Robots will enhance - not replace accountants

Photo: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images
Great article from Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com.au/robots-will-never-replace-accountants-heres-why-2016-12

It’s an interesting time to be a bookkeeper and an accountant. Australia’s economic reform is focused on being a prominent player in the world of innovation, the working class is changing global politics, and news articles debate whether robots can uproot our jobs. 

In fact, the latest report from CEDA states that, “More than five million jobs, almost 40 per cent of Australian jobs that exist today, have a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing in the next 10 to 15 years, due to technological advancements”. 

It begs many questions for the people on the ground within my industry. I am a proud bookkeeper, and that’s one of the jobs often quoted as being at risk of irrelevance. Certainly, I know that bookkeepers and accountants have access to more than 500 add-ons and integrations using Xero, which means technology can automate the time-consuming tasks we once did. So with all this power at play, what does that mean for our industry? Can robots really take our place? 

Just a robot and a dream 

Let’s think about it in real terms. I read an article recently that spoke about two people who quit their stable jobs and bought a bar, with no previous experience. The beauty of their decision, the article said, was that they could buy one point of sale system to provide all the information they needed: every drink sold, at what time, profitability levels, stock … even the financial information that could help them complete their tax return.

No bookkeeper, no accountant – just two new business owners, a ‘robot’ and a dream.

We all know that a small bar needs to run a tight ship. As a business, it must keep a close eye on staffing, costs and pricing to ensure profitability at all times. Often, there’s simply no space for big bookkeeping or accounting bills – especially from those still charging hours to file paper receipts.

There’s only space for a nimble, streamlined service that delivers data-driven insights in a timely, cost efficient manner. And that’s the key – it’s not just the data that businesses need, it’s the insight that can be invested back into the business. 

For data to be insightful, it must go beyond standard data aggregation services and tailor the numbers against an evolving knowledge of the business. And that’s where humans come in.

Situation, data, insight, action

It doesn’t make business sense to flood a busy small business owner with streams of ever-flowing data – especially if those business owners are learning the ropes as they go. No one has time to make sense of all the data available. There’s just too much of it. And at the same time, it won’t help to keep your clients in the dark to their data either. 

It’s far better for a small business to receive figures tailored to their evolving needs, delivered at precisely the right time to make a difference, from someone who can help turn those insights into actions.

And for that, you need an advisor who stands hand in hand with the robots, so to speak. You need someone who has taken the time to learn the best apps available for your small business – and who uses those same skills to streamline their own service. 

Statistics show that while only 51 percent of small businesses survive more than five years, 88 percent of those on Xero will still be around to celebrate their fifth birthday. And crucially, 92 percent of small businesses on Xero have an advisor. 

The formula for success

The fact of the matter is that turning data into insights and insights into action will always lie at the heart of innovative business. Once, such advisory services were only possible to monolithic organisations with large analytics and finance teams. 

Now, it’s at the fingertips of every bookkeeper and small business owner willing to work with technology – not against it. And that’s the real beauty of business.

Melanie Power is the Head of Bookkeeping at Xero.

How Coca-Cola Is Harvesting Innovation Energy

 

From Startups in Forbes https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2016/12/06/how-coca-cola-is-harvesting-innovation-energy-from-startups/amp/

Dan Woods , CONTRIBUTOR

In 2013, after senior leadership at The Coca-Cola Company challenged its IT staff to find ways to accelerate innovation, Alan Boehme realized that rounding up the usual suspects would not get the job done. Instead, Boehme, an enterprise IT veteran with deep connections in Silicon Valley, realized that he had to find a way to bring the vibrant energy of startups to the problems his company was facing.

The result is a program Boehme, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Innovation Officer & Chief Architect at the Coca-Cola Company, and his team created called The Bridge, which held its third showcase event in Atlanta on September 27, 2016. In short, The Bridge is a systematic way that a large organization can engage with startups to move the needle with respect to urgent problems. See this video for a summary of the 2015 Bridge Showcase event.

