Automation: Doing the wrong thing — faster!
Automation is like optimization, so I would like to invent a corollary to the Horre’s famous Maxim:
Premature automation is also the root of even more evil
If you spend time and money to optimize the performance of a particular piece of code, it will often become more complex, more difficult to understand, and more costly to change in the future.
The same thing happens when you automate a sales process, or the way you route phone calls. The process becomes less adaptable to change, sub-processes are invented to route around difficulties with the main automated process, and can get crazy.
Sure, you can get things done more quickly. But if you’re customers are routed incorrectly, they don’t care how quickly they get to talk to the wrong person!
And the danger is not just that you’ll get it wrong in the first place, but that you won’t be able to adapt to changes in the environment around you because adaptation would mean throwing out all the work that went into optimizing that process.
Some of this problem is economic.
The cost of automating a process must be repaid quickly for the automation work to be valuable. The exact ROI time is function of how much change happens in that area of your business.
But some of it is psycho-social.
Even if a particular automation project has already paid for itself, the fact that it exists makes the whole organization more likely to resist change, because you don’t want to ‘throw away’ all the hard work that went into automating the old process.
Not only that, if it’s not handled well by management, seeing a project you worked on for months last year being “thrown away” can be seriously demotivating to the automator.
Premature automation is the root of all kinds of evil.