You often hear people talking about process automation, as if hence forward, people will no longer take part in the process. This can be the case, but in most situations, its more a matter of identifying what things people are good at and what is best done by technology and how they can both work together in a coherent way. I would describe a ‘process’ as ‘the way a team agree to work together to achieve a set of outcomes’. So, the team need to identify which bits of their process will be done by humans and which will be done by technology.
Innovation means doing new things or doing current things differently, to achieve a desired set of outcomes, in completely new and better ways. Technology never delivers innovation alone; the innovation is delivered by the new process. Technology can, however, often play a crucial role, in enabling such a change.
Technology is frequently useful for doing repetitive tasks reliably, speedily and precisely, whilst humans are better at providing judgement and dealing with new and unexpected situations.
So taking innovation in reliability, one example of benefit from technology is improved quality. To take an example: a process requires three things to be done after finishing speaking to a customer, or the customer will receive a poor service. This process is currently the best way of doing it, so an improvement in reliability will be an innovation. A human service deliverer can on occasion get distracted and forget to do all three. Technology can ensure that all three are done automatically or if requiring input, that the service provider is reminded, resulting in an improved level of customer satisfaction. Improved reliability innovation was used in warehouses with early stock control systems and just-in-time ordering, so that whenever a stock was depleted past a certain level, technology automatically placed the new order, avoiding dependence on a human noticing and making time to place a new order. Then the purchaser’s computer system and the supplier’s computer system were linked for automatic repeat order transmission, enabling lower levels of stock to be held by the purchaser. This innovation created major improvements in sunk capital in assets and more reliable supply for the purchaser.
Opportunities to innovate in this way often occur around co-ordination points between individuals, teams or organisations. Things that frequently go wrong, and lead to difficult or dangerous service failures, often stem from a trivial mistake in a mundane task, or more often just forgetting to tell someone.
Next, taking innovation in speed, some things were not possible till technology came along. Take the example of the search engine replacing manual searches. A human could not search millions of documents in a fraction of a second to find relevant information. The skill of the human to see a similar pattern in, say, two very different problems, can lead to them finding a tried and tested solution to what on the face of it is a new problem, however without a search engine, they would never be able to assemble that knowledge in one lifetime, let alone be able to find the repeating patterns that they need.
Opportunities to innovate in this sort of way occur when a new process can be envisaged theoretically, but is impractical because of the amount of human effort required. Such opportunities occurred in the past after manual filing systems were replaced by computerised filing. The sheer ability to locate information and retrieve it speedily made new process forms possible. Similarly computerised filing enabled new processes based on concurrent access to the same data and significant paralleling of previously sequential tasks.
Taking innovation in precision, lasers can allow delicate surgery to be performed at a level of precision, beyond the capability of a human eye. Similarly computerised DNA matching enables police to exclude unproductive lines of enquiry.
These types of innovation occur in situations where significantly enhanced precision, will enable new and valuable outcomes.