Here's how it works in a nutshell:-

• Internal sponsors are found who have problems and some budget to help fund The Bridge program. In later iterations external partners such as Turner have joined the program.
• The internal sponsors help define a set of relevant themes, like customer engagement, marketing innovation, health and wellness.
• Startups are found that have technology relevant to those themes.
• The startups are offered marketing and other training to participate in the program.
• Startups connect with internal sponsors over the course of the program, with a view to doing a proof of concept with their technology at Coca-Cola.
• At a public showcase event, all the progress made during the Bridge program is celebrated and the startups are introduced to customers and partners.

So far Boehme and his team have run three cycles of the bridge, resulting in a variety of projects that have applied the technology to both marketing and operations functions.

Here are some of the startups that Coca-Cola has engaged with through The Bridge:

• Cimagine allows a tablet to become an augmented reality system for projecting what a cooler, vending machine, signages, or other point of sale material would look like in an retail environment. Store owners can take a photo and virtually set up equipment. Using this technique reduces delays and return rates.
• Bringg is creating an “Uber” for the enterprise provides a platform to support delivery of products/services on demand.
• Fusic offers an innovative music and film creation , sharing and social platform allowing the user to be part of the theatrical video clip or music video and share with their friends
• Weisbeerger is a big data analytics platform that provides in-depth insights to beverage use-age and facilitates  on data driven  sight marketing and promotional campaigns.
• Endor out of MIT implements the concept of “Social Physics” to gain behavioral insights into consumers with minimal effort.
• Dov-e creates a way to use inaudible sound waves to trigger actions on mobile devices (promotions, coupons , experiences  ) delivered through TV, Radio, movie screens speakers etc.

The result of The Bridge is that Coca Cola has been able to quickly adopt new technology in ways that would have never been possible using traditional processes.

“Innovation is an engine, a journey toward something new that can be frightening. It must be pursued and fought for,” said Boehme. “The things you achieve through perseverance and by taking risks are worth all of the obstacles that you are facing.”

It is important to point out that Boehme and his team are not proposing that the current way that enterprise IT works should be tossed out. Traditional IT at a healthy and well-run company helps a business operate in a stable manner, reduce costs, adopt new technology in a way that minimizes risks and solve new problems with a certain type of innovation.

“IT departments constantly innovate with the help of consultants and vendors to solve the unique problems facing their businesses and also to adopt proven technology in a methodical manner,” said Anthony Newstead, Global Group Director Emerging Technologies & Strategic Innovation, who works on Boehme’s team. “But the processes in place to govern traditional IT act as an immune system against the type of innovation that comes from startups.”

Startups are not about proven technology, but about new technology and new ways of working that are just emerging. To succeed, startups must be targeting important problems that are present in many companies. The question The Bridge seeks to answer is: How can a large organization jumpstart its journey to new ways of working by engaging with startups?

“The Bridge is about balancing efforts at innovation in IT,” said Newstead. “We want to find the parts of Coca-Cola where a startup’s ideas and technology can move the needle, and try that approach out and see if it works.”

The Bridge overcomes the IT immune system by taking barriers away and getting to the proof of concept as fast as possible. If a project is successful, enterprise wide deployment may indeed be achieved through traditional IT processes. But The Bridge accelerates discovery of ways to make new technology work.

The Bridge also works because it creates good will. Boehme says that seeking sincerely to help the startups participating in The Bridge, rather than trying to negotiate purchase of equity or other models for engaging with startups, really creates a positive environment for exploring new ideas.

There are mechanisms for Coca-Cola to protect competitive advantages it may gain from new technologies. Limited non-compete agreements are signed so that the new technology cannot be used by specified competitors of Coke for the 7-month duration of the Bridge program.

The Bridge also nicely supplements the traditional form of IT innovation where consultants are brought in to create a company specific solution. In the Bridge, startups are creating general solutions with a broad appeal. This focus on using generally applicable technology for innovation also fills innovation white space in a new way.

Expanding the Bridge

At the event in Atlanta, Coca Cola was joined by Turner who signed up for The Bridge program for the most recent cycle. Boehme realized that by adding other companies to The Bridge it would be possible to engage with more start ups and to offer different types of training.

