Digital and Smart Transformation

PI: Mr Poon King Wang (LKYCIC, SUTD)
Team: Dr Samuel Chng, Dr Thijs Willems, Dr Gayathri Haridas (LKYCIC, SUTD)

OBJECTIVE

This is a research collaboration to collaborate with a major government-linked entity on a digital and smart transformation pilot project, and the recommendations in the recently published Living Digital 2040: Future of Work, Education and Healthcare.

The collaboration will tackle three questions:

1) How can we help today’s workers and firms, who are disrupted by digital technologies, so that they can continue to thrive tomorrow?

2) What is the “right way” for organizations to respond to digital disruption?

3) What are the implications of the above to a city’s or country’s smart city/Smart Nation’s strategy?

We will use a multi-disciplinary and multi-method approach – from data science to social science – and draw on relevant research. These include:

1) Task-based Migration and Transformation

Drawing on the conclusions of labor economists, think tanks, and consultancies, the most appropriate unit of analysis to examine the impact of digital technologies on work is at the task-level.  This collaboration will hence map out the tasks for three different profiles of workers, and explore how task-level analysis and task-based strategies can identify:

• which aspects of their jobs will be substituted/complemented by technology
• which technologies (AI, Big Data, Digital etc.) will have the greatest impact
• what migration/transition pathways are available for workers/organizations
• what the re-designed work/jobs and organizations will look like
• how workers and organizations should respond to the above

The choice of these profiles provides a spectrum of workers and tasks that are representative of the skills and work profiles across industries and sectors in the economy (for example, traders in the financial sector are now being disrupted by algorithmic trading powered by AI advances). This makes it more likely that findings from this pilot project can be generalized to other organizations, across Singapore, and even to other cities/countries.

2) State of Digital Transformation Survey

Staff will participate in this survey as a complement to the other surveys that have been/are being conducted, and a customized report would be generated. This will give us additional insights into how workers perceive digital transformation, how we can transform tasks and work (see above), what the “right way” to respond should be, and what being a smart city/Smart Nation means.

The organization can also benchmark their responses against the entire survey.  We can further categorize the responses according to the three profiles of workers.  We can also include a small set of customized questions to meet the needs of the key questions (e.g. what Smart Nation means to workers).

3) Observations/Interviews/Workshops

We will conduct interviews, workshops and observational studies with the three profiles of workers.  These will give in-depth and diverse views, and innovative pathways and new designs.

Observational studies from an anthropological perspective of the three worker profiles – at work and at training (if available)– will help us understand the cultural and organization context of the digital transformation for each of them, and uncover unexpected critical factors – above and beyond the interviews and workshops – as we are studying workers in their “natural environment”.