Category identified to have transformational benefits for manufacturers and frontline workers
When I started in the enterprise software market 20+ years ago (yes, over 20 years ago!), I first met Gartner as a leading technology research company. Today, Gartner remains incredibly insightful and influential around technology trends and business insights. Every year, the firm publishes a variety of Hype Cycles on specific technologies or innovations. These Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. This year, the concept of the connected worker was added to both the Gartner Hype Cycle for Manufacturing Operations Strategy, 2019 and the Gartner Hype Cycle for Frontline Worker Technologies, 2019.
Gartner defines connected workers as being capable of using various digital tools and data management techniques to improve and integrate their interactions with both physical and virtual surroundings. These workers are then able to make faster and better decisions that enable and optimize a process or set of processes that they participate in.
We were thrilled to see this inclusion in these two reports. Connected work is fundamentally changing manufacturing and the day-to-day lives of frontline workers. At Parsable, our mission is to give industrial workers around the world a digital edge in an increasingly connected and automated world – so it is great to see Gartner recognize this powerful evolution and share their perspectives.
According to Gartner, connected worker was added as a category in these reports to reflect the increasing focus on upskilling and integrating industrial workers with their surroundings. This aligns with what we witness firsthand with our customers. Despite the narrative and concern about automation, the reality is that the role of human work is not disappearing, and the demand for skilled industrial workers far outweighs supply. There is a major shortage of skilled workers, yet as Gartner points out in the reports, “there is a glaring absence of strategies for training and upskilling factory workers beyond their core skill set so they can fully exploit new tools and techniques as part of their daily routines.” Solutions designed to empower connected workers can do just that: provide modern digital tools that enable industrial workers to dramatically increase productivity, quality and safety.
Given the potential benefits of the connected worker, Gartner classified it as a “transformational” capability in both reports. We are seeing firsthand how Parsable customers embracing this evolution today. Companies like Green Chef, Nalco and Daher are already leading the way by digitizing knowledge and procedures and making them interactive and collaborative. These innovators are able to gain unprecedented insight into human work by capturing essential data to improve their operations.
This is an exciting time for connected work; it’s now becoming primetime and increasingly a must-have for global industrial companies. As illustrated in my recent World Economic Forum article, we must act now.
To learn more about how companies can empower connected workers today, contact us for a demo.
