I have written elsewhere about the Coming Trough of Disillusionment for robotic process automation (RPA). While I don’t believe that the overall market behavior of “inflated expectations” followed by a trough of disillusionment can be stopped, individual companies are capable of navigating their own paths independent of the overall market. Doing so requires a clear view of what RPA can... Continue reading...

Are you ready for the RPA Trough of Disillusionment? Gartner’s time tested Hype Cycle model predicts that new technologies will go through a cycle in which media (and analysts) over promise the potential, inflating expectations, and ultimately disappoint early investors in the technology as it fails to live up to the promises. As this recent post in the Wall Street... Continue reading...

I have met and worked with dozens of companies that hope to use machine learning in a meaningful way to improve their business operations. Almost all of them are lost in the details of the science experiment of getting the technology to work. And this misses the key larger issue – the need to conduct business experiments on how to... Continue reading...

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” – Abraham Maslow - 1966 The Psychology of Science We’ve all heard this said in one form or another and we likely agree with the problem it identifies. And yet I would guess that we all see the mistake almost every day. The latest example in my experience... Continue reading...

In 1990 MIT computer science professor Michael Hammer started a revolution in management thinking with his HBR article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” The basic premise of his article, which put the business process re-engineering movement into high speed, was that organizations were wasting time and money putting technology into organizations to automate existing processes that created little or no... Continue reading...