A tweet sparked this one. And it’s true. The IT and the business world are just like the fashion industry where trends and styles come full circle decades apart. Like the mini skirt making a resurgence, business operations took to outsourcing under the false banner of quick cost reduction only to bring the process back inhouse years later when customer service dropped to new levels of dissatisfaction. Now we see it happening again, all for the same reasons, all with the same mistakes. Just give it a few years, the rinse cycle will repeat once more.
And now there’s another potential IT trend occuring, it’s almost happening by stealth because of the rapidity and terminology being used: We are slowly handing work back to the workers and dropping the focus on automation and moving towards collaboration. You cannot automate collaboration, it requires manual interaction and people, and so where the COO and CTO were keen to push process out to systems to automatically handle routine tasks they are slowly bringing them back inhouse and allowing the workforce to process that work manually again.
Many hands make light work as they say.
Of course not all processes will be suited to this style of working and automation won’t just disappear because we have a social layer sitting on top of the workstack but the shift is happening across the C-Suite as they begin to realise that employee engagement drives far better productivity, innovation and improved customer service than farming it out to an automated process management system. New success stories will replace the stale old ones we’ve been hearing from vendors.
And this means some bad news for those players in the market who advocate automating as much as possible with an all encompassing BPM system.
What goes around comes around.
