An unavoidable process
Every company today depends on automation to some degree. Sometimes that means simple things such as emailing with contacts, or streamlining bookkeeping and stock management. A more complex case arises when a government body imposes new rules that more or less force you to automate. Many companies have no natural affinity with IT at the core of their operation. The challenge is that ever further forms of automation force those same organisations to engage with it anyway.
At first sight, choices around automation look deceptively simple. Choosing an accounting system as a starting landscaper is a good example: initially a spreadsheet will do, since there are only a handful of customers. Over time, however, a large business client comes along with multiple sites and separate requirements for invoicing, staff, payroll and purchasing. The landscaper can keep relying on the spreadsheet, but there comes a point where it simply no longer suffices. What now? Above all this is a matter of strategy. It also shows why automation has to be tied to a company’s long-term objectives.
Always one step behind
At many companies, an automation strategy is not a self-evident part of running the business. That is entirely understandable: the landscaper wants to spend time creating beautiful gardens, not on a long-term strategy for automating the bookkeeping. Why worry today about tomorrow’s problem — if it becomes an issue, we will look at it then. In that case automation is always reactive, born out of necessity, with solving an acute problem as its primary goal. This is one of the main reasons automation is so often experienced as disruptive or invasive: it costs time and money, it breaks existing ways of working and it introduces (unforeseen) side effects. The change is not driven by a predictable and accepted growth process, but by acute problems.
The landscaper example illustrates this clearly. The spreadsheet is no longer adequate to support the bookkeeping of a growing business, so the landscaper has to spend more time on administration. That comes at the expense of serving customers. Here a problem emerges: selecting a new system becomes a necessity, and solving the immediate problem becomes the primary requirement. That opens the door to tunnel vision, silo thinking and short-term decisions. Whatever the landscaper chooses, the choice demands investment: the existing bookkeeping has to be migrated and new ways of working will emerge. The new system will genuinely solve something, but without a strategy it remains an open question whether it is the best solution in the long run. And even if that realisation comes later, the landscaper will hardly be eager to reconsider — the investment has been made, and every euro can only be spent once.
Insight that grows over time
Automation must always serve the business, never the other way around
The quality of automation is therefore directly related to the quality of the business strategy and its long-term objectives. That does not mean the landscaper in the example should have skipped the spreadsheet altogether and picked a “bigger” system straight away. It means the landscaper could have estimated when the spreadsheet would stop being adequate, and could have prepared the move to an alternative system before it became a problem.
That is the theory. In practice these processes are a good deal less linear. Countless companies work with systems that are sub-optimal for their operation or their long-term strategy. All too often that creates ways of working that serve the automation instead. The world upside down. The idea behind non-disruptive automation is to guide and support companies by choosing the most suitable form of automation at the right moments and in the right places.
That does not mean every decision a company has made about automation should be questioned and immediately replaced. The choices made so far do not have to be perfect to serve the business to a greater or lesser degree. Replacing an entire system is in fact hugely disruptive, and usually comes with a loss of knowledge and investment. What matters is identifying the problematic processes where the business is genuinely being held back, and intervening exactly there.
Two steps forward, one step back
Again, the landscaper illustrates the point. After buying the new accounting package the acute problem is solved and the bookkeeping works properly again. The spreadsheet, however, also allowed the landscaper to record current stock alongside the accounts, keeping purchasing, sales and inventory in one place. The new accounting system does not support that, which means the landscaper keeps relying on the spreadsheet for part of the work. At that moment a new way of working appears, one that serves the automation: the link between stock and accounts now has to be maintained by hand. An unpleasant side effect that shrinks the net benefit of the new system.
For employees and operational staff in particular, that kind of situation can be genuinely frustrating. On top of the disruption caused by the automation project itself, the new ways of working that follow from it can mean staff feel — or actually have — less time for useful work.
Timing is everything
Automating without disruption is a process in its own right, in which you keep assessing at a strategic level whether something should be automated at all, and if so, what. Ways of working are central to that question. It calls for staying critical and asking, again and again: does this really need to be automated? It is enormously tempting to automate as much as possible, but that is rarely a profitable strategy. By taking automation into account in the company’s objectives and long-term strategy, the question becomes easier to answer. Systems and automation then stop being an anchor and start driving both the business and the people in it.