“We’re a company that has always strived to be ahead of where the media consumption patterns are going,” said Peter Scott, Vice President of Emerging Media and Innovation for Turner Studios and Turner Sports. “When Coke asked us to join, it was clear that The Bridge would allow us to explore and find new companies that have synergies with our mission, whether it’s blockchain, ad blocking, video highlights, or whatever the topic is.”

Mercedes-Benz is also planning to join the next cycle of the The Bridge. An IT innovation strategist at Daimler said Mercedes-Benz is in discussions for a strategic cooperation with Coca-Cola and Turner Broadcasting in order to enhance the status of the development and sales of digital services to customers, to introduce new working methods for their employees, as well as new organizational structures, and to better anticipate the needs of their customers and offer them more personalized products and services. The IT strategist said the Bridge will help Mercedes-Benz share best practices with other giants, like Coca-Cola and Turner, as well as the most promising startups. New concepts can be quickly tested and help foster an entrepreneurial spirit, and promote radical innovation and outside-the-box-thinking.

Startups find that The Bridge is an opportunity to learn about how their tech works in the real world, to learn key skills, and to build confidence.

“The Bridge provided a huge opportunity to work with a company like Coke,” said Noa Levy, COO and co-founder of Platica, which offers a vertical AI engine for automatic customer support over any chat platform. “As a small startup, getting to work with this kind of client would be near to impossible. Learning how to market and sell and also being treated as a peer by team members at Coke was amazing.”

Doron Alter, co-founder and CEO of Endor, a startup that offers analytics to help understand, predict, and influence the dynamics of human behavior, said that bringing the “fail fast” mentality of startups to Coke had a mutually beneficial effect. “Within a matter of two months of joining The Bridge, we actually started to pilot our technology within the Coca-Cola ecosystem and after only two more months the results were very clear,” said Alter. “Without The Bridge, we would have never been able to work with such a big company and in such a short time.”

The first round of The Bridge was run in Tel Aviv in 2014. It focused on bringing startups from Israel to the attention of Coca-Cola. The Tel Aviv program continues and is currently in its third cycle. Boehme’s vision is to carry The Bridge forward by including more sponsoring partners to startups in other geographies so that the local communities there can offer their technology to Coca-Cola and others. To find out more about The Bridge see http://thebridgebycocacola.com/.

Follow Dan Woods on Twitter:

Follow @danwoodsearly

Dan Woodshelps users (CITO Research) find the right technology and vendors(Evolved Media)explain their wares. Dan's Client List.

The future is coming - Self Driving Cars

Apple Drops Hints About Working on Self-Driving Cars 

In letter to U.S. transportation regulators, Apple said it is investing heavily in machine learning and automation 

Apple has written to U.S. regulators to offer the company’s thoughts on proposed rules regarding autonomous vehicles. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

By 

Tim Higgins and 

Tripp Mickle

Apple Inc. took its biggest step toward acknowledging it is working on autonomous vehicles, writing a letter to U.S. regulators offering feedback on proposed guidelines for the emerging technology.

The letter from Steve Kenner, Apple’s director of product integrity, to the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration offered no details on the project, but said Apple “is investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation.”

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has been working on its car effort, code-named Project Titan, for several years, but has never publicly acknowledged it. The secrecy has made the exact status of Project Titan hard to pinpoint. The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Apple had restructured some elements of the project, which has had several hundred employees working on it, after placing it under veteran Apple executive Bob Mansfield in July.

Apple has looked at doing an entire car, but more recently its focus has narrowed to developing an autonomous-driving system and software. Focusing on software is more in line with the company’s historic expertise and fits its efforts to improve machine-learning capabilities that allow computers to adjust their behavior without being explicitly programmed. 

Apple’s five-page letter, dated Nov. 22, appears on the NHTSA website. It isn’t clear when it was posted.

