The rise of cognitive work (re)design: Applying cognitive tools to knowledge-based work
Cognitive technologies and business process reengineering could be a match made in heaven, but only if organizations do the work to redesign their processes with cognitive technologies’ specific capabilities in mind.
New automation and cognitive technologies present a unique opportunity to redesign knowledge-based work, but they likely won’t do so without a concerted effort to redesign work processes around their capabilities. In order to achieve the productivity and effectiveness benefits that these technologies offer, companies may need to adopt, or readopt, techniques from a variety of systematic approaches to process improvement and change. This time, however, they may want to take a synthetic approach to process change that is consistent with the unique capabilities of cognitive technology.
In the early 1990s, one of the most important management trends was “business process reengineering�? (BPR). This set of ideas, which encouraged order-of-magnitude improvement in broad business processes, was widely advanced in best-selling books, and led to considerable activity among consulting firms. The primary drivers of the BPR movement were need to substantially improve productivity (in part because of a perceived threat from Japanese competitors) and a powerful new set of information technologies, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, direct connections between customers and suppliers, and the then-nascent Internet. BPR may have been the only process change approach that specifically addressed information technology as an enabler of innovation and improvement.
Some of the same opportunities and threats appear to be present today. Productivity growth in the United States has slowed for several years, and some prominent economists have proclaimed that information technologies have never fueled the productivity improvements of which they might be capable. As for threats, established firms’ primary perceived risks no longer come from large Japanese competitors, but from nimble start-ups in regions like Silicon Valley.
On the technology front, perhaps the most disruptive collection of tools is found in cognitive technologies, the contemporary term for artificial intelligence. This group of technologies, which includes deep and machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and generation, robotic process automation (RPA), and older tools based on rule and recommendation engines, is currently capturing substantial attention as a source of business and workforce disruption. Perhaps, as in the earlier generation of process reengineering, this generation of technologies can become a driver of work transformation. Also, as in the 1990s, the desired transformation won’t take place with technology alone.
It may be time, then, for a renaissance of BPR—this time with a specific focus on cognitive technologies as an enabler of process change, and with a more synthetic approach to process change methods. The marriage seems a good match. Cognitive technologies need a set of management structures and best implementation practices to yield the benefits of which they are capable. BPR could use some updating to accommodate contemporary technologies, and an injection of new change techniques could make it a more effective methodology.
Most importantly, immediate opportunities for business improvement from cognitive technologies are likely not being realized because complementary process changes aren’t being designed and implemented. At one large bank, for example, NLP technology was used to extract payment terms from a large volume of vendor contracts. The terms were then compared to the amounts actually paid by the bank in a large number of invoices (from which the payment amounts had also been extracted with a different set of cognitive tools). The automated analysis identified tens of millions of dollars in contract/invoice mismatches, most of the value of which would accrue to the bank.
