- Just because you can automate it
doesn't necessarily mean ya should.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla,
is the poster child for automation and innovation,
yet he showed us that
even for the most forward thinking companies,
automation's not always the answer.
Tesla over-automated,
which helped speed up a cash crunch in production delays.
Musk admitted this in a tweet in which he said, quote,
"Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake."
End quote.
He went on to say, quote,
"Humans are underrated," end quote.
This lesson applies to RPA in spades,
after all it is but one tool in your tool belt.
Don't try to shoe horn RPA into solving problems
it's not built to solve,
especially when they might be other solutions available,
like cognitive technologies, workflow tools,
or the most miraculous of all, humans.
I've long asserted that the future of work
is actually an optimal orchestration
of a hybrid ecosystem of tools and people working together.
The critical lesson here is that we often get bogged down
with the buzz words, hype, and opportunities
of automation and we forget to focus
on the business fundamentals.
This is when I see if businesses make the mistake
of looking for symptoms of underlying problems to tackle,
relying on the technology itself
to miraculously fix their problems.
Continuous improvement, change management,
strong program management,
talent acquisition, employee development, and much more.
The fundamentals are still the fundamentals.
Respect the mechanisms that have kept the business
running this long and don't forget to loop in
the black belts, data scientists, and project managers
who have been on the front lines of change
across your organization for decades.