One of the most expensive issues, from an operational perspective, that I have seen in the course of my IT career has been the efficient drain created from the siloed nature of most business units. KPIs, bonuses, etc. are derived from unit performance and most often exclude any measurement of increases in operating expenses; time to serve that arise through the normal course of business.
In fact, when increases in operating costs inevitably arise, the problem is compounded by the siloed nature of the business/IT response. Rarely, is there the necessary “look-left”, “look-right” focus to understand the situation in its entirety, resulting in partial solutions that provide only a fraction of the benefit that an identical investment in technology could achieve.
Work-automation and work-elimination efforts expose this weakness in a very stark way. Recently, an IT team, working with a business operations group, focused on a work mitigation initiative to reduce the time it would take to open a new account at a broker dealer. The result was a transaction-type specific “robot” processing a middle-step an 8 step process. The solution delivered as promised, and reduced the work effort specific to that business team by more than 60% and reduced the total time to set up a new account from 3+ days to around 2 days. There were many types of transactions, in addition to new account openings, that would then be tackled – achieving similar results for the other 30+ transaction-types was the 3 year plan.
Sounds like a success, perhaps? Well not really. Because the focus was a team, not the life-cycle of the transaction, the best solution wasn’t even considered. No one looked upstream or downstream to see what COULD be possible.
Fortunately, a better solution was begging for mind-share. A pilot application, processing the same transaction, was able to open an account in 30 seconds – entirely hands off. It was simply a matter of looking at the whole problem – not a piece.
Ironically, the elegant, paradigm-shattering solution was not embraced to replace the original 3 year plan, because it didnt align with the incentives of the business. I would like to say this is unusual, but I cannot.
What to do to fix this? That’s a topic for a future post.