Certain sci-fi movie tropes have captured the human imagination like nothing else in pop culture.
Whether it’s Han Solo making that first jump to hyperspace or Marty evading Griff on his hoverboard, these iconic moments make every kid sit up and think “Wow - I can’t wait for that to be real life”.
But in time you grow up and realise they’re just movies - stuff like that will never happen in our lifetime.
Except earlier this year it did…
After the stop-start history of Google Glass in the 2010s and the rumoured $20bn failure of the MetaVerse, the first videos about Apple Vision Pro Max seemed unbelievable.
We watched people wave their arms around like Minority Report as Imax-sized screens exploded into their front rooms, and every formerly nerdy kid jumped for joy.
And, while Apple Vision Pro Max has so far been focused on entertainment, AR like this will have a massive impact on how we work and learn.
According to Gartner, “Through 2027, 25% of CIOs will use augmented-connected workforce initiatives to reduce time to competency by 50% for key roles”, and AR like the Apple Vision Pro is just one technology that falls under this umbrella.
In a recent keynote, Chris Howard from Gartner described the Augmented Connected Workforce (ACWF) like this:
“Imagine you’re a technician on the airport tarmac fixing a complicated problem that you’ve never seen before. So where do you get knowledge?
You get knowledge from schematics. You get knowledge from standard operating procedures. You get knowledge from other people who have seen and fixed this problem. You get knowledge from the device itself through IoT and sensors and data coming into that environment.
Imagine that digital experience for that employee if you can help them solve a problem they’ve never seen before using generative AI to query the systems and bring stuff back, or to use mixed reality to actually bring them immersively into that experience"
It’s an exciting vision for the future, and one that’s not too far away - especially for those of us who don’t have to worry about fixing jet engines.
A lot of the confusion around ACWF - why it seems so futuristic and unattainable - is that people focus too much on the augmented part, and not enough on the connected.
Think of it like this...
VR promises a future where remote teams can meet up in the metaverse and work together side by side as avatars in a virtual world
Sounds cool, right?
But how much benefit is the "augmented” adding?
Do you really want to attend a board meeting at Disney Land? Or turn to your right and see a cartoonish version of your coworker with a cat face staring back at you?
Probably not.
Tools like Microsoft Teams, Miro and Slack already provide us with virtual spaces to connect and work together - and they can be highly effective when your organisation fully adopts them.
And, advances in AI, Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs mean you can quickly build an inventory of everything there is to know about your organization and use simple chat-based UIs to query it.
Here’s a scenario…
You’re running an S/4HANA program and you lose a key team member partway through - maybe a Solution Architect contractor leaves for a higher rate.
Until you find their replacement and get them up to speed your program will likely limp along as you burn through the weekly run-rate of cash. You eventually find a replacement, but by the time they join you have 5 working days of face-to-face handover time between the two consultants.
The new person’s “time to competence” is likely to be 4-6 weeks as they try and decipher your As-Is ERP landscape from a myriad of out-of-date Visios and Powerpoints. Knowledge is a moving feast on most SAP programs and it’s unlikely your As-Is and periphery documentation is as joined up as it should be.
In the future ACWF world, you’d have collaboration software ready to go so you can make this hire from anywhere in the world, and you find someone quickly as your resourcing pool is far greater.
When they join, they spend the first week or so querying your organisation’s knowledge graph, talking with teammates over Teams, and working collaboratively in Sharepoint to come up with a plan of action.
Within days of joining you’re already seeing value from this new team member - and crucially the program keeps moving.
In office environments like S/4HANA migration projects, it isn’t the limits of human physical performance and presence that hold us back as it does in engineering - it’s knowledge.
By providing people with easy ways to communicate and placing knowledge at their fingertips, they can reach competency faster which translates into increased productivity and operational efficiency.
If you can say yes to these 3 things you should see significant reductions in the cost and time to implement S/4HANA.
This may sound like Sci-Fi, but you can hugely improve efficiency on S/4HANA projects if you approach them from a different perspective.
If you’re interested in exploring this world, send an interplanetary message to us.