Yes, you can automate it… but should you?
For four months of my late twenties, I worked on a state government candidate’s election campaign. At the time, an unpopular and very expensive publicly facing ICT project had recently spent much, much more than its promised budget, and I was tasked with coming up with a social media campaign to highlight better ways the money could have been spent. It didn’t matter that that the incumbent candidate had had little to do with that project - they were a member of the party that had overseen it, and our campaign hit a nerve with voters. The system wasn’t just over budget. It was also clunky. It didn’t necessarily save time for the voters who interacted with it.
Most of us, including myself, still assume that automation is making things more efficient, and saving time. But I recently had coffee with a former colleague who inspired this post. Yes, you can automate it, he said. The question is… should you? It reminded me that I seem to spend more time filling in online forms, and trying to meet their password requirements and upload limitations, than in the days of pdf forms (or paper for that matter). It reminded me of census night 2016, where I was swiftly filling in the paper form I was accustomed to while the online site was down. In this case, the extra time and cost is borne by the customer - but what if that extra cost is borne by your business?
So how do you know when to automate, and when not to? It’s not an easy question to answer, but its one that we increasingly need to, given that companies and organisations are trying to capture value from their investment in AI, and that anyone with a working knowledge of Microsoft products now has access to a library of workflows, PowerApps and automations that they can build themselves.
Given that Microsoft has given us this gift, let’s go back to what its founder, Bill Gates, said much earlier: ‘;The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.’
If you’re worked in IT, you might be familiar with this quote, and if not, you’ll certainly be familiar with the consequences of failing to heed it. I have seen many, many projects spend far more time, or even fail, because the work of looking at the basic business process and optimising it before someone had invested in a software product. The problem is that doing business process work doesn’t give you a tangible deliverable, so many decision-makers can’t see the value. But you need to invest in that work do it before making a decision to automate. The whole discipline of Business Analysis exists because of this.
The thing is, you can get tangible gains from very short engagements mapping an existing process and identifying inefficiencies, without spending a cent on software. There’s something magic about that penny-drop moment in a one hour workshop with the right SMEs, where the managers come to realise the number of times the same people sign off on the same decision, or the amount of work that goes into each process step, and understand why it takes so long for things to get done.
It isn’t because people are lazy, or not trying hard enough. It’s because the process isn’t right, and without getting everyone together in the room, no-one on their own has the full process in their heads.
That’s one of the reasons I started Working Order… not to spend my days filling in Visio diagrams, but to faciliate those sorts of conversations with the right people, to give them the easy, quick wins.
Yes, you can automate it… the question is should you?
