enablement plays the de-stratification of the Open Socio-technical Systems that goes against experimentation, multiplicity and intense social human interaction and important component of Open systems. When designing IT strategy, the peril for the CIO and the IT teams is to overdose the enterprise with integration technology and superpower the enterprise service bus, over-dosing on too much de-stratification decoupled from the new business models and human relationship management of digital banking.

Providing Banking Platform as Service

Exposing the Banking Platform As a Service – BPAaS, allows banking services to talk to other services. In this sense, leveraging on API allows you to open up data and functionality to other developers, to other businesses or even between departments and locations within the bank. It is increasingly the way in which banks exchange data, services and complex resources, both internally, externally with partners, and openly with the public.

BPAaS, can provide a common root so that transactions can flow from wherever they originate: mobile apps, integrations with clients, the client’s website or physical devices. All mapped into a strong ecosystems of partners that repurpose, resell and re-bundle assets to reach new customer segments – like the millennials – that the bank could never have reached alone.

Imagine for example, you want to offer a mortgage service coming from a real estate website or you want to open the possibility to customers subscribe financial products from 3rd party, like Brokers or the case were the bank can outsource loan services to partners keeping costs low. Providing the banking platform allows customers and partners to integrate them as a self-service adapted to their particular needs or bringing the reality of the Bank of Me.

Regulation want banks to embrace open ecosystems
The UK regulator, issued a report [6] that sates in the remedies section:

“mobile banking tools have been rapidly adopted, and a growing financial technology (‘FinTech’) sector is developing and applying new tools. Application programming interfaces (APIs) will allow publicly available data and customers’ own data to be shared with trusted third parties, and ‘open standard’ APIs can be particularly powerful (with necessary safeguards for security and privacy) in opening up new customer information and advice services.”

 

CMA states clearly about the importance of:

“development and implementation of an open API banking standard has the greatest potential to transform competition in retail banking markets […] by making it much easier for both personal customers and SMEs to compare what is offered by different banks and by paving the way to the development of new business models offering innovative services to customers.[…] APIs may also be used, with the customer’s informed consent, to share securely their transaction history to enable access to tailored current account comparisons and other services.”

As I pointed before in this post, banks can offer for example, in the retail segment, custom services like automated financial management based on your spending patterns, risk appetite and the phase of your personal life – before entering into labour market, in labour market, retirement – this is just a matter how soon banks want to enter in this new kind of business models before they are expelled from the market.

From a strategic point of view, some banks consider the remedy with a very strong dose or as a threat to their outdated business models. In my experience dealing with CIO’s and CEO’s from different banks is clear that the younger generations are much more prepared or already sparked business model transformation and look to this more as an opportunity. The generational gap – a self-acquired soft skill – can play a key role how the organisation perceives the way forward.

 
References:

[1] Unfortunately, due protective measures related with entry in force of the regulation, most countries in European Union delayed the application of the new regulation, meaning that a cargo travelling from Portugal to Germany will only benefit from the electronic act when enters in Germany, meaning that all way down the road the paper document should exist to present to customs and other government authorities. In other terms, the digitalisation of the process is impracticable, an outcome that is still a reality.

[2] Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide, 2016. […] “Integration PaaS delivers some combination of the capabilities typically found in enterprise service buses, data integration tools, B2B gateways, managed file transfer products and API management platforms. IT departments, line-of-business developers, mobile application development teams, application teams and even business users (aka “citizen integrators”) leverage these capabilities to develop, execute and manage integration interfaces (or “integration flows”).”

[3] Emery, Fred E. “Characteristics of socio-technical systems”, in Design of Jobs: selected readings, Davis, L. E. And Taylor, J.C. (Eds.), Penguin Books, ASIN: B013KQY62S

[4] Merrelyn Emery “The current version of Emery’s Open System Theory” Systemic Practice and Action Research.

[5] Application Programming Interface

[6] CMA – Retail banking market investigation. Summary of final report. August 2016

A Thousand Plateaus

On June 2014, I was at Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe in London to present my work on the theme of cybernetics, called Viable System Model meets Enterprise Architecture. During the preparation of the presentation, I was exposed to the concept of the rhizome, created by two French philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari, designed to bring some random pointers about complexity theory, deeply related with the challenges a cybernetician like to reflect on. The rhizome was brought to life in a book called A Thousand Plateaus, that according to the authors, was written in random mode. Every day, they decide in which part of the book they will work on with no direction, rejecting ‘the law of narrative order’, like Robert Musil’s masterpiece Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (the man without qualities), that by coincidence, was one of my inspirations for the talk at the conference. I bought the book when I was in London but once I buy more books I can read, I only started to read the book these days.

A thousand plateaus is broken down is many directions, that I would like to point only some, as follows:

• Epistemological – how the models we create to understand the reality are fit in terms of meaning, completeness and de-territorialization (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to the true meaning of systems out of context of operation);
• Ontological – how the meaning of concepts evolve in a way they are the result of constant change;
• Anthropological – how human beings are able to interpret signs that will tell about the necessity of change. A theme I explored with Amy Santee in February 2015, when I was in Seattle;
• Social – how individuals can self-organize in a knowledge oriented world, contrary to Kant’s ideas of following the natural order of laws, rules, regulations and procedures.

The emergent self-organization is a matter in focus which is materialized in the concept of chaosmos, that explain the functioning of the universe as a meta-system composed of abstract machines, very well aligned with cybernetic principles. Exciting days are coming.