It seems like what we hear about most these days is how bad things are and who’s at fault.
When I feel like I’m in that situation, I try to follow the old adage – “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
It sounds simple enough, but it sometimes takes me a bit to get there. But once I do, I can start to look at the facts of my situation, see options for getting out and learn to avoid that particular scenario in the future
Last week in our post, we discussed the importance of dealing with data-driven facts to make your best decisions. This week, let’s look at the role automation can play in assisting data harvesting.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a “silver bullet or lottery fix” existed to resolve problems? If there is such a lucky cure, I haven’t been privy to it.
Like many – I find that luck is where hard work meets opportunity.
But the hard work doesn’t have to be so hard if you have good automation to help.
Most of us seem to approach automation with some skepticism. Rightly so, since there’s a lot of history where investment in automation hasn’t achieved the advertised results. That leads to wasted dollars and resource time, in addition to underachieving the goals for it in the first place.
In my opinion, there are four primary goals every automation project should deliver:
- Make it Easy – It should improve the time required and overall effort of the task
- Make it Efficient – It should allow you to focus on the highest priorities and offer directed actions to streamline your work
- Make it Timely – It should allow you to harvest the information when needed, offering confidence in its accuracy
- Make it Valuable – Its output should meet your needs for the best decisions and outcomes
If your automated solution can provide positive answers to these four goals, you probably have an option that will work well for you.
We’ve built the mobilePLUS solution to deliver on these goals for each of our clients – whether they are conducting physical inventories with Workday, creating compliance reporting on IT equipment, or other data-generating tasks.
Automation is a critical tool today. It may come in the form of mobile solutions like ours or AI tools like ChatGPT for jump-starting your research and options. The real challenge is that it addresses your requirements at the end of the day.
What are your goals for automated solutions? Do you have general guidelines in addition to the specific purpose that they serve? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments.
