You & Your Systems: Who's Working for Whom?

Are your systems working for you, or are you working for your systems?

Most organizations will answer yes to both of those questions, although our goal with digital transformation initiatives is to have systems working for you, not the other way around.

However, a lot of organizations still have their people working for their systems.

Consider these examples:

1. A salesperson needs to manually key in a referred prospect’s name and email, log the interaction, and update the lead status
2. An operations staffer receives back a set of spreadsheets from a vendor that always have the same format, then manually uploads those to a system
3. Data is manually entered from paper forms that look similar in structure and have text-based identifiers and handwritten information

In all of these cases, we have low-hanging, ripe fruit that is desperate to be picked!

1. Automatically scrape the from name and email address (and optionally use generative AI to parse other details from the body) to create a new record within CRM
2. Create a process that reacts files being uploaded to a shared folder, which optionally could be exposed to the vendor
3. Digitize the paper forms and let document AI solutions recognize the template and extract data using OCR to process downstream

Some of those might sound expensive to implement, or only available to enterprises or well-capitalized organizations.

But, that’s not the case: all of those are possible using technology available today!

The key is thoughtfully designing the business processes to optimize for the hardest thing to find and retain: your people.

As you design your business processes, here’s an easy trick that you can use: ask yourself “does this step truly require a person’s judgment, or are we just using them to connect data?'”

If it’s the latter, free your people from doing that and use systems to satisfy the step.

TLDR: Aim to have your systems work for you as much as possible. Don’t be working for your systems.