Senior leaders know that automation can be a difference maker. Automation boosts productivity and delivers better margins. It helps them scale faster than the competition.
So how can you make automation work better for your business?
A recent article, “10 Common Mistakes in Automation” resonated with me. The author is Laurence Goasduff of the Gartner Group, a respected IT advisor and researcher for enterprise organizations. www.gartner.com
For small and medium sized companies (SMB) 5 of these mistakes cause most of the trouble:
- Not engaging all stakeholders.
- Ignoring culture and employee impact.
- Wasting effort on overly complicated projects.
- Falling in love with a single technology.
- Believing business can automate without IT expertise.
The first two mistakes are related to how IT decisions are made. Because most SMB’s have technicians running IT, when asked to step out of their technical role into a role requiring communication, persuasion, and leadership, is it any mystery that they struggle?
Numbers 3 and 4 are related again to how IT is managed in small firms. Many SMB IT managers are early in their careers (because the more experienced ones have left for higher paying jobs!). Without the benefit of experience or access to experts, an automation project that seems ‘simple’ can be hopelessly complex. I once met a small company that was attempting to build their own mapping software! Even Apple struggled with that!
The other issue with 3 and 4, is a lack of understanding of how business works. Just because a technician fell in love with a tool they learned in college, that tool may not be reliable enough to run a business. Again, I found a ‘custom shipping’ system that the IT department thought was cool, and reliable because it worked 90% of the time. But 10% of the time not being able to ship cost the company thousands of dollars every month!
Number 5 falls on non-IT managers. It is common to have software firms sell their solution as ‘no-code’ or ‘low-code’, or that ‘you don’t need IT to run this.’ Then after it goes into production, you discover it won’t work within the cyber security platform, can’t integrate with accounting, or the SAAS company has no disaster recovery plan!
Before you start your next automation project, get in touch with us, and we can help you ensure your success with your automation projects!