Which technology would have the maximum impact on your process automation goal (or hyperautomation)?
A central orchestration and automation platform for business14%
RPA48%
Low Code26%
iPaaS7%
Something else (comment to share)4%
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A central orchestration and automation platform for business14%
RPA48%
Low Code26%
iPaaS7%
Something else (comment to share)4%
Please allow me explain....
In the last era, I had the great honour to be my company's delegate to The Phoenix Group, the late Dr. Michael Hammer's Business Process Management invitation-only forum of leading business process practitioners. During that time I also participated in the great debates between process re-designers and process improvers in this same forum, as LEAN and Agile were rising in practice and impact.
I have long argued that the best run companies have the minimal amount of business process automation (all other things being equal) and instead focus on getting rid of all non-value added work instead of "outsourcing it to the poor robots." Moving inefficiency, waste and error from humans to machines just creates faster and more expensive inefficiency waste and errors. I still struggle to understand why so many companies, with what is now well over half-a-century of business automation do not see this.
And here I differentiate sharply between technology that helps drive individual productivity (like Excel) and technology that codifies inefficient workflow into rigid expensive software. Before you touch such a thing, I recommend that you be 100% certain that the process has been leaned to the point of it being the most commodified and repeatable value-stream with 0 waste. At that point, go to tech.
Here are some of the disadvantages of RPA, low-code, and the like:
- you create overreliance on automation and tend to attract and retain lower-skill for core business processes. That's a short term cost benefit for a long-term brain drain that can kill the company.
- the cost of implementation - but worse, the cost of maintenance, of all of that human-developed logic (once the humans move on) creates a technical debt burden that is very difficult to fund in the long term - which tends to generate successive generations of costly re-automation.
- humans are flexible, emotional and exception driven creatures. This tends to be one of the reasons some companies tend to automate their poor processes - to eliminate exception. What ends up happening is rigidity, and that often tends to alienate customers (where the money comes from) who often value consistency, but never at the expense of their need for flexibility.
- process complexity builds up and pretty soon the humans no longer understand the core business. Far from freeing them up for innovation and value-added work, they actually lose insight into their own core business, negatively impacting innovation and reducing morale.
- while it is true that humans are often cited as the weakest link in cybersecurity defense, and social engineering is a very persistent and viable threat vector, it is more true that software is where bugs and security vulnerabilities lie. The more software, especially all that locally developed low-code, or hastily ported (lifted-and-shifted) RPA, is a massive target for cyberattack and data privacy incidents.
What should, imho, any company looking at process automation do instead?
LEAN: streamline business process and empower employees (and suppliers)
Agile: create cross-functional teams that are trained and permitted to adapt quickly to changing priorities and respond quickly to customer needs.
Teach and Elevate: put humans at the centre of your organisation, not process, and hire, retain and train for human centric roles that leverage human creativity. Continuously upskill, reskill and empower. Yes, AGI is coming and possibly we will welcome our AGI colleagues into the org chart, but process automation is a very far cry from AGI models.
Happy to discuss and debate further.