Establish organizational guidelines or policies
Little of this can be handed to software today.
Software can assemble the case and recommend an answer, and that is genuinely useful. The decision stays with a person because someone has to be accountable for it. Treating the recommendation as the decision is how automation projects fail.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Judgment, authorisation and strategy |
| Jobs that do it | 13 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Generalist agents, Models and routing |
| O*NET activity | Developing Objectives and Strategies (4.A.2.b.4) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 13 occupations that perform it.
- Establish departmental responsibilities and coordinate functions among departments and sites.
- Formulate policies and procedures for bid proposals and procurement of goods and services.
- Participate in the development of spill prevention programs and hazardous waste rules and regulations, and recommend corrective actions for hazardous waste problems.
- Develop guidelines for nondiscriminatory employment practices.
- Write or update standard operating procedures, work instructions, or policies.
- Develop employee health and safety policies.
- Identify or develop business rules or standard operating procedures to streamline operating processes.
- Write or revise standard operating procedures for logistics processes.
- Review and revise sustainability proposals or policies.
- Prepare, maintain, or update security procedures, security system drawings, or related documentation.
- Interpret budget directives and establish policies for carrying out directives.
- Establish guidelines for procedures and policies that comply with new and revised regulations and direct their implementation.
- Set credit policies, credit lines, procedures and standards in conjunction with senior managers.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for judgment, authorisation and strategy, and what it costs.
There is nothing here worth buying beyond a good assistant. Software assembles the case and recommends an answer, which any $20 assistant already does; the decision is yours, and no product on this page changes that.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Generalist agents
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
13 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Budget Analysts
- Chief Executives
- Environmental Compliance Inspectors
- Equal Opportunity Representatives and Officers
- Financial Examiners
- Labor Relations Specialists
- Loan Officers
- Logistics Analysts
- Logistics Engineers
- Purchasing Agents, Except Wholesale, Retail, and Farm Products
- Regulatory Affairs Specialists
- Security Management Specialists
- Sustainability Specialists
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Develop organizational policies, systems, or processes”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.