Technology is so pervasive it is getting difficult to do anything without it.  Yet, the overall purpose of technology is to help us accomplish things.  Time is the  core  component of context. 

Time is almost always  linked to process.  Most traditional consumer actions occur  at the beginning of a process (an event) - the consumer wishes to do something.  It starts a process where other consumers participate to help deliver the  goal.

Events and process are the keys  to understanding time.  My time shadowing the  help desk reinforced this point.  The customer is calling because of something we are doing to them (a bill or notice) or something that we may be doing in the future (require a filing). They are not calling for conversation.  In the commercial space the  most common starting activity is wanting to buy  something.  Today  this  type  of activity is on a company  web site, but the future  may  well be AI agents that integrate the purchase activities of multiple businesses,   coordinating your best buying experience (cheaper, faster, more reliable, better terms).  The purchase activity may consist of integrated services from the customer, product (inventory), and marketing domains.  This  is a tool.  The purchase agent is also a tool.  They both  are a collection  of capabilities to  facilitate an outcome (purchase).

The desire  to purchase  is an event. The order is the  outcome of the purchase, and is the event that  triggers subsequent processes (fulfillment, delivery).  

One way to look at an enterprise is to look at what makes them unique.  What is their special sauce?  

From a technological view there is very  little that makes  an organization unique.  The  Right Strategy Universal Architecture roadmap makes this  abundantly clear.  Everyone has the same consumers, channels, common services,  etc.  What truly identifies an enterprise is their  specific domain information, the rules that govern that information, and their  processes/events.  

Of the three, processes and events are  the single greatest opportunity  for  transformation.  

Transformation is doing things differently, not  what we do.  Digital transformation changes an organization's division  of work and separation  of  duties.  Process steps that were manual become automated, steps that  were conducted by  one group of consumers is now  given to different group empowered consumers, AI bots replace other consumers, etc.  

Self service  is just  another way of changing the division of work by "empowering" the  customer.  The customer now becomes an enterprises' data entry by filling our their own order. 

This was observed when the taxing organization where I worked undertook several e-initiatives.  From partnering with software vendors to online filing, the outcome was the  consumer was now our data entry.  We reduced data entry staff by hundreds, reduced storage costs for paper, reduced paper handling, and got more complete and better information. When system transformation occurred, we leveraged these concepts into automatons for processing  returns (each income  tax return takes 2.5 seconds  across 4 platforms).

Any  interruptible step of a process (manual  intervention) can be handled by a tool.  The tool may incorporate capabilities that eliminate entire steps of the as-is process.   

Many processes have checks and balances, separate owners of processing details, multiple systems and repositories.  This was historically done because  the paper physically  moved to different departments.  Over time each  department created their own systems and methods to manage and process their paper.  The  complicated hand offs meant paper got  misplaced and controls were put into place.  

The tool simply allows the users to work in context.  Every  access is based on solving a particular problem at  a point in time.  Users get access directly  to tools which serve as the security proxy to the required accesses.  This allows users to access even the most sensitive of systems based on business need.    (Why would two people using a tool have different access?  if a user needs an access to get a job done, then all users need the same access to get the  job done).   

Empowerment changes the  division  of  work.  Fewer touches in process can occur because the  "value add" of multiple  steps are "covered" in the tool.  Tooling is the augmented, optimized implementation of automation.