The Changing Face Of How Work Gets Done

Since the dawn of automation the focus has been on increasing productivity. Frederick Taylor, a pioneer of efficiency, started the automation movement by redefining how workers did their jobs during the industrial revolution. Taylor's focus was on repeatability and standardization of work activities to increase productivity and consistency of work. In the decades since his death in 1915 technology has advanced his concepts to a point where it has fundamentally and substantially changed the workplace, companies and economies. Productivity gains from technology are now the primary drivers of GDP.

Within companies, automation has moved from the manufacturing floor into the back office. It then migrated into the front office and beyond to the extended ecosystem, along the way redefining how companies sell, distribute, collaborate with suppliers and partners, interact with prospects and customers, and manage their employees.

Enterprise software applications like financial systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM), to name a few perfected Taylor's concepts of automation by predefining and codifying how routine, repeatable tasks were to be performed. The goal was to perform these tasks faster, more accurately and with less human involvement; theoretically to free the employee to perform higher level or more creative activities. Because of how these systems were designed, employees have to structure their work around how the systems function. How often have you been told by an accounts payable clerk, inventory manager or manufacturing engineer that they couldn't do something because of 'the system'? A classic case of the tail wagging the dog.

We've all benefited from the productivity gains of enterprise software but the gaps are glaring in product innovation, actualizing business strategy, and synchronizing company activities in light of constantly changing priorities. These are threatening not only job creation but company survival.

What is lacking is the ability to holistically direct and manage a business from all angles – top down, bottom up and sideways. While existing systems excel at routine task automation, they do not help employees understand their current work priorities or help them to understand their role in the context of the company's strategy. Wouldn't companies be more productive (and fun to work at) if enterprise software proactively informed employees of new priorities based on strategy changes made by management? Wouldn't managers be more responsive and effective if they were automatically alerted to the effect of decisions made by others and how it impacts their group and the company's goal? What businesses need in this economic climate is automation that synchronizes priorities and actions instead of data gathering, processing, reconciling and reporting. It's a proven fact is that workers are more productive if they can see how their role relates to achieving company goals and understand how top-down decisions impact them and the technology exists today to automate this.

Imagine if a company had an automated framework within which everyone worked. As management decides on particular courses of action, objectives and priorities are automatically cascaded down the organization and shared with employees ensuring company alignment and synchronization. New priorities are reflected not only in employee performance plans but also in their ongoing tasks lists and in departmental and team plans and goals. As various parts of the business work on actualizing the strategy, managers had real time status on the progress made across the organization. As external customer and market conditions changed, the impact on progress and business objectives was automatically assessed and employees alerted in real-time to performance gaps.

Now let's imagine that an event occurs that requires the strategy to be changed. That same framework is used to update the strategy and company plans. However, because everyone in the company works within the framework, the revised strategy and new priorities are immediately visible and reflected in every employee's priorities. Questions, conflicts, inconsistencies and constraints are logged within the system by any employee. These are immediately visible, as well as their impact on target results, to other employees and managers who can collaborate on and resolve gaps and issues.

Sounds farfetched? I don't think so. The technology to do this is here with IaaS, SaaS, MDM and new product innovation management systems. The claim that managing strategy and alignment is by its very nature what managers are paid to do just doesn't fit our economic reality anymore. Yet people stick to these long held corporate beliefs that "gut instinct" should be the prevailing decider of business decisions rather than real analysis. To the contrary, these are the very areas where automation can have greatest impact on business growth, profitability and employee effectiveness. If these gaps are closed, businesses could be managed with a greater degree of certainty and speed; it could dramatically change economic cycles and drive job creation.

And that would make everyone's job a heck of a lot less frustrating.

Thanks to Christine Crandell - Outside the Box / Blogs Forbes