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By Mark Muro, Sifan Liu,Jacob Whiton, and Siddharth KulkarniNovember 2017Executive summaryIntroductionDigitalization: What it is and why it mattersDefining and measuring digitalizationFindingsImplications: Strategies for adjustingConclusion34510153849CONTENTS3Digitalization and the American workforceEXECUTIVE SUMMARYOver the past half century, wave after wave of digital innovation has ensured that “digitalization”the diffusion of digital technologies into nearly every business and workplace and pockethas been remaking the U.S. economy and the world of work. So rapid are the developments, in fact, that while the “digitalization of everything” has become a hallmark of techs promise of empowerment, it has begun to prompt widespread anxiety, including among workers who worry about their future in an age of brilliant machines.And yet, for all of the evidence that big changes are underway, surprisingly little data exists to track the spread of digital adoption. In the absence of such information, the digitalization trend, as prominent as it is, remains diffuse and hard to pin down. Hence this report: Designed to clarify a major trend, the present assessment provides a detailed analysis of changes in the digital content of 545 occupations covering 90 percent of the workforce in all industries since 2001. Along these lines, the report finds that: Though digitalization is an ongoing trend, the U.S. economy has digitalized rapidly over the last decade. The degree and pace of digitalization vary widely across occupations and industries. Digitalization is associated with increased pay for many workers and reduced risk of automation, but it is also helping to “hollow out” job creation and wages by favoring occupations at the high and low ends of the pay scale while disfavoring those in the middle. The extent of digitalization also varies widely across places and is strongly associated with variations in regional economic performance. Digitalization is changing the skills needed to access economic opportunity while creating new race- and gender-based access challenges.In keeping with these trends, the overall takeaway here is twofold, as befits a powerful but ambiguous trend. Digitalization, for one thing, is vastly expanding the potential of the American economy, and generating opportunities for many. However, the construction of an inclusive labor market as digitalization proceeds wont happen by itself. Instead, it will require significant improvements in digital education and training, both to broaden the high-skill talent pipeline and ensure that underrepresented groups can connect to an increasingly digital economy. In addition, it is going to be important for workers to get better at being “what we are that computers arent.”Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program4Over the past half century, wave after wave of digital innovation has ensured that “digitalization”the diffusion of digital technologies into nearly every business, workplace, and pocketcontinues to remake the U.S. economy and the world of work.Nurses work like scientists, using portable vein finders for blood tests, while auto mechanics employ laptops to troubleshoot cars, and salespeople rely on cloud-based, artificially intelligent software agents like Siri and Alexa to schedule meetings.So rapid are the developments, in fact, that while the “digitalization of everything” has become a hallmark of techs promise of individual and business empowerment, it has also begun to prompt anxiety, including among workers who worry about their future in a world of brilliant machines.1And yet, for all of that, and despite much evidence that big changes are underway, surprisingly little data exist to track the spread of digital adoption across industries and into workplaces.2In the absence of such information, the digitalization trend, as prominent as it is, remains diffuse and hard to pin down.Which is where this report comes in. To help address the shortage of data on the topic, this assessment provides a detailed analysis of changes in the digital content of 545 occupations covering 90 percent of the workforce in all industries since 2001. The latest in a series of analyses from the Metropolitan Policy Program aimed at helping leaders understand and manage the disruption associated with major economic trends, the report moves initially to define and state the importance of “digitalization” and then to describe a novel method for quantifying the trend. With the resulting data in hand, the analysis then reviews a series of trends reflecting the spreading reach of digitalization and the varied ways it is affecting workers, industries, and places. Detailed information for states and large and small metropolitan areas is provided in an accompanying web-based interactive tool. Finally, the report discusses implications of the findings and suggests ways communities can work with firms and workers to spread the benefits of digitalization while mitigating its potentially harmful effects.In keeping with this discussion, the report concludes by stressing the importance of improving digital education and training, both to expand the high-skill talent pipeline and ensure that underrepresented groups can connect to an increasingly digital economy. In addition, the discussion notes how important it is becoming for all workers to cultivate durable “soft” or human skills as a way to get better at being “what we are that computers arent.”In the end, the main takeaway is twofold, as befits a powerful but ambiguous trend. Digitalization is vastly expanding the potential of the economy, and generating opportunities for many. However, the construction of an inclusive labor market as digitalization proceeds wont happen by itself. INTRODUCTION015Digitalization and the American workforceDIGITALIZATION: WHAT IT IS AND WHY IT MATTERS02What precisely is digitalization and why does it matter so much? WHAT IT ISDigitalization, according to Gartner, Inc., is the process of employing digital technologies and information to transform business operations.3As such, the digitalization of American life may be the fastest, most striking, example yet of the adoption of what economists call a general purpose technology (GPT)a technology like steam power or electricity so broadly useful that it reorients the entire economy and tenor of life.4The speed of digital technology improvement is encapsulated in Moores Law, which is an expansion of the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that the transistor density of low-cost integrated circuits was doubling every 12 months and was likely to continue to do so.5Over time, Moores Law has become shorthand for the idea that anything involving computing gets more capable over time.6That Moores Law has largely played out for 50 years underscores the momentum of digital technology improvement. The rapid diffusion of such gains, meanwhile, can be measured to a wide extent through new digital products that have been adopted by consumers and businesses.7After the introduction of the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981, personal computers spread rapidly, followed by regular waves of innovation including the internet, 2G Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program6and 3G smartphones, fixed and then mobile broadband, the cloud, the Internet of Things, social media, and artificial intelligence.Figure 1 plus some top-line data illustrate the pace and reach of digital technology