The Process Nobody Owned
There's a process in most businesses that nobody made and nobody owns.
It works. Mostly. Someone built it years ago and left. The person who inherited it learned just enough not to break it. Now it just sits there, doing something, for reasons nobody can clearly explain anymore.
A professional services firm came to me wanting to know where they were actually profitable. Which jobs, which teams, which regions. They had that file: a black box Excel full of VBA macros from someone long gone. Moving to cloud was the opportunity to do it properly. Power BI connected with Copilot changes how decision makers access their data: plain English queries, real-time insights, no waiting for someone to run a report. Exactly what they needed.
So the analysts rebuilt everything. Every report, every piece of logic, meticulously reconstructed. Weeks of work.
Then at presentation, someone asked the question nobody had thought to ask first.
What is this report actually for?
Nobody knew.
The client had paid to reconstruct one obsolete report, buried inside a process full of reports that were actually doing their job. We stopped. Went back to first principles. The analysts, who knew the data inside out, worked through what the business actually needed to make decisions. The result was better, more automated reporting, and every single report had a reason to exist.
That last part is the part AI cannot do for you. It cannot ask why. It cannot decide what is worth building. The humans in the room did that, and the technology finally had something worth running.
Before the next automation conversation: find the processes nobody owns. Ask what they're actually for.
Some will have good answers. Some won't.
The ones that don't are costing you more than you think.
What's something you've automated, or nearly automated, that probably should have just been stopped?
If you've got a list of things you've been meaning to look at but keep getting pulled away from, I'd love to be the person you think out loud with. Drop me a message.
