Have you ever noticed that you are spending more time (human effort) on supposedly digitized processes than you used to before they were “streamlined”?
The digitized process that requires so much manual escalation, diagnosis and intervention to achieve a timely outcome as to render it unproductive and a frustrating customer experience?
The root cause of this is often in the lack of awareness of what the steps in the specific process pathways are, or lack of transparency into upstream tasks that are incomplete or incorrect.
It is a paradox.
It is an economic fact of life, but one worth untangling.
The promise of digitization is that of improved business productivity, enhanced customer experience and reduced cycle time, all of which drive improved financial results.
We sometimes assume that a digitized process “obviously” eliminates manual effort and thus can be regarded as a “black box” to the “user”.
But real life isn’t like that.
I think we are missing the point here, and we risk exactly the same challenge with Generative AI.
Reading a McKinsey article this week really resonated with this on several levels.
“Technology alone not enough for true productivity” by Lareina Yee of McKinsey in an interview with economist and Stanford professor Erik Brynjolfsson.
We talk about automating, but “it’s rarely just replacing the entire job or an entire set of tasks. It’s more often allowing people to do them better with more quality and effectiveness, augmenting their ability to do the job.”
Augmentation vs Automation.
It turns out that even our classic “automation” implementations perform more “augmentation” than “task replacement”.
Getting to the root of this will help us dramatically improve the processes of tomorrow.
“One of the things we learned was that awesome technology alone is not enough. What you really need is to update your business processes, reskill your workforce, and sometimes even change your business models and organization in a big way. This can lead to what we call a productivity J-curve, where initially, as you’re doing all those changes, you don’t see productivity gains, and may even experience a productivity loss. Over time, the J-curve kicks in, and you get these bigger benefits.”
Technology alone is never enough for true productivity.
We pay lip-service to this idea but consistently fail to put in the hard yards that take us to a truly optimized “customer experience”.
- Understanding the end-to-end value streams / business processes
- Aligning with the “WHY” and key business outcomes
- Recognizing that no end-to-end process in the enterprise has only one desirable pathway or journey
- Identifying the defects, waste, error, delay and frustration in these journeys
- Focusing on simplicity of process experience
- Discovering the WIIFM “What’s in it for me” in any change for the process participants and stakeholders
- Prioritizing the maximum impact for the least cycle-time, effort and cost (Pareto Principle)
- Executing with urgency whilst aligning with longer term strategy
If you haven’t read the playbook on this, now is as good a time as any!
Thanks for reading . . .