The New Automation Mindset

CHAPTER 4The Scale Mindset

“The potential for employee‐driven digital innovation … cannot be accomplished by small groups of technologists and data scientists walled off in organizational silos.”

—Satya Nadella & Marco Iansiti

Automation is not a new concept. Most understand its value and are aware of ample opportunities for automation in their business. So what's stopping them? Why not automate every process in every corner of the business? Many leaders would say it's impossible.

Say a midsize company has 200 apps (a conservative estimate).¹ The company has 1,000 employees. Each employee uses three apps and three processes every day. The scale of processes in the company is some multiple of those numbers. It can come out to thousands of processes and subprocesses. The top processes have names and established checklists. Most others do not.

In most companies, nameless processes are manual ones. They typically exist only in the heads of the team members involved. These processes very rarely get automated. These can include:

• Data entry into the customer relationship management platform (CRM);
• Reporting on quarterly performance;
• Project requests between teams;
• And thousands more.

It would make no sense for an average IT team, which is understaffed and overworked, to prioritize these unnamed processes. As a result, only the most critical and high‐profile processes in the company get automated. The remaining 99% of processes go unaddressed. When thinking about automation in ...