After the payroll was automated, there wasn’t a good reason to continue employing an army of wage clerks. It wasn’t a service worth paying for.
After CRM systems took off, it got harder to justify the need for the rolodex.
And now we can take advantage of the huge shifts that have moved us away from what we used to do (scribing what people want, right?) and from this new place start to redefine better.
Because better is what our stakeholders are waiting for.
Consider the functional business analyst. She used document the existing process. If you didn’t employ a business analyst, you had no one to consolidate what you did now. Today, in a world where systems and procedures are commonplace, the subject matter expert is likely to have access to at least as much information as the business analyst does.
If the goal is to automate (and re-automate) the status quo, to simply ‘digitalise’ or ‘roboticise’ the ‘legacy’ which happens now, it’s going to require enduring energy, a level of stamina that keeps pace with the lead pack in the ever-accelerating information and technology race.
But what would better look like? Not for you, but for the stakeholder?
This shift is true for many of us. So many of the tools are accessible, reliable and scaleable now. I needed a project team of fifteen people and a budget of millions of pounds to develop a workflow system in 1996. Today, anyone can do it for a few hundred dollars a month using Bizagi.
Just over a decade ago, it took a dedicated team consisting of analysts, developers, and testers to build an online presence. Now a website can be built by one smart person with a content brief.
We “computerised” the manual process, which is precisely why we need to move on from that part of our job and focus all our energy onto the hard work of making change happen for the better.