The Human Side of Systems – Where the Opportunity Lives
Systems exist to ensure what you want to happen, happens. Be it in business, health care, government or summer camp, organizations build processes to ensure results. The objectives may change, but the goal of any system is to generate predictable outcomes.
Companies build processes to achieve many objectives within single systems. Usually, companies wish to achieve the highest level of quality possible, with the least amount of cost. All of this, however, must often be accomplished in a compliant and scalable fashion. It’s a tall order, but the rewards for succeeding are bountiful. When a company gets it right, a system becomes an organizational asset. Employees are able to leverage the knowledge and experience of the company’s entire history while they execute on their role.
However, you should not be fooled by the sounds of the industrial revolution creeping through back office processes. There’s more to it than deciding to systemize a process or two. Though SOX, FOIP and other compliance guidelines have driven many companies to document their business processes, there still remains many steps to implementing, executing, monitoring and reporting on your processes.
Many scholars have broken down the elements of systems into various components. They will not be recounted here. Rather, for simplicity’s sake, systems will be separated into two components – the human side and the non-human side.
The human side is easily defined as the work within a system that people actually do. It’s the hands on work, decision making, data entering and/or contact that is required to forward the ‘worked upon’ item to the next step. This could be anything from making a decision to approving a loan through to inspecting a pair of blue jeans – if a human interacts with it, we’ll call it the ‘human side’. It’s important to see this side of systems because humans bring an extremely complex (and often unpredictable) set of reactions / responses to systems. The success of any system must thoroughly contemplate the human side.
The non-human side of systems is everything else. The conveyer belts, the business rules, the heating/cooling devices, the keyboard. This is the software code that drives an application and the maintenance schedule for the bakery stove. This side of systems drives the pennies out of processes and keeps the auditors and lawyers at bay. This side of systems is what drove manufacturing automation and to this day creates the imagery behind systems.
Given our simplistic split – human and non-human – which side do you think presents the greatest opportunity for improvement? To make the question easier, think about back office business processes such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, HR OnBoarding and/or Contract Management. Most companies are surprised to learn that the human side is the biggest opportunity. But there is a twist – the opportunity is created through changes made to the non-human side of the process.
Allow me to explain. As companies focus on driving cost out of, and compliance into, back office processes (such as the ones mentioned above), there is often great attention paid to the process flow and business rules that will drive decision making. Manuals are created, diagrams are color coded and the trainers take to the beat. Some companies buy new line of business systems and / or code new rules into their existing applications. Quality may be increased, but time and time again companies find that the effort required has also increased. This is frustrating for the line workers ‘living’ the new processes, and devastating for the executives who paid for them. So why does this happen?
Of course, there are many reasons well defined processes can fail to achieve their objectives – no matter how much software, time, training and money are thrown at the change. However, the biggest reason is the “Everything Rule”. Too many business processes fail to find the right balance with respect to presenting information to humans. They either present them with nothing (i.e. fully automating everything), leaving people to spend countless hours trying to figure out what exceptions exist and how to fix them. Or, the system bombards people with too much information and complexity, leaving them buried with information overload. For example, with respect to invoice processing, many companies have either over-shot their expectations that they can automate the approval and coding of every invoice (via applications like SAP) or under-estimated their ability to catch exceptions and therefore present every invoice to every person in the process. The opportunity lies in balancing out the “Everything Rule”. I repeat: the single greatest opportunity to improve business processes is to find the right balance with respect to what your employees need to see and work on. Good systems address the ‘normal’ and quickly identify the exceptions. Effective system design shoots for the 80 / 20 rule…and drives towards 90 / 10.
Document Management, Imaging and Workflow solutions can help. These solutions live in the middle – they don’t automate everything, but they sure can address a lot. The index information associated with documents can help companies quickly identify process exceptions, and determine when to involve a human being. And just as importantly, a good document-centric workflow system will know when to leave humans out of the picture, while enforcing important business rules. Document-based workflow (such as invoice, contract and form processing) effectively finds the middle ground of systems by using key document index fields to drive work process, enabling most documents to flow through a system with minimal human contact. Yet, exceptions are quickly identified. This is where the real value lives – in presenting work that truly requires human interaction to people, along with the information they need to move the item forward in the process. This may look like an Invoice that exceeds the Purchase Order amount by more than 10% being presented along with the Shipping Statement and Service Notes or a Contract that is set to expire in 90 days being presented with all the Statements of Work generated over the past year. The point being, when humans are equipped with the right information, there is no greater opportunity for system improvement. This is where the dollars, rather than the pennies, can be saved. Not to mention the fact that most people prefer to use their skills and intelligence to deal with exceptions rather than to work on mundane tasks. The real value of systems lives in using your human capital effectively.
As organizations continue to embrace technology as a means of improving business processes, companies will do well to consider the human side of systems. Document Management and Workflow solutions can be used to process the routine and identify the exceptions. By presenting people with system exceptions, as well as all the information required to act upon the issue, companies will realize the true value of their systems and fully achieve their business objectives.
Article written by:
Sean Halliday
Sean Halliday is the President of Imagine eDoc Solutions Inc., a Calgary based Document Management, Imaging and Workflow solution provider.
To learn more about Imagine’s solutions, please contact us at 403-245-6625 or visit
www.imagineedoc.com for more information.
