I was wondering about this just the other day. It’s pretty easy to forget our social and economic history when looking at other nations.

I like this line from a recent ThoughtWorks post:

Neal Ford, another ThoughtWorker, likes to joke that when people do the things computers could do, all the computers get together late at night and laugh at us.

Reprinted from ProcessGo!

At ProcessGo!, we are privileged to see some of the best solutions to common challenges in areas such as Finance, HR, Logistics and IT Services.

We’re seeing a clear trend that operational efficiency is more highly correlated to automation than to outsourcing.

Over the past few months we’ve put 8 enterprise clients through ProcessGo!. These clients have described their Finance, HR, Logistics or IT Services operations using our standardised format and asked suppliers to respond (using the same standardised format) with a proposal to improve their operations.

Suppliers have responded with a variety of solutions ranging from software automation through to outsourcing, and all combinations thereof. The most efficient respondents fall into one of two categories:

1. Outsourcing suppliers who combine high levels of automation with outsourced services and who have a mature offering. These suppliers will regularly propose solutions that reduce the operating cost of the process by 50% or more (provided the enterprise can adopt their process without modification).
2. Software companies and integrators who have a highly automated solution that is managed internally by the enterprise.

The cost differential between these two types solutions is not significant. Once we have more data, perhaps we’ll be able to pick a clear winner. What is clear is that both types of solutions involve high levels of automation. The only difference is who manages that automation.

We’re excited to be working in this space at a time when enterprises are finally able to take advantage of unprecedented levels of automation. We expect to see huge improvements in the efficiency and productivity levels within enterprises over the coming years and will regularly share our analysis of the trends.

Reprinted from ProcessGo!

I’ve spent the past 12 years helping companies improve their operations. Throughout this time, I’ve continually faced two challenges

1. Gathering and structuring the information required to understand my client’s operations.
2. Proving that my recommendation, at the end of my engagement, is the best way for the enterprise to proceed.

Over the past several years, I’ve been honing how I gather and structure information on my client’s current operations to the point where, last year, I reckoned I had it about right. So I got together with Matt Allen, one of Australia’s most talented web developers, and put it into a web application.

The challenge with gathering and structuring operations data is one of staying at the right level. When you first start an engagement, it’s like you’re flying over a dense jungle at high altitude. You can identify the big rivers and a mountains and it all looks pretty easy to understand. So you and your team strap on your parachutes, jump out of the plane, start floating towards the jungle. As soon as you pass through the tree canopy, it starts to get darker and your visibility is limited to a few metres. By the time you reach the jungle floor, you can’t see anything but undergrowth and you’ve usually dropped your machete. You can spend months smashing through the undergrowth and produce no tangible results other than losing some weight and half your team to Malaria.

Photo courtesy Kings Park, Perth

At ProcessGo! we provide the toolset to keep you at the canopy level. It’s like a series of tree top bridges that keep you close enough to the action to understand what’s going on but high enough that you can still make good progress.

So, after starting to build our web app to gather and structure operational data, we met up with Tom Frazier, who became, in Matt’s and my estimation, irrationally exuberant about what we were doing. He said:

You realise that once an enterprise describes what they are doing in your structured format, you can put that out to dozens of suppliers who will pay to show the enterprise how to significantly improve their process using the supplier’s software or services

And so, ProcessGo! was born…