Why Should You Consider Incorporating Automation In Your Business
Automation is a wonderful way to supplement the efforts of your organization, boost productivity, and ease the burden of minutia on teams. While implementing automation has trade-offs to consider, and can even cause disruption to certain business processes, it also can have immense benefits if implemented correctly.
Adopting automation doesn’t mean using technology to replace or restructure your current company models, processes, and structures. Automated applications can help you address problems within your organization, ameliorate weaknesses, and empower employees.
With the use of automation, and other exciting technologies powered by artificial intelligence, we are able to allow employees to concentrate on more nuanced, complex problems and projects.
What is there to consider before adopting an automated application? In actuality, you’ll want to consider everything. It’s tempting to adopt a new technology simply because another institution is using it to great benefit. Automated tools work differently for different organizations.
As with most things, it’s best to take a measured approach, and to tailor the tools to the job at hand. In order to do so, you’ll need to understand where automated tools may be useful to your organization.
Every company has room for improvement. Sometimes automation is the answer, other times training employees is the most productive solution. Often, it’ll be a mixture of activities, tools, and applications that will give you a workable solution to a your problems.
For instance, let’s say that you find that your daily meetings with your IT team is ineffective. Team members often aren’t on the same page at the end of the meeting and topics brought up during discussion rarely identify real weaknesses within the team.
In short, the meetings aren’t helping the team improve or progress despite the massive amount of time and dedication poured into them. How do you help address all of these problems.
Can team communications be automated?
One solution might be to make meetings weekly instead of daily and improve tracking tasks. Automated applications, like ones that could be found within the team messaging app Slack, could help teams track company projects progress as well as turn in tasks. That way, it’s much easier to be on the same page about projects, and reduce the amount of time it takes to get up to speed. This frees up resources, like all the precious time being spent during meetings, and helps streamline project management.
In the above example, a related set of problems is identified and a few related solutions (i.e. changing meeting timeframes and integrating automated project management applications) were offered up as a solution. Then, we hypothesized how this might benefit the organization as a whole.
Taking it further, you can surmise that some time might be lost in the short-term as employees have to be trained to use the new tech and adapt the changes a automated application might bring to current and future projects.
In analyzing some of the initial drawbacks, we can conclude whether or not an automated application is truly useful to the organization as a whole or if it simply a quick and ineffective solution that fails to address a larger problem.
Automation is clearly not a cure all for all of your organization’s inefficiencies. But, it is, at the very least, a very useful tool to your business that can be applied in creative, innovative, and incredibly beneficial ways.
Artificial intelligence has propelled tech further and has wrought some amazing automation applications. Your organization could address real weaknesses and inefficiencies in ways that were previously unimaginable.
Conclusion
Employees could also benefit from learning to best leverage these tools to accomplish individual, team, and company goals. Using some problem solving skills, some advanced tech, and data-driven operational strategies, automation can be used to further your business’s goals, empower your employees, and strengthen your bottom line.
Adopting automation with a plan and tracking the results of the automation is surely a great way to not only experiment with new and innovative tech and ways of doing business, but also a wonderful answer to mundane and repetitive work.
Anthony Coggine is a HR professional turned business analyst. He has spent more than 5 years as a recruitment consultant in a variety of industries, primarily focused on consumer technology and research. You may connect with him on Twitter.
