"Automation can fix problems. That belief is a persistent and expensive myth in today's organizations. Automation only accelerates what already exists. And if you have a bad foundation, anything built on it can't be stable, regardless of how much technology you try to inject into it. Because automation doesn't improve marketing maturity, it exposes it. If your processes are clear, lean and well-governed, automation will make them faster, cheaper and more reliable."
"In practice, the underlying approval logic had never been challenged and automation has been added as just a layer on top. The process still included: Three functional approvals. Regional sign-off was required even for low-value items. Exception handling for edge cases occurred daily. In retrospect, it's clear that automation didn't simplify any of this. What used to be slow but flexible enough became fast, but rigid. Finance teams lost the ability to apply judgment and exceptions piled up in queues no one owned anymore."
Automation accelerates existing processes and reveals their true quality rather than fixing defects. When processes are clear, lean, and well governed, automation reduces cost, time, and variation. When processes are bloated, contradictory, or influenced by internal politics, automation magnifies inefficiencies and causes failures to occur faster and more severely. Automated workflows can create rigidity, remove human judgment, and allow exceptions to accumulate in unowned queues, eventually stopping the process. Speed can mask previous warning friction, turning slow-but-adaptable systems into fast-but-brittle ones. Deploying AI or automation without improving underlying process maturity is a rapid path to operational failure.
Read at MarTech
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]