throughout the world: Global annual sales of personal computers have increased from 700,000 units in 1980 to 260 million today.8 Smartphones in use have proliferated from 23,000 in 1980 to 7.2 billion in 2015, approximately one for every person on Earth.9 Microsoft Office now has more than 1.2 billion users.10 Amazon Web Services, one of the largest cloud computing providers, took seven years to store its first trillion digital objects in 2012 but now stores tens of trillions.11 The use of mobile point of sale credit card readers like Square surged from 5.8 million installations in 2014 to 15.6 million in 2016 with that number expected to double by 2020.12 Likewise, 35.6 million Americans now use voice-activated “smart speakers” like the Amazon Echo or Google Home to conduct business or order dinner.13The concrete impacts of all of this installation has been reinventing business activity thanks to the power of computing and IT to manage information, speed calculations, accelerate sharing, reduce marginal costs, and improve the scalability of operations.14Analogously, the arrival of technologies such as smartphone apps, mobile computing, file-0.00.10.10.20.20.30.30.40.40.01.02.03.04.05.06.07.08.01980198119821983198419851986198719881989199019911992199319941995199619971998199920002001200220032004200520062007200820092010201120122013 2014 2015Mobile-cellular subscriptions PC unit sales1980-2015, in billionsWorldwide digital device penetrationFIGURE 1Source: Brookings analysis of International Telecommunications Union, International Data Corporation, and Gartner Data7Digitalization and the American workforcesharing, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), the Internet of Things, big data, digital marketplaces, and social media has enabled an explosion of digitally enabled business models and ways of working. In terms of business models, organizations of all kinds are experimenting with myriad new formats ranging from decentralized and remote work, e-commerce, internet marketplaces, online talent platforms, online supply chain management, to “sharing” models, dynamic pricing, crowd financing, and many more.15In the workplace, meanwhile, the basic conduct of work has been remade by the continuing integration of digital tools ranging from digital storage, the Windows operating system, e-mail, productivity software like Word and Excel, to enterprise management platforms like PeopleSoft and social and collaboration tools like Slack and Skype.16As a result, workers of every stripefrom corporate finance officers to sales people to machine operators to utility workers and Uber driversare spending sizable portions of their workdays running the Waze app to navigate traffic; connecting to the office by text message; managing processes through Salesforce; or running diagnostic software at the building site or at bedside. The process of digitalization is accelerating, even in less extensively digital industries such as retail and health care. Industries are also expanding their use of enterprise management software, digital payment systems, social media marketing, and data analytics.17Beyond that, powerful new tools are arriving in the workplace. As the McKinsey Global Institute notes, the rapid spread of the Internet of Things is opening the possibility of improving the utilization of machinery, boosting the output of oil fields, and making buildings and roads more efficient.18In the world of professional services and business administration, even bigger changes are on the horizon with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning.WHY DIGITALIZATION MATTERSThe progress of digitalization is crucial to track, because major economic and labor-market impacts that flow from it are redefining work and transforming the structure of the entire economy.Central to these impacts is the role technology has long played in the collection, storage, exchange, and use of information.19Digital technology particularly has a special power because it amplifies the ability of workers and firms to add value by improving the organizational, analytic, and managerial aspects of production while demoting the value of and need for other kinds of work.In this regard, digital technology has emerged as arguably the most important driving force in the economy today given its power to both massively improve information management and rules-based processing in workplaces even as it disrupts established business practices with sizable impacts on workers.20Which is why academic research in recent decades has tended to show that the spread of digital technology is having significant impacts on workers, firms, industries, labor markets, and whole regions: Individual workers are seeing the nature and rewards of work change rapidly, thanks to digitalization. Significant research examining labor markets in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s shows that workers who use computers at work earn more.21Research also shows, however, that while digital technologies reward those who use them, they penalize those whose rote work the technologies can replace. Given that, most analysts attribute at least a portion of the nations increased inequality among workers to the spread of computers in the workplace.22 Firms, for their part, have been shown to reap performance gains from digitalization. Firm-level analysis in recent decades on Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program8both the services and manufacturing sides has found cost savings, improved output, and productivity gains from the adoption of digital technology.23Numerous studies have concluded that service firms IT competence supports improved business performance and innovation.24An even longer string of research findings documents ITs favorable impact on manufacturing firms productivity.25For example, one recent study found that software-oriented manufacturing firms generate more patents per research-and-development dollar and achieve better valuations of their innovation investments in equity markets.26Much of this firm-level research stresses that the benefits of digitalization are best realized when digital investments are combined with organizational adjustments.27Such combinations of technology and workplace readjustment are likewise leading to effective new arrangements of work: more virtual and interdisciplinary teams; more use of networks, outsourcing, and online platforms; and more use of nonstandard work arrangements, crowdsourcing, and cloud-based services. Of course, the inverse is also true: firms that do not go digital or do not combine digitalization with organizational innovations are falling behind.28 Digitalization has also helped improve the performance of whole industries. That was especially the case in the last major U.S. productivity boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. Between 1995 and 2000, high-tech IT-producing industries saw mean annual growth rates of 13 percent a year; industries using IT grew by 2.9 percent a year; and non-IT users expanded by only 1.7 percent a year.29Economy-wide, IT-producing and IT-using industries accounted for all of the nations productivity revival, while nonparticipating industries made a negative contribution. More recently, McKinsey found that industry performance is correlated with industry digitalization.30Most notably, McKinsey concluded that industry digitalization levels were an important influence on 10-year productivity growth trends in the 20
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