Instrumenting the human and socializing the machine

When it comes to the digital workplace, the popular opinion, and fear, is that machines are encroaching upon human work activities and taking an ever larger percentage of this work away for good -- from the dirty and dangerous, to the dull, to decisions. Fortunately, this doesn't take into account the realm of possibilities created when work processes are reimagined in the context of mutual human-machine collaboration. By instrumenting the human and socializing the machine, we can redesign business processes to optimize the blend of human-machine participation and interaction -- and complete tasks far more efficiently than either could individually. Machines are stepping out from behind the cage, and humans are stepping into their worlds. As Julia Kirby and Thomas H. Davenport have pointed out in "Beyond Automation," rather than a zero-sum game, robotic automation can be thought of as augmentation, where humans and machines collaborate together to get work done.