Our Economic Future Depends on SWCT Becoming a Tech Hub. Here’s Why. 

SOURCE: https://www.choosestamford.com/why-stamford

By The Stamford Partnership

Part 1, The Trends, Forces, and Factors. 

Every company is a data company. And every company is a tech company. These are inescapable truths today. Any executive or leader who wants to expand operations to national or global prominence must develop a stable cadre of technology workers. Same goes for any nonprofit or government agency.

We live in a digital age that is only becoming more digital, more virtual, and more automated.The World Economic Forum calls it the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Whatever you call it, we are living and working with technologies that blur the traditional lines between the physical, digital, and even biological worlds. Data lies at the heart of this union. This is great news for workers with a STEM background.

The tech sector is growing rapidly, according to this Visual Capitalist article. In Connecticut, the average tech worker earns 46% more than workers in all other occupations. The article also noted that jobs in the U.S. information technology sector will continue to grow as the sector’s value will expand from $1.6 trillion to about $5 trillion by the end of 2021. 

On the flip side, job markets around the world have more technology openings than qualified workers to fill them. LinkedIn’s 2018 Emerging Jobs Report found that data science related roles represent one-third of the top 15 fastest-growing jobs in the United States. Locally, the Connecticut Department of Labor reports that 40% of the top five fastest growing jobs in the state are classified as data science professions.

“We have seen a vast growth in Stamford’s economic development over the past several years, and while the store closings in the mall have been a minor setback, they are not indicative of the larger economic progress we are making in Stamford,” said Stamford Mayor David Martin in an October 9 article in the Stamford Advocate.

The article cited Connecticut’s Department of Labor August report that put the city’s unemployment rate at 5.7% — the lowest among Connecticut’s five most-populous cities. The article also pointed out that Stamford is “…arguably the leading corporate hub in the state, with eight firms on this year’s Fortune 1,000 list headquartered in the city.”

Source: Connecticut Data Collaborative

“If we fail to recognize the shift happening and take appropriate actions,” Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont wrote in Workforce Plan 2020, “we will be letting down current and future generations of workers and their families and stifling the growth and innovation of the Connecticut economy.” This article’s authors and contributors couldn’t agree more.

“We are in one of the hottest tech job markets since the dot-com era,” according to a Technical.ly article that quoted Dice CEO Art Zeile. “Technologists are in incredibly high demand across multiple sectors including tech, defense, healthcare and finance.”

The stakes are high because they define the economic future for Stamford and Connecticut. This article explores some of the trends, forces, and factors that demand our attention. 

Global Trends Define Digital Winners and Losers

COVID-19 lockdowns and the resulting global recession have created uncertainty in labor markets and supply chains. Despite these disruptions, the pace of technological adaptation and adoption has not slowed — and has accelerated in many areas, according to the World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs Report 2020.” 

Source: Future of Jobs Report 2020, World Economic Forum

Cloud computing, according to the report, as well as big data and e-commerce continue to be high priorities for the business leaders that the World Economic Forum (WEC) polled. They also discovered heightened interest in encryption, non-humanoid robots and artificial intelligence. The Future of Jobs survey of businesses reveals that:

• 43% will reduce their workforce as a result of technology integration.
• 34% will increase their workforce as a result of technology integration.

These changes indicate redundancy in the employment market. In the short term, the number of jobs that will disappear will be less than the number of “jobs of tomorrow” that will be created. However, the WEC report estimates that by 2025, new jobs that reflect the new division of labor between humans, algorithms and machines will outpace the displaced jobs by 12 million.

The report also discovered that 41% of businesses will use more contractors for specialized task work, and 84% are ready to digitize work processes. With digitalitized work processes, 44% of white collar employees will work remotely. 

“These changes underscore the inherent value in broadband access, 5G infrastructure, and cybersecurity structures that protect decentralized and virtual human and digital resources,” said Jon Winkel, CEO of The Stamford Partnership,a nonprofit focused on improving the quality of life for the city’s residents, workforce, businesses, and stakeholders.

