Executive summary
5
dimensions that decide whether a purchase becomes capability or debt
Key conclusions
- Data comes first. Everything else fails if the record does not exist, is out of date or cannot be trusted.
- Process, governance, team capability and measurement follow in that order, and each depends on the one before it.
- These five questions match the site-assessment stage of our own engagements. This is why our engineers visit the site before anyone writes a proposal.
Most operators first meet AI in one of two ways. Someone mentions a tool at a conference, or a competitor is reported to have automated something. The instinct is to act, and acting usually means buying.
Five dimensions decide whether the purchase becomes capability or debt. Answer them in order, because each one depends on the one before it.
Answer the five readiness questions in order
- Data. Does the record exist, is it current, and is it reliable enough to act on? If not, every other dimension fails.
- Process. Is the process the tool will change clearly defined, or does it exist only in the heads of three people who each do it differently?
- Governance. Who decides what the system may do on its own, and who is accountable for it? Small organisations need an answer too.
- Team capability. Who will operate the system after handover, and are those people already in place?
- Measurement. What baseline will you capture before go-live, so that any claimed improvement can be measured against it?
Data comes first because the other four depend on it. A well-governed, well-staffed business still fails if the underlying record is missing or cannot be trusted.
These five questions match the site assessment stage of our own engagements. That is why every engagement starts with our engineers visiting the site.
