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204 CHAPTER 6 • PRoCEss TECHnology sTRATEgy
to extreme customer dissatisfaction. (It is worth reflecting at this point on your own
experience of trying to connect to and use a very busy website.) Conversely, too much
technology means excess invested capital to service too few customers.
Scalability, however, does depend on the ability of IT systems to work together.
Upgrading the functionality (what it can do) of an IT system is usually a matter of
evolution rather than revolution. Sometimes totally separate and only partially con-
nected systems are installed alongside existing ones. So, some IT systems finish up with
patched and inconsistent system architectures. This does not mean that they are in
themselves inefficient. However, it does make them difficult to scale up because they
do not fit conveniently with other units of technology. Thus, the underlying consist-
ency and stability of an IT platform’s architecture is an important determinant of its
scalability. Also, a more stable platform often will have support staff who have devel-
oped a greater depth of expertise. Similarly, if IT is stable and standardised, one of the
possible reasons for changing a process is removed. It is partly because of these issues
that many organisations have adopted ‘off-the-shelf’ internal business process man-
agement systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP). Indeed, many adopters
of ERP systems have chosen to change their business processes to match the IT, rather
than the other way around.

Degree of automation/‘analytical content’ – what can each unit of technol-
ogy do?
Very few technologies operate continually, totally and completely in isolation, without
ever needing some degree of human intervention. The degree of human intervention
varies from almost continual (the driver’s control over a bus) to the very occasional
(an engineer’s control in an automated pharmaceutical plant). This relative balance
between human and technological effort is usually referred to as the capital intensity
or degree of automation of the technology. Early applications of automation to mate-
rial transformation processes revolved around relatively simple and regularly repeated
tasks because technology is ‘dumber’ than humans; it cannot match people in many
delicate tasks or those requiring complex (and especially intuitive) thought processes.
But low automation often means higher direct costs – a requirement for control skills
and human creativity – whereas automated technology can repeat tasks endlessly and
is capable of repeating these tasks with precision, speed and power. However, in many
cases there have not been overall savings associated with automation, especially if a
complex system requires regular and expensive maintenance. It is common for a shift
towards greater capital intensity to necessitate the employment (either directly or con-
tractually) of more engineers, programmers and so on, who normally come with a much
higher price tag than the direct labour that was replaced. Other potential downsides of
automated technology include possible decreases in flexibility (labour-intensive tech-
nologies can usually be changed more readily than capital-intensive technologies) and
dependability (highly automated technology can be less robust than a more basic ‘tried
and tested’ technology).

From ‘automation’ to ‘analytical content’
Again, information processing technologies are, to some extent, an exception. Even
when considering automation of the most sophisticated forms of material and cus-
tomer processing technology there is usually an underlying strategic choice to be made

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