What is Task Discovery and why should you care?
Jennifer Pinto
- July 7, 2021
- 3 minute read
A recent study by McKinsey & Company states that 7 out of 10 digital transformation programs fail and do not reach their stated goals. The three main reasons for this failure is not having insights on –
- Tasks that employees spend time on that their managers are unaware of.
- Tasks that employees spend time on that their managers are aware of but in wrong proportions.
- Tasks that employees spend time on that are not structured enough for automation to be feasible.
Most organizations rely on consultants to get the above insights, but this method is expensive and time consuming. Some tech savvy organizations use classic process mining to derive these insights, however this method still takes 4-8 weeks. Additionally, both the methods can only be done with a small set of users and cannot be scaled to an organization of 1000s of employees.
Most leaders we spoke to are not satisfied with the traditional methodologies and need ways to do this faster, in a cost-effective way and at scale across the organization. With advancements in technology, it is now possible for organizations to get task level insights at a speed and scale that they desire using ‘Task Discovery’.
Before we dive deep into Task Discovery and how it can help your organization, let us learn about tasks and processes.
What is a Task?
A task is a sequence of steps performed by an end-user in a single uninterrupted session of a few minutes and has a definite start and end step. In the above example, (refer to the image above) to hire an employee, a task would be adding a calendar invite, briefing a candidate over a call, or sending an assignment.
What is a Process?
A process is a related set of tasks that helps accomplish a business outcome. It is usually not performed by a single user in a single session. In the above example, the process to hire an employee includes a related set of tasks like searching for the ideal candidate, shortlisting applicants, and setting up an interview – which may be done by multiple users (with handoffs), across many days.
What is Task Discovery?
Task Discovery is a fully automated way to collect and analyze user interaction data to identify frequently occurring tasks across colleagues in a team. A good task discovery tool can quickly quantify the discovered tasks with an estimate of effort spent, automatability, time spent and potential effort savings thereby giving insights into improvement and optimization areas across key dimensions of your operations.
What is unique about Soroco’s Task Discovery?
| Soroco Task Discovery | Competitors' Task Discovery | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | Get set up in a few hours without the involvement of an IT team or additional infrastructure. | Set up takes weeks due to requirement to integrate with enterprise applications and dependence on IT teams. |
| Time to first insights | Get the first set of insights in 48 hours. | It takes about 4-8 weeks to get the first set of usable insights. |
| Scale | Capture data from any number of users and processes across teams, locations and roles in the organization. | Usually captures data across 10-15 users within a particular team and you are charged per process discovered. |
| Manual Intervention required | Task Discovery is fully automated; it finds repeated patterns across your team. | Yes, an SME or a manager needs to teach the tool the entire process as-is to get any insights. |
| Technology used for Data Capture | Proprietary Deep Capture technology which allows data capture at scale, keeps server requirements at a minimum and enables advanced PII filtering. | Primarily, use Event Logs, and Computer Vision thereby making it difficult to scale data capture across the organization. |
With Soroco’s Task Discovery, you can understand the tasks, your teams are spending their time on, the proportions in which they are spending time and if they are process ready. With insights delivered in 48 hours, organizations can take decisions to quickly move on to another team if the tasks of the team in scope are not process-ready.
Task discovery can act as a quick and scalable telescope across teams and its insights can be used by organizations to build a healthy automation pipeline, thereby ensuring success of their transformation initiatives.
We are offering an invite-only free trial of our cloud-based Task Discovery platform, Soroco Cloud, that will help you understand how your team is working in just 48 hours, with no setup effort.