Technology products are generally designed to automate some manual process or procedure. Before you run out and slap down your organization's hard earned revenue on the latest technological silver bullet, you would be well advised to take a hard look at the underlying manual process that the product automates. Management consultant Peter Drucker reminds us that, "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." Nowhere is this more apparent than in information technology.

The proliferation of "fat-client" applications, in which the majority of the software was resident on the workstation, created a monumental burden in software distribution, which for many organizations involved a desktop technician traveling from desk to desk to install the latest version of the program. To ease that burden, a number of systems management software companies created automated software distribution systems that would electronically distribute and remotely install client-side software from a central site.

While this did serve to automate this previously labor-intensive operation, organizations that transitioned to server-based "thin client" applications (in which the software resides centrally on the server and not out on the individual desktops) eliminated the need for the entire process completely. With server-based applications, automated software distribution technology is just an unnecessary expense. Before you automate something, you really need to make sure that it is something that you should be doing in the first place.

Our recommendation before purchasing any automation is to review thoroughly just what it is you're trying to automate. There are three key questions you should ask yourself whenever you're looking at one of your processes:

• Why are we doing it?
• Why are we doing it this way?
• Why are we doing it now?

These questions help focus your analysis on what it is that you are trying to accomplish and how effective your current methods have been at achieving these goals. Come up with the best manual methods first and then institutionalize those methods. Once that has been accomplished, you will be equipped to go out and analyze the various features and functions of the available products. Buying the product first is like spending all of a football team's practice time on unnecessarily obscure and complex trick plays when you really need to focus the team's energies on fundamentals such as basic blocking and tackling. Until you can do things consistently, reliably, and effectively by hand, there is no point in rushing out to automate the process!