It's all about Efficiency

There may be many reasons why tech as well as business leads are asked to find opportunities for gaining efficiencies. The heat of the volatile environment, the pressure to innovate, the need for operational excellence. All the things I am discussing in this TDWI Talk - sorry, German only:

Now let's assume you already have smart and eager people in your organization, of course you give them enough space to learn new tricks and grow.

And effectively, your task would be: Scout opportunities for gaining efficiency. How do you go about it?

The pyramid shows the balance of FOCUS, TECH (with AUTOMATION part of it), PROCESS ANALYSIS you need to strike in order to come up with new ideas for driving efficiency gains in your organizations.

Balance, because an extreme tilt into one direction has severe detrimental effects.

Disclaimer: Next to what I portray as follow, you want to lay the grounds for an effective Change Management. Managing Change well is in itself an accelerator for any efficiency gain - or, if not taken care of, a guaranteed fail thereof. I mention this here only in case you wonder where the people would be "in the picture".

Now back to the Efficiency Gain Pyramid.

EXAMPLE SCENARIO, to make things more tangible:

Imagine a car manufacturer is contemplating on how to gain efficiency.

An extreme tilt towards FOCUS implies restricting the organization to the greatest extent to "as-is" and focusing only on the core business and the core value chain. No technology, no (significant) process changes. This was the go-to choice for many companies during the start of the Covid pandemic. At the time nobody was prepared and manufacturing, transport, tourism - just to name some verticals - were facing unexpected and disruptive challenges. It came with cutting down workforce, minimizing spend wherever possible. However, this tilt towards FOCUS implies taking care of tactical aims only, dropping strategic ones almost entirely. For our car manufacturer staying "as-is" and restricting itself to "bare minimum" in terms of investments and efforts means, cars can be produced - but its strategic goal of becoming a software company and rivaling tech companies making headways into the automotive industry is further away than ever.

Staying in this mode for a longer period of time means ultimately losing market share and relevance, because innovation in the fast-paced tech sector is like a red queen race from Alice in Wonderland. If you stop running as fast as you can, you will fall behind.

Bottom line, this tilt will not help you to maintain efficiencies in the long run.

An extreme tilt towards PROCESS ANALYSIS/DISCOVERY implies little focus on business drivers - they just happen to be in the big chunk of processes you comb through but essentially you're looking at as many processes as possible. (Automated process analysis with the help of process mining may help you with managing the numbers, in that case you would be between PROCESS ANALYSIS and AUTOMATION and not in the farthest corner of PROCESS ANALYSIS.)

At the same time, the extensive analysis leads to few take-aways implemented via Technology and in particular AUTOMATION. That's because you're stuck in an "analysis paralysis", where each process seemingly leads to more inconsistencies which need to be resolved. Often the number of stakeholders involved in the process skyrockets the deeper and wider you go, resulting in even less "doing" and even more "contemplating".

Bottom line being, this tilt may never really lead to efficiency gains at all.

An extreme tilt towards TECHNOLOGY/AUTOMATION is not ideal for gaining efficiency, either. It means you are automating whatever comes along, with little (business, value, priority) focus and in all likelihood the decision goes for processes or part of processes that come with "low friction". For the sake of getting "hands dirty" and "going" as quickly as possible. Low friction as in, these bits and pieces are not all that critical and are only of interest to very few in the organization. Hence, they do not require a wider discourse and seemingly, stakeholder management is not much of a concern. Most of the time the latter assertion is wrong. Which is besides the main issue of this heavy tilt towards TECHNOLOGY: Often, these implementations are just too small, do not really prove or provide value and just do not carry across the full potential of using technology (for automation) as a selling point within the organization. This is the typical "tech for tech's sake" approach and chances are these well intended efforts will end up as "techy playgrounds" in the organization history, doing little or nothing to reap lasting efficiency gains.

This is not to say any of these extreme positions are of no use or never lead to great change initiatives. For example, technology focused development streams may produce stunning proof of concepts that could serve as eye opener -?and inspire a whole new initiative, program, grass roots movement. The chances of falling short are just much higher compared to keeping a balance between PROCESSES, TECHNOLOGY and FOCUS.

In an upcoming article I'll write about what first steps towards automation you may consider - and how to get the organization behind you in the process.