Automation is a big industry. It can be intimidating to navigate the surplus promises and claims of added efficiency, easy of use, fast adoption, boosted profits, and any number of seeming miracles offered by the automation companies vying for your attention. Some of these claims appear self-contradictory, like self-service process automation. Others don’t jive with your experience, like fast deployment and wide adoption. Vendors in this space sell their tools as the glue with which to seal every crack in your business processes.
The swelling wave of software claiming to be accessible to non-developers—like that from the “no code/low code” guys—is especially tempting as a process panacea. Long has there been a communication abyss between business and IT teams, and these “accessible apps” allegedly offer a byway for business folks to trek into IT territory. Because business solutions arise from and solve the needs of business teams, it’s assumed that business teams are best suited to develop solutions themselves, rather than risk the chasm to talk with IT. Seems logical.
Trouble is, accessibility comes at the cost of flexibility and control. So while simpler problems can be solved by “self-service” apps, as those problems grow in complexity developers almost always have to open the hood. Think of it like a car: your 4×4 SUV is great in the occasional city snow storm. But if you’ve got to drive it through the Alaskan Tundra, with 10-foot snow drifts spilling over a path most frequently traveled by brown bears and moose, are you confident modifying the SUV yourself without a trained mechanic?
At best, you’ll solve 80% of a given business problem with a certain technology made for the purpose. For the remaining 20%, you’ll either call in a dev team or buy another “self-service” tool to fill the gap. This is how a constellation of different apps comes to define a company’s tech stack – a series of spot solutions piled one atop the other. Not quite a strategic approach.
Now, none of this is to say that these tools don’t have a place in your processes; they very well may. You need business intelligence, and Looker, Tableau, or Domo might be the one for you. But maybe it’s just Excel. Or for process automation, UIPath might be the tool you need. But maybe what you really need is an API.
It’s absolutely crucial to realize that your business processes and technology are an ecosystem, each piece or process of which exists in symbiosis with all the others. Solving even a single problem in that light takes balance.
Balance is found by auditing the processes with which you’re having problems, gathering requirements from business and IT teams, and engaging software experts to recommend the best mix of tools not only for the job but for the ecosystem in which the job is carried out. In comparison to buying a license and downloading an app, this probably sounds daunting. But the amount of money spent on poorly planned and ill-fitting software in the long run far exceeds the short term cost of doing it right.
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Getting tech done right the first time takes a holistic approach. A holistic approach means bringing different perspectives to bear on a particular problem, and when that particular problem is situated in an environment where every piece relies on and contributes to the function of the whole machine, well, you’d better bring in mechanics. Unless you’re in the tech business, you’re not in the tech business, and to land a solid win with tech projects you’ll want someone who is. Someone who can look at your ecosystem and recommend which tools will fit best while also solving the salient problems. Otherwise, that technology constellation becomes a technology soup: impossible to take apart, cryptic, and unfulfilling.
As often as it’s like that, it doesn’t have to be. It just takes the right set of eyes and brains, someone with knowledge of your industry as well as domain expertise related to the problem you’re trying to solve, whether that’s an accounting problem, an automation problem, or anything else. The trick is knowing that a fix over here may open up a problem over there. No problem is an island, so making sure ripples from each solution don’t flood the other beaches is a crucial part of all your digital efforts.