Since I’ve been an Intelligent automation product owner, and even before that, when I’ve been a scrum master or RPA developer, I’ve noticed a couple of things that I summarize as something that in governmental circles or intelligence gathering community might pass as very dangerous: anarchy.
Obviously, the fact that I consider it anarchy is a rather recent development of my thoughts. Throughout the years, one observation of mine came front over and over again: my clients, my business (me standing in IT) was free to reject my solution and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I felt really, really frustrated.
How is that anarchy, one might ask?
My business was not governed. By anyone. And they were free to decide, in a state of permanent conflict of interest, against the interest of the company. The interest of the operational analyst was to get rid of the bot, while the interest of their supervisor’s supervisors or managers, and of the corporation as a whole, was to adopt the bots.
My business was as free as the Pashtun in Afghanistan, who are not governed by the Afghan state and live in a state of relative anarchy. My business was anarchic. There was no one who could “force” them to do something that they did not want: automation. They had managers, but the managers were absent, probably also living in a constant state of fear and not encouraging their people, to automate. Their managers didn’t care so much if their people, their direct reports, automate or not.
So, I was out of work, because I could not convince anyone to use automation, because they were afraid of it, and there wasn’t any governance in place to incentivize these people to automate, either.
Of course, these nice and smart people in business developed a whole quasi-ideology against automation. Every time the bots failed, they were starting a “jihad” against the poor bot. They cursed and bad mouthed the bot as unusable, as ridiculous and they sabotaged the bots and my team’s efforts to train and test the bots, using all their arsenal to achieve what they wanted: dismantling all together the bots program, so that they continue to do their process manually. Of course, I do not want to generalize, but this was the main feeling.
They did not communicate to us the changes in processes, so that when the change cause the bot to fail, they argued to the deletions of the bots and never saw each other again.
I could write a whole essay on how the lack of communication, honesty, and (probably) the conscious desire of the business people to destroy automation bots, still creates headaches in the automation team.
Now, I am using strong words here. Forcing someone to do something they don’t want is not acceptable in today’s life, is it? Well, was “forcing” people to wash their hands or take regular baths useful throughout history?
I feel it’s one of those moments in history. Automation saves a lot of time and money and frees people to do interesting stuff, new stuff that was never done in the business office before, but people don’t want it. So it’s a governance, government, problem.
How did we end up paying taxes regardless if we want or not, despite our constitutions declaring black on white that we are born free? I feel automation has a lot to learn from political science and government. It won’t be easy to make people accept automation on a large scale the way they accepted (or coerced to accept) nation-state form of political organization.
There’s more to the story. Not only business rejects intelligent automation, but there are traditional software developers, often with a lot of influence within the IT department, who reject also intelligent automation, because of obvious political reasons: they have other tools that they prefer, like traditional application development or their new dream, API. Instead of thinking holistically, and uniting for the same purpose of automation, they are playing a zero sum game in which their win is intelligent automation’s loss. And they seem to be relatively successful in this game.
Who in the organization must step in to create order and stop all the bullying from traditional developers toward intelligent automation developers? No one knows, therefore the state of anarchy continues. With no one stepping in, and everyone fighting everyone, the violence continues indefinitely and the loudest and the strongest will get the budget for the projects.
Organizations with a culture against change, against innovation, are the ones who are losing. And these organizations are also the most anarchist, surprisingly. Rejecting the new, rejecting innovation, only makes you more anarchic, and this is why I titled this article after the American series. We are the sons of anarchy, inevitably.
We’re all born in these cultures that reject innovation, reject progress, run by anachronic leaders, only to realize that in fact the paralyzed traditional leaders are in fact nurturing an anarchy. And some of us are frustrated by this anarchy, only to move to groups that openly accepted innovation and where order is created just by this culture switch to an environment that openly accepts and encourages innovating, creating the future business processes, with people working together with robots as a natural thing to do, instead of sabotage and libel.
Isn’t this a modern dilemma? It is, and to make everything even more complicated, let me cite this 2019 HfS study, which I found in Willcocks, Hindle, and Lacity’s latest book: 51% of the highest performing organizations say culture is keeping them from true digital transformation, while only 36% of the lowest performing organizations say culture is a problem.
Why would successful organizations change, if they are successful the way they are? Successful organizations have an anarchy problem which lower performers do not have. So, one would ask if automation really brings results, which is a rather funny question. How did we end up asking this idiotic question?
And this is a huge deal, not for me, as I am not a huge fan of militaristic organization of groups, but exactly for the ones who run now these anarchic organizations. The anachronic leaders are running anarchical, and they are paralyzed to do anything.
The solution, if anyone was asking for it, is very simple: adopt the new. Why is it so hard to do so? Adopt the new, and order the new as you ordered the old. That’s it. The “people + machine” combination, as we learned from Bornet, Barkin and Wirtz’s book, is much more productive and high quality than humans alone.
If you reject this basic fact, then indeed we have an anarchy problem. Because there is no authority yet to state clearly that intelligent automation is superior to manual process.
Intelligent Automation Product Owner 
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