Work deconstruction
The job is the wrong unit. Break it into tasks before deciding what to automate.
Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau, Reinventing Jobs
2018
Ravin Jesuthasan and Tanuj Kapilashrami, The Skills-Powered Organization
MIT Press, 2024
Jesuthasan and Boudreau's method: deconstruct the job into tasks, work out the return on improving each, identify which kind of automation fits which kind of task, then recombine. Their key point is that automation types are not interchangeable. Repetitive independent work suits process automation; variable cognitive work suits something else; physical interactive work suits collaborative robotics.
Automating at the level of the job is why so many deployments disappoint. Almost no job is uniformly automatable, and the average across a job hides both the parts that should have gone and the parts that should never have.
For each workflow, what is the human to agent ratio, and who signs the quality baseline?
What is owned, what is rented, and what is summoned only when needed?
Who is qualified to overrule the machine, and how would you prove it?