And the difference between delegating and outsourcing?

Outsourcing is a contentious issue in today’s world as many organizations outsource activities to third world countries and this creates problems with corporate governance and different portions of society. But outsourcing is a legitimate activity particularly for areas of your business that aren’t core business activities but still need to be performed. The example that I like to use best for outsourced activity is debt collection. Debt collection is rarely a core business activity to your corporation or to my corporation but it’s very important to our cash flow so we need to do it.

If we use the analysis of AutoVation to determine the payback in weeks of our activities, we’ll find that by outsourcing debt collection we free up expensive time inside the organization to focus on core activities by outsourcing non core activities to organizations whose core activity is debt collection.

I got you. How then do you determine when you should automate a task?

There’s two ways, as a Technology Company I believe you should look at automation as the first port of call of any activity because most activities that can be automated are boring and routine and repetitive. I would say that you need to look at the Time Audit that’s been conducted earlier and look at the biggest activity and see if there’s a way to use technology tools to automate them. Having said that the alternative approach to that is you don’t automate first, you don’t do, you outsource, you delegate and then it it’s left, you automate. So it’s either top down or bottom up depending on how people approach the situation.

All four of the activities, don’t doing, outsourcing, delegating and automating are all legitimate and which approach comes first and which is second is really not the key element of AutoVation, it is an element and as long as we’re capturing time so that it can be spent in innovation we’re being successful.