The four units

Conversations about automation go wrong because people are talking about different sized things without saying so. Four units, from largest to smallest.

The business. Nobody automates a business. Claims at this level are marketing.

The department. Departments get restructured around automation but are not themselves automated, and treating a department as the unit produces programs with no definable scope and no completion condition.

The job. A job is a bundle of tasks held together by a person. Jobs change composition when tasks within them are automated, sometimes a great deal, but the job is not the unit of work either.

The task. This is the only unit at which automation actually happens: a bounded activity with an input, an output and a rule.

The practical value is that it makes proposals answerable. "Automate customer onboarding" is a department claim and cannot be evaluated. "Automate the creation of the account record from the signed order" is a task, and every question in this course can be asked of it.

The three-column inventory follows directly. For each job, list the tasks; for each task, mark automatable now, automatable if defined, or requires judgment. The middle column is the useful one, because it is a work list rather than a verdict.