Once an integral part of the modern office environment, the fax machine is now an almost-forgotten relic of the pre-internet era, used today by just a handful of industries. Its journey from relevance to near-irrelevance, though, tells us a lot about the impact of technology on the workplace and on the workforce…

April 27th, 2000, is an auspicious day in the history of the fax machine. It was the day that the UK Government squeezed billions of pounds out of telecoms companies for the auction of 3G mobile phone spectrum – and it was conducted almost entirely by fax.

It was an event where the fax machine played to its strengths. The auction needed to be conducted over a secure one-to-one connection with each of the bidders, one that couldn’t be hacked or snooped. Each bid was a legally binding contract, and the fax machine – with its encryption and compression – was an inherently trustworthy communications channel.

Although it was several more years before 3G networks launched commercially in the UK and Australia, the writing was on the wall for the humble fax machine. Once everyone could access emails on their phone, send and receive photos, and even conduct video-calling, the need for the fax machine dissipated quite quickly.

The fax’s demise went unnoticed. No-one mourned. There were no grievers while the new 3G licenses around the world ushered in an always-on, always-connected mobile internet era. In a decade or so, almost every single one of the fax machine's functions were replaced by the quicker, more efficient and personal mobile phone and digital technologies.

Welcome to the digital era

Digitisation, in the form of the internet and everything it enabled is accelerating the pace of change. The challenge for leaders is that they need to understand the fact that business cycles are becoming shorter and this creates a winner takes all environment ­– there is no time to react or rebound – if you don’t have a forward looking approach and the capacity to innovate before the competition, you’re out.

But looking into the future is difficult and people are not very good or well-trained enough to do it. To adapt to the changing scenario, businesses have to accept that digitisation is essentially a people issue, not a technology one. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the differences in approach between big companies and start-ups. Many people believe start-ups are all about technology. But if you talk to venture capitalists, they’ll tell you they’re actually about people. Start-ups make sure they get the right people in place. Although they’re small, they’re very sophisticated about how they deal with people.

The human factor has always been important, but at this stage of rapid technological progress, it’s essential. For organisations to predict developments and anticipate market needs that can radically change their business they need to hire people with the creative and intellectual skills required to develop ideas. They need workers with the ability to operate effectively in a highly networked and collaborative environments.

Digitisation and Jobs

As the rise and demise of the humble fax machine shows, digital technology can dramatically change the business landscape and the workforce that operates within it. But what digitisation won’t do is destroy employment. A small core of jobs will likely disappear for good – but new value chains and new businesses will continue to create the need for new skills. These new hot skills will characterise the evolved modern corporation.

Although, as many have predicted, digitisation hollows out a core of easily automated jobs and middle management posts, it also creates new business models that shift employment, creating new roles and opportunities. Digitisation is removing bottlenecks in industries and shifting the nature of work and driving demand for different skills and different ways of thinking.

It’s possible for organisations to identify the particular hot skills they will need to succeed as digital technologies transforms the business environment. We predict that these new hot skills will be centred around four main areas:

• Cognitive – the creative and intellectual skills needed to develop ideas, concepts and strategies
• Systems/solutions – the ability to operate effectively in a highly networked and collaborative environment and to make sense of data
• Leading people – leadership becomes even more important and nuanced in the digitized world
• Transactional – dealing with other people(like customers, employees, partners, etc.) is an essential skill when organisational structures and boundaries are more fluid

Being prepared for digitisation means recognising its potential to change your organisation, testing scenarios and planning the workforce you need to succeed in the future. In our report, Digitisation and Your Workforce we show you how organisations can profit from this trend by looking at their workforce and using advanced tools to simulate the future.