subject: Can Routine Activities Be Transformational? [print this page] In the article, Bringing Your Strategy to the Front Line by James Allen, he mentions that A successful strategy must be translated into front-line activities that are delivered well, everywhere, every day. Simply put, its about the transformational power of routines. The word routine implies an ordinary, everyday occurrence. But if you can make your companys routine behavior mirror your strategy, you can transform your business (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/01/bringing_your_strategy_to_the.html).
It was interesting to read this article and reflect on the scenario in the IT Operations area, where doing routine activities is a way of life. Many of these routine activities are dependent on few skilled resources, still done manually and regarded as an interruption to higher levels of work. Taking a cue from James Allens work in this area, and a simplistic analogy, if the Business Strategy of the organization is to grow 50% year on year for the next 3 years, then one of the IT objectives aligned to that should be to get more efficient in operations to support the business growth. This should ideally translate to many or most of the front-line or routine activities being done in an automated & efficient manner as opposed to the current model mentioned above.
Some of the early empirical evidence from clients where we have automated routine activities / processes points to significant improvements in cycle time reduction, error elimination and adherence to compliance all of which align to a higher objective or strategy.
1.Storage Allocation service request in a large Bank was automated using OpsOne and this resulted in completing the requests in 5mins from the earlier 20mins, removed person dependency and enabled 100% compliance to the defined process.
2.User Account creation and provisioning across multiple business applications with complex business rules, was done 50% faster with OpsOne automation
3.Time required to archive 1000 files from a common folder dropped from 20hours to 1hour post OpsOne automation with the added benefit of generating Who/When/What logs for the actions
What we consider as routine activities could have a significant impact on strategy and an even great impact if the routine activities are automated using an IT Process Automation platform like OpsOne. One of the areas we have embarked on is to create solution packs for automating these routine activities, those that can be generalized across IT operation organizations, so that the automations are available out of the box and quicker to implement. The transformational power of routines as envisaged by James Allen and Chris Zook (Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change HBR Press, March 2012), is for real and can be further enhanced with the power of extreme automation.
