Seeing Through Automation

by Doug Henschen

Nobody seems sure where the economy is headed, in part because there's one commodity in short supply these days. Wall Street analysts look for it, and CEOs press business managers to get their hands on it. Yet for many, it remains illusive.

The commodity is visibility - accurate knowledge of costs and, more importantly, anticipated revenue. Until last year, rising revenue and earnings were taken as an article of faith, and analysts and CEOs concentrated on growth. Now, the pulse of these business fundamentals has to be evident, or the patient is given up for dead - or at least comatose.

In early August, Jeff Kleintop, chief investment analyst at PNC Advisors, told Reuters, "the market kind of understands that there is not a lot of visibility, so analysts are taking a little bit more of a pessimistic view on the length of time for this turnaround."

Of course, visibility on the scale of the larger economy depends on visibility within thousands of corporations, but this sometimes runs counter to the automation initiatives of recent years. Integration and automation have increased service speeds and diminished cost-intensive human labor, but in some cases they have also created "black box" processes. Managers can see what business came in and what business was completed, but they may have little knowledge of what's in progress, when it might be completed or, worse still, what problems may exist that will prevent revenue from being realized.

The idea behind collaborative commerce is to strip off the blinders by extending the enterprise to business partners and customers. In place of pure automation, systems incorporate human interaction at crucial decision points or wherever problems or exceptions might arise.

"Getting applications to talk to each other - both intracompany as well as intercompany - sets up a collaborative commerce environment," Ivy Eckerman of webMethods points out in "Collaboration Meets Process Integration," this month's cover story. "It's not good business to have primarily no-human interface. No matter how automated the system, a human must make the ultimate call."

This may sound familiar to those of you who have implemented workflow technology. Workflow, or process automation as it is now commonly marketed, combines the benefits of automation with the advantages of human interaction, and that gets right back to the issue of visibility.

According to Thomson Financial/ First Call, health care services and financial services - both big users of workflow/process automation technology - have been the two best sectors in the Standard & Poor's 600 small-cap index in meeting analysts' earning estimates.

This issue is loaded with content on workflow and process automation, including our "Transactions" review of a new data capture platform (page 21), Bruce Silver's monthly "Business Rules" column, and back-to-back feature stories incorporating a number of success stories (pages 32 and 39).

If visibility is a problem within your organization, we hope this issue helps you investigate the potential of process automation. It may be just the thing to put productivity on track and provide a clear vision forward.

Send questions or comments to dhenschen@cmp.com