You’re absolutely right that modern process automation should be focus on helping people become more effective by encouraging them to be creative and innovative. IPA does sound exciting. Indeed, we wrote above that: “Interactive Intelligence’s new product offering will undoubtedly help businesses improve benefits to customers as well as decrease costs.”

Unfortunately, Patrick Barnard’s original article from July 2009—upon which our blog post was based—is no longer available. However, our main concern was not with the technology but the language. Any technology can be used to empower people or to do the opposite. You are right that ultimately customers have to choose how they implement a system and the words they use to describe their implementation. Hopefully they will use language more like that of your comment and less like the copy from the original TCM.net article. Your phrasings illustrate that you truly care about helping businesses and their stakeholders through innovative technical solutions.

Just watch the AccuQuote customer video series (http://www.inin.com/ProductSolutions/Pages/AccuQuote-Video.aspx) and you’ll see– instead of focusing hours a day on searching, moving, shuffling and stuffing folders all day, the employees are able to spend more time on their “real” work, and are more free to become creative and involved in improving the process. Supervisors can spend more time training and coaching employees instead of figuring out how to find the folders and papers that are causing bottlenecks. By eliminating waste and inefficiencies, process automation has the potential to enrich employees’ work and make their role in processes more meaningful instead of less so.

Today’s process automation shouldn’t be geared simply toward eliminating people, or their initiative and creativity – just the opposite, in fact. Today’s process automation should be about making people more effective at what they do, which can actually increase employee morale. It is not intended purely for “transactional” processes, but rather is designed to improve the process and the customer experience, provide added value to the business, and explicitly capture the functional representation of the business process. Companies can change the people or organization without “breaking” the process, opening the door for increased personal development and career path opportunities and avoiding the all too common scenario of an employee getting “stuck” in a role because it’s too difficult to easily replace them.

Ultimately, how IPA is applied is really up to the customer. So the relative emphasis on employee well-being is a company culture issue that is only reflected in how technology is used – not the other way around.

We would be happy to show you in more detail how IPA works and discuss our methodology for process automation projects, as we rely on expert consultants like Slaughter to ensure all facets of an organization’s operational performance (especially the human element) are considered when deploying IPA.