Gardner on Going Paperless

Automating Business Processes with Digital Technology

Part 1: Measure Your Data — Make the Right Decisions

This topic of automating business process with digital technology is obviously too large to be comprehensive in just one entry.

Therefore, I’m going to start by picking apart this topic, bit by bit, and I’m going to start with looking at the question of “why” before I go to deep into the “how”.

When we think about the automation of business processes, we usually jump to dreamy concepts like competitive advantage, service differentiation, or streamlining back-office efficiencies.  But I think we miss the more obvious – providing a source of data measurement.

Our organizations are rich with completely unmeasured processes.  A good example of this is service level commitments, often called SLA’s or Service Level Agreements. Regardless of whether or not we decide to publish our business processing commitments, we all set them.  We tell our staff to approve client credit applications in fewer than 10 hours from the time of receipt, or ask our accounts payable people to process invoices in under a day.

In my years of working with companies, originally as an analyst looking at just these types of problems, the process was always the same – first we had to find the data.

One of the greatest arguments for automating business processes with digital technology is so that you have a consistent and reliable source of data.  In the right hands, this data can tell you where you are over or under staffed, how you are doing on customer commitments, where your other systems are letting you down, or where you may have an opportunity to really build one of those service differentiators that will one day become a competitive advantage.

Without intelligent automation you either have to go through herculean efforts every time you want to measure a function, which means you won’t watch it all the time, or you simply guess where your organization needs to put its attention.

In the worst case, leaders who are struggling to find data simply give up and start making decisions in absence of data.  As a great business leader friend of mine always says, “prescription without diagnosis is malpractice”.  He’s right, and having no data is no excuse for making off-the-cuff changes to your business.

Go get the data, and do it right.