Big Data and COVID19 Increase and Accelerate Change

Businesses are inundated with structured and unstructured data. Spreadsheets and other legacy tools are inadequate to the task of discovering the insights that help us build better strategies and make smarter decisions that create value for stakeholders.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics have established beachheads on the big data front. Valued at $41.33 billion in 2019, Fortune Business Insights projects that the global big data technology market will grow to $116.07 billion by 2027. 

The global response to COVID-19 is broadly accepted as a disruptor in the global labor market. It has also accelerated the demand for the “future of work” jobs associated with big data, AI, predictive analytics and cybersecurity — to name a few examples. 

Data is the engine of today’s economic and social activity. Understanding the data and properly applying the insights is the engine’s fuel. For example, businesses and public health agencies have used advanced analytics to help them understand COVID-19’s nature. In the United States, the departments of Energy, Veteran Affairs, and Health and Human Services partnered in a big data collaborative that shared and analyzed health data, and conducted COVID-19 research.

Data is used to create products and deliver better services to customers. The key to success for any region lies in training and developing an agile tech savvy workforce. The best regional governments and policy makers foster enlightened policies that acknowledge and leverage the changing dynamics of a global economy. People know this, as well. 

The Future of Jobs Report discovered:

• Four-fold increase in online learning by workers who took the initiative. 
• Five times as many employers provide online learning opportunities to their workforce.
• Enrollment in online learning through government programs has increased ninefold. 
• Unemployed workers are more likely to seek training in digital skills such as computer science, data analysis  and information technology.

The opportunities are obvious and the threats are manageable, but Southwestern Connecticut can compete globally only if we attract a steady and reliable stream of tech workers. 

There is another side to all this data: Security. 

Data Driven Journey Defines Security Capabilities That You Need

Ten years ago, about 48% of companies acknowledged that their work in AI and big data produced successful business outcomes. This year, according to New Vantage Partners’ 9th annual survey of senior corporate c-executives, 96% of companies reported that this work yielded results.

Success notwithstanding, company culture — people, organization, process, change management — impedes companies’ efforts to become data-driven organizations. 

Over the past several years, chief data officers (CDOs) were hired from the outside and given primary responsibility for their companies’ data. Only a third of these companies confirmed that their CDO role was successfully established. The New Vantage Partners survey discovered that company veterans are beginning to move into the CDO role with responsibility for business results. Some observers believe that these insider executives are in a better position than their outsider counterparts to create positive culture change. 

Massive amounts of data, as well as the capability to mine these databases for actionable insights, does have downsides, too. 

Among them: data breaches, loss of data, privacy, as well as security vulnerabilities from the applications that access or process the data. These threats cut across industries — retail, manufacturing, IT and telecom, government, healthcare, utilities, education — no one is untouched.

Source: Organizational cyber maturity: A survey of industries, McKinsey & Company

The reality of these threats requires companies to design digital resilience into their systems. A recent McKinsey blog outlines cybersecurity tasks that include: 

• Prioritize information assets. 
• Integrate cyberreslience into processes. 
• Deploy active defenses. 

Toward the top of the list: Enlist frontline personnel. This effort includes:

• Awareness, training and risk culture,
• Employee and contractor security, and
• Talent recruitment and development.

Digital businesses are entirely dependent on trust. “If a company’s customer interface is not secure,” the McKinsley blog noted, “the risk can become existential.” Investment in tech and cybersecurity savvy employees is clearly a key to Southwestern Connecticut’s success.

The entire world is in the midst of revolutionary change that will define winners and losers in the 21st century. The  choices that Stamford’s leaders and policy makers implement in the coming days will define our future. 

The greater Stamford area has natural corporate and — most important — human resources that are well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that many thinkers about the Fourth Industrial Revolution envision.

Source: Annual Average Employment and Wages | Year: 2019 | Category: All Industries, Connecticut Data Collaborative.

Emerging technologies represent more than good-paying jobs. These are the core ideas and strategies that companies and governments will use to deliver their goods and services to their customers and constituents.

This insight may seem obvious, but the implications and stakes could not be greater. Our economy and our workforce of the future depend on not only making this transition, but leading it.

Our next 3 articles will begin to explore the assets and momentum in our region. We’ll first cover the notable companies in the region, and how they use big data and advanced automation such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing to promote their business objectives in a changing world.