Seven Questions Leaders Should Ask Before Automating a Business Process

Automation applied to the wrong process makes a bad process faster. These questions help identify the right ones.

1. Is this process well-understood today, with clear inputs and outputs? 2. Does it happen often enough that automating it is worth the investment? 3. Is the current version of the process one we actually want to preserve, or does it need to be redesigned first?

4. Who is accountable for the outcome once the process is automated? 5. What would 'better' look like in measurable terms — faster, cheaper, more consistent, or some combination? 6. What happens when the automated process encounters an exception it wasn't designed for? 7. How will we know, three months from now, whether this was worth doing?

Automation applied to a poorly defined or inefficient process does not fix the underlying problem — it simply performs the same inefficiency faster and at greater scale. Answering these questions before selecting a tool substantially improves the odds that automation produces the value it promises.