- There are two primary audiences of your top-down mandate,
the internal and the external audiences.
In other words, you're declaring your intentions
to your employees and your customers, investors,
competitors, and the general public.
For this lesson, I'll be referencing parts
of the Mandate Template
which you can download from the Exercise Files.
Just as you might have learned
from Norton and Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard concept,
pick a few key metrics to rally around.
Pick ones that matter to your industry
and ones that are measurable
and meaningful to the organization.
In my Introduction to RPA course,
I speak about the forms of benefits
that automation can help achieve.
They include cost reduction, improved quality,
speed, agility, visibility,
improved employee productivity, and compliance.
And while they're all important,
the ideal top-down mandate needs to be crisp.
The top-down mandate also has to be empathetic
to the organization.
For instance, unless things are really bad,
I'd shy away from saying
that your primary goal is to cut jobs.
That's hardly motivating to the teams tasked
with making the change happen,
and most often you'll lose your best folks first.
Remember the Wipro mandate about a 30% head count reduction?
That shocked me at the time, and I imagine it left
the entire organization shocked as well.
Instead of job cuts,
articulate the impact in a different way.
One way that's commonly used is
in hours given back to the business.
This concept was introduced
by professors Mary Lacity and Leslie Wilcox,
and it refers to freeing up your staff
to focus on more valuable tasks.
So the dos of mandate crafting.
One, be crisp and clear.
Two, use metrics that have positive connotations,
like an improved efficiency ratio,
greater ability to invest in innovation,
or hours given back to the business.
Three, be empathetic to the staff.
Four, use clear, quantifiable targets.
And five, be bold.
And the don'ts of drafting a top-down mandate.
One, don't use hype and buzzwords.
For instance, AI is not a very descriptive term.
I'd shy away from using it.
Two, don't equate value in terms of terminations.
Head count reduction may be a mechanism to unleash costs,
but don't focus on it.
Three, don't be too short-term.
In my opinion, the best mandates refer
to three to five year horizons.
Give yourself time to achieve the bold goals.
And four, don't use excuses like competition
or tough market dynamics to justify your bold pronouncement.
It sounds like you're being reactive.
So putting all of this into practice,
if I were the CEO of a healthcare organization,
for instance, I would consider a mandate such as this.
Sacred Heart is launching an intelligent automation center
of excellence to digitize clinical
and back-office operations
in order to reduce average cost-to-serve by 25%,
wile increasing patient and employee satisfaction ratings
by 50% and increasing revenue per bed
by 30% in the next three years.
And if I were heading a bank, I might declare
that YouBank is launching a one-bank initiative
to digitize and unify all customer support functions
using RPA in order to reduce costs by $1 billion,
improve the efficiency ratio by 25%,
and create the data necessary for intelligent,
predictive decision making growing average products
per customer by 50% through increased engagement.
So there you have it.
While the declaration to the market
isn't necessarily the first place you start,
it's most certainly a guidepost
that energizes all of your stakeholders
and frankly commits you and your organization
to put your money where your mouth is.
So be sure to get this stage
of your digital ops journey correct.