“We’ve provided comments to NHTSA because Apple is investing heavily in machine learning and autonomous systems,” Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said Friday. “There are many potential applications for these technologies, including the future of transportation, so we want to work with NHTSA to help define the best practices for the industry.”

The letter comes as the Obama administration rushes to put guidelines in place to help guide self-driving development. Alphabet Inc. ’s self-driving project had already collected more than 2 million miles of public-roadway testing and General Motors Co. this year competed a $1 billion deal to acquire Cruise Automation to jump start its autonomous vehicle program.

In the letter to NHTSA, Apple called on the regulator to work quickly to adopt new safety rules and look at ways to be more flexible with regulations. Mr. Kenner said by “improving regulatory flexibility,” the agency would foster more innovation and encourage “the development of life-saving technology.” 

Not surprisingly, the letter showed Apple’s autonomous-vehicle ambitions go beyond the U.S. Mr. Kenner encouraged the agency to work with international groups such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe and others to develop a “harmonized approach to automated vehicles.”

Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com and Tripp Mickle at Tripp.Mickle@wsj.com

What happened to our Economy?

Here’s one way of thinking about Bill Davidow’s seemingly insoluble problem of insufficient jobs.

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There was once a country with a well-functioning economy. It enjoyed a virtuous circle of increasing prosperity for all. Firms were well managed and drew on the full talents of workers. Workers became steadily more productive. Innovation flourished. Customers were thrilled. Firms made more money. The gains in productivity were shared fairly with the managers and the workers who created them. 

The increased pay for citizens enabled them to spend more on products and services. As they spent more, firms were inclined to invest more. Some workers used the money to launch new businesses, some of which grew into big businesses.

As banks made money by financing investments, they were highly respected members of the community. Investments in turn generated more jobs for workers. Workers became more productive and had even more resources to spend. Many more new businesses were created. As the economy grew, everyone was better off. The future looked bright.

Then something went wrong. It was as if a strange new set of economic diseases began to infect everything. As globalization, deregulation and new technology empowered customers, firms found it more and more difficult to monetize gains in productivity. Customers increasingly demanded and extracted improvements for free.

Firms focused more closely on their own gain. Gains in productivity were not shared with workers. As salaries of workers stagnated, they became dispirited. Citizens had less money to spend. As firms perceived a lack of demand, they invested less in new products and services. Real economic growth slowed. 

Because salaries were stagnant, there was no money for workers to start small businesses—formerly the main source of new jobs.

The economy went into a spiral of decline. To make executives more entrepreneurial, firms gave them generous compensation in the form of stock. But instead of becoming more entrepreneurial, executives extracted resources from their firms and handed them back to the owners—the shareholders and themselves. 

As the economy slowed, there was less need for banks to finance investment. So bankers began making money from gambling, rather than investing in the real economy. The financial sector and the stock market grew but because they weren’t grounded in real products and services, real GDP stagnated and there were increasingly severe financial crashes. As bankers profited from the ensuing volatility and slid into rampant illegality, they became disrespected members of society. 

As the economy slowed and firms found it steadily more difficult to make money, they resorted to shipping jobs overseas in a desperate effort to cut costs and silence workers’ unions. In the short term, they were rewarded by the stock market for cutting costs, but the firms soon found that they had undermined their own long-term capacity to evolve and grow their businesses. When many firms did this, whole industries were lost and could not be retrieved. As a result, the sectors where the country could compete steadily narrowed.

As a result, in a further effort to cut costs, firms invested less in shared resourcessuch as pools of skilled labor, supplier networks, an educated populace, and the physical and technical infrastructure on which competitiveness ultimately depends.

These management actions in turn gave rise to serious social problems (loss of jobs, stagnating income, growing inequality) and eventually a decline of the public sector (an inability to fund health and pensions, or investments in the commons such as infrastructure, training, education, and basic research, fields that the private sector had abandoned.)

As new firms used new technology to produce the same output with much fewer workers, and as rate of new business creation declined, the prospect of not creating enough jobs for the entire population became a serious prospect. Most of the new jobs were in low-paying local service jobs not subject to international competition.

