Large Scale Automation

Imagine for a moment that you were suddenly placed in charge of a huge company, with tens or hundreds of thousands of people working there. Your first job is to find out, as quickly as possible, what your job means: what the company does, how does it do it, who does what, when, etc. Big, worrisome, ongoing task.

On the desk in front of you is your computer, with a big screen. Someone told you, during the hiring discussions, that everything you need to know is contained in a single program in that computer. At the time, you didn’t believe it, but now is the time to find out. The company has a very aggressive IT program and a reputation for efficiency.

You log in by touching the screen. The computer has already opened up the single program running on it; there is no desktop, no program icons, minimal controls. You can log in, log out, lock the computer, shut it down, start it up, nothing else. The simplicity is almost suspicious.

The screen in front of you is so simple, you can take it all in with your first glance. You see a mere six items displayed, with clear graphics: Business, Company, Communications, Daily, Climate and Customize. There is no help button, and none is needed.

You touch Business. The screen changes to a new one showing the lines of business, customers and suppliers for each. Touching one business line brings up a new screen with a brief, high level overview, and various touchable objects to drill down to view increasingly detailed information. In minutes, you grasp the business line basics. You repeat for each line of business. In less than an hour, you know to a satisfying level of  detail, what the company does.

You touch Company next. There you see an organization chart, news of relevant recent events inside and outside the company, physical sites for the company’s operations, history of the company, operations, financials, taxes. In less than an hour of browsing, you know where to go to find out what you need to know about the company, quickly. No need to ask anyone anything.

In turn, you do the same with each of the top-level items. Communications is much more than e-mail; Daily organizes the events and decisions of the day very clearly and succinctly; Climate shows market information, competition, important and relevant news, trends, legal and government information, and detailed forecasting. Customize allows you to easily and intuitively design and build your own screens to suit your way of thinking and doing business.

Before lunch time, you are already oriented, and ready to begin some actual work. You go to lunch impressed and far calmer. As soon as you return, you will go right to the Daily screen and dig into the productive work of the day.

The scenario described above doesn’t happen in the real world; typical companies use many different computer systems and programs, few, if any, really integrated to make high level work easy and fast. Meetings with various people often fill the days, and are often less than productive.  Instead of half a day to get oriented and “find out where everything lives”, a new chief executive may take months to get the same grasp of the company, working long hours, enduring endless meetings, talking, listening, thinking, asking questions.

The job is not rocket science; routine information gathering, organization and presentation shouldn’t be a struggle, but always seems to appear so. Creating such a system to run a huge company can be done, even if incrementally; however, someone has to conceive of it, design it, build it and then maintain it. All of this is a lot of work.

Every operation or concept described above can be automated. At every level, from the Board of Directors to Senior Management down to individual contributors, machines can be built to take care of routine tasks, freeing people up to do the things only people can do: conceive, create, think, decide, buy, sell.

Large scale automation, as an ongoing mindset and practice, brings an organization ever closer to the idealized story told above. In future articles, the topic will be examined in detail.