A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
A letter to my past self-Four lessons learned from the past 4+ years working with Automation
To be successful with automation, you need a centralized support function.
When we began our automation journey, we didn’t have a dedicated team. Everyone involved was contributing on a part-time basis on top of other responsibilities. For example, our original developers were accountants who were doing their typical accounting work at 75 percent of their capacity, while trying to learn & develop automation with the remaining 25 percent of their time. While I believe citizen developers can add tangible value to an automation program, without a centralized support function, the program will never be fully successful. The first thing you need to do when you set up an automation program is to establish your controls, operating procedures and best practices. Without these core tenets in place, your citizen developers will struggle to deploy automation that do not require constant maintenance.
Automation is not a silver bullet. We should not automate processes that do not fit the key requirements for automation: tasks that are repeatable, logic-driven and high in volume. Automating processes outside of these requirements can make the process worse. Instead of automating these processes, we should look to understand how we can improve them. Can we standardize the process to make it more efficient? Do we need to do the process in the way it is currently defined? Is there a benefit to be gained if we execute the process more often? Taking the time to understand the process and its constraints and drivers will lead to the best solution. Good processes are automatable. For bad processes, we should focus on improving the process before introducing automation.
Automation comes in all sizes.
The criteria for success in automation will differ depending on the scale of the company. Companies with large call centers will be able to generate more automation value due to the scale of people doing the same task. Smaller companies with employees who have specialized roles will have a harder time finding easy-to-implement, large-return automation. To get the most return, companies should have a strategy for both attended and un-attended automation, citizen-developed and center of excellence (COE) built automation. Covering these different areas allows a company to capture value from the small personal productivity automation to the large industrial automation solutions. If a company only focuses on COE-built automation, the smaller personal productivity automation will never be prioritized. Conversely, if a company only uses citizen developers, large industrial automation will be nearly impossible to build and support.
You will never be 100% successful.
I am a perfectionist, always have been and looking back, that’s probably why I got my degree in accounting. In accounting, I have appreciated that there is always a right or wrong answer and hardly any gray area. Moving over to automation, the most difficult adjustment for me was being comfortable in the gray. You can do all your due diligence, test every scenario you can possibly think of, deploy to production & immediately have something break. Taking a step back & recognizing that success is measured in the long run, not within a single deployment, has allowed me to become more comfortable with uncertainty.
Again, I am incredibly proud of our automation team and where our program is today. From where we started during the pandemic of 2020 to where we are now, there has been a holistic transformation. I am extremely excited about the future of automation at Weyerhaeuser, and the sky is the limit with the team we have built.
