The New Automation Mindset

CHAPTER 8Mastering Your Automation Journey

“Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.”

—Napoleon Hill

We all see automation through the lens of our personal or team goals. It is natural. Our minds work this way; new technology sparks ideas of all the exciting ways we can put it to good use. We'll commonly apply new technologies to the tasks in front of us, no matter where we sit in the organization.

Hopefully the first half of this book has inspired you to rethink your automation mindset. As a result, you have taken an important step in your automation journey by developing what Harish Ramani, CIO of Helen of Troy, calls the “helicopter view of the enterprise.” From this vantage point, we rise above our immediate goals and projects to see the outcomes that need to be delivered across the company.

With the helicopter view, we can align our automation work to the business outcomes that make a company thrive. In other words, our new automation mindset makes us recognize the core outcomes that automation can:

• Drive revenue growth;
• Increase customer retention and expansion;
• Help retain employees and empower them to be productive;
• Improve supplier relations and efficiency;
• Encourage operational excellence.

Every automation initiative a company undertakes will impact one or more of these outcomes.

Take, for example, the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Company. That name might not ring a bell, but you certainly know them by their shortened name, 3M. They produce many products ...