When talking about cats and boxes, the famous Schrödinger’s Cat experiment probably comes to mind. The possible status for this cat was “dead” or alive” and each of them was an alternative for the other once the box was open. In our story the cat is, alive, both inside and outside the box and this is the ideal situation, as we will see.
A couple of months ago, we discussed the benefits of fusion teams in order to speed up the necessary digital transformation that COVID brought to the center stage. The main purpose of these teams is to bring together diverse knowledge for a common goal: the business knowledge needed to orientate the digital automatic processes which are based on the technical knowledge of the available functionalities of the software solutions.
Now, we are a step ahead of fusion teams. We are talking about a special breed of consultant designated the Business Technologist — a professional that, due to its long market experience and direct relation with customers and their challenges, knows very well the business side of things and, at the same time, knows in-depth the available functionalities of the different solutions and how they can not only work together, but work to the benefit of the customer’s challenges allowing for costs savings.
By knowing the business, the Business Technologist does not only know what the business is about or what are the general outcomes, they are supposed to know all the details of that particular business, such as which workflows should be implemented and which tasks are human-based or machine-based; which roles there are, and which profiles granting different types of rights must be assigned to each of those roles; which tasks are supposed to execute during the automatic processing of information; what validation rules must be applied for each of those tasks; to whom must the escalation be addressed in case of the tasks not being performed in time or having been performed with validation errors, and so on.
On the technological side, the Business Technologist must address subjects like user-friendly user interfaces; methods for automatically transferring information among different software solutions; methods to mitigate human error; design workflows; manage AI technologies able to learn how to read documents; and, generally speaking, managing the different functionalities that are available knowing exactly how they can add value to the customer’s business.
But what about the cat being, at the same time, in and out of the box? Well, a Business Technologist is someone that has already provided professional services to many companies, both for same type of business as well as other types. Considering that even other types of business may have similar processes, there is always a lot to learn.