Because the education system was focused on producing students who could regurgitate the right answers, rather than ask the right questions, even graduates were not well suited to the emerging entrepreneurial economy.

As the future for average citizens was bleak, and income inequality increased, social unrest spread. In politics, demagogues emerged, proposing desperate remedies like “erecting trade barriers”, “getting rid of immigrants”  “taxing the rich,” or “printing money.” As social cohesion frayed, thoughtful observers wondered whether the country could even survive.

****

No economy has ever functioned with the uniform growth and prosperity that I have just described. Nor are the economic diseases of our world today as uniformly grim and dispiriting as the misfortunes I have just recorded. Yet every one of these phenomena has been happening in significant parts of the economy today. An economic horror story has been unfolding almost unnoticed, and this imagined disaster is not far from our reality. 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/10/29/the-surprising-truth-about-where-new-jobs-come-from/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/08/17/why-amazon-cant-make-a-kindle-in-the-usa/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/03/10/the-surprising-reasons-why-america-lost-its-ability-to-compete/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/11/15/will-trump-discover-why-so-many-americans-were-left-behind/

I believe that Bill’s problem of the shortage of new jobs needs to be seen in this wider context of an unfolding economic disaster that is only partly related to problem cases like the newspaper industry, which inexplicably and nonchalantly failed to take action to deal with the obvious pending problem of technological disruption. 

What we have is a whole series of problems emerging simultaneously causing economic stagnation. In this context, no one single action will solve the problem of jobs, which is part of a bigger set of problems.

Innovation in Australia: Collaborate and Flourish

Innovation in Australia: Collaborate and Flourish:

posted by Eric Tjoeng of BGES - founder of the BBG/BGES Paramatta Forum   Great collaboration between  BBG  &  BGES.

Collaborate and Flourish

Great article posted by Eric Tjoeng of BGES - founder of the BBG/BGES Paramatta Forum

 

Great collaboration between BBG & BGES at the Parramatta Business Forum.

One of the new business paradigms of the New Age is to “Collaborate and Flourish”.

Facing much-accelerated business disruptions and increased complexities of current business operating requirements, to be successful and sustainable, business services providers need to work with one another to provide valuable services and to explore and maintain sustainability, as well as to innovate for prosperity.

Business Growth and Exit Specialists (BGES) is proud to collaborate and work with the Business Builders Group (BBG) through the Parramatta Chapter (pictured above).

What is the Business Builders Group?

“In a world where media fragmentation is making it increasingly expensive to generate new leads and the ever-increasing demands on SME owners leave most of us without the time or energy to make cold calls or attend “yet another fruitless networking event”; Business Builders Group offers new hope.

Built by referral marketing specialists, run by professional business development experts and supported by best-of-breed referral tools and training resources; Business Builders Group is re-defining the business growth process.

If you want to accelerate your business growth and are willing to invest just $4 a day and 3 hours a month, Business Builders Group might just be the answer you've been looking for.” (source: https://www.bbg.business/).

Written by

Eric TjoengCEO, Management Consultant, Business Coach, Business Strategist, Business Growth & Exit Specialist

Life Animated - Owen Susskind - a man with a Coolability

I have just seen this inspiring movie about Owen Susskind - an autistic child and now young man - who learnt to connect through Disney Movies.

He doesn't have a disability .... as Chally Grundwag puts it - he has a "coolability" ... with guidance and support he has been able to add so much value, hope and joy to so many.

Humans with coolabilities have got massive strengths and many ways that they can add a positive influence to society. It is these cool people - who bring colour and humanity to our race, and brings out the best, and yes, also the worst of ourseselves. 

It is these humans who will provide a key to the future of employment over the next 100 years. 

As congressman Bill Foster said at the I4J forum on Tuesday (a hackathon laying the foundation of a pathway for technology creating jobs bs destroying jobs! ) - only 15% of the workforce supported by AI and automation, will be needed to provide for all our needs - what will the 85% do? 

Maybe providing support, guidance and teaching and being of service to others? 

Coolabilities is such a great word!!!