Business Process Automation – Are we losing control?
The extensive capabilities of computers has allowed many business processes to be automated. While automation may reduce manual labor costs, it can have a wide variety of unintended consequences.
A manual process can be observed, evaluated, determined to be efficient or flawed and easily changed or improved. An automated process cannot easily be observed and evaluated. Many of the documented business processes simply describe how a person interacts with a computer. The people have no idea why or how the computer arrives at the decision or output and they have a limited understanding of the automated decision processes. They become slaves to the computer and do not question the accuracy or logic of the automated processes.
Automating a business process should not shield the users from the process. It is important for the users to understand the decision logic in their applications and even to question the results. Just because a computer produced the output doesn’t make it accurate or true!
I truly have this btietr experience of how the LEAN initiatives are being thrown to dustbins. Most of the time, the LEAN is perceived to be “layoff” or the change is directly going to impact the way the things are carried out..your article is quite bang on target. Thanks for sharing your thoughts….
Rejecting Lean solutions could be justifies as a resistance to potential layoffs. Resistance to change is quite common regardless of the reason for the change. People will typically look for a reason to justify the resistance. Successful implementation of change requires the sponsors to anticipate and address potential resistance.
Hi, Nick
What you understanding Automating a business process?
Can we also, understanding that this can be aplicated to Test automation?
Many Thanks.
Gunther, A good test plan will organize test cases to align with the supported business processes. This will help to ensure the functionality supports the business process.
My personal point of view on business process automation is the following – if you want to be competitive and make your company successful you need to automate your business processes BUT decision making function should still be left for managers. I think at present you can keep the control over your tasks using many different software solutions like, for example, task tracking software from comindware. We’ve been using this simple but rather effective program for some time already and like its functional.
Sam, In theory, I agree. The problem we have today is that many of the decision making processes are complex but they are repeatable. Automation seems to be a good answer for repeable decision criteria. Decisions that require judgment and assessment must still be performed by people. The automation of repeatable decision-criteria is not the issue. The problem is that people become dependant on the automation and lose their understanding of the decision-making process.
Nick, completely agree that nowadays we rely more on software than real minds. I also thing that the final decision must be made by a person (better two).