software. In our view, however, too little creativity has been applied
to the question of how software can be used to replace providers of
professional services, whether those providers are inside or outside
the corporation. In the consumer realm, TurboTax represents prob-
ably the most impressive undertaking of this kind. TurboTax works
so well partly because of the rule-based nature of tax preparation
and partly because the software itself is structured as a conversation
that follows the thread of a defined process or sequence. Although
the software can fully substitute for the professional tax preparer,
professional advice delivered by a person can complement the
underlying preparation and filing system that TurboTax provides.
TurboTax has the potential to focus the use of professional advisers
on the areas where their expertise is genuinely needed and
to enable greater specialization in the advisory realm, where a
TurboTax user might consult different individuals expert on specific
questions that factor into a single return.
We believe that there are many areas of professional services in
which variations on the TurboTax approach could prove valuable.
One venture that our firm has launched automates the process of
interpreting 360-degree leadership feedback instruments, instru-
ments for team assessment, and other management surveys. We
have been able, for an investment of less than a million dollars,
to build a system that delivers detailed feedback to managers
from 360-degree or team surveys with each bullet point in a feed-
back report based on a specific micropattern in the survey data.
These reports generated by our Performance Leaders system pass
the “Turing Test”:^1 they are as good as or better than the interpre-
tive feedback generated by trained coaches, as judged by the
designers of the instruments. Tools like TurboTax and Performance
Leaders represent the very beginning of what is possible in terms of
full automation of expert judgment. While we believe strongly that
it is important to recognize when business problems cannot be
reduced to problems of information processing, the upside, in terms
of scalability, is tremendous when full automation can be achieved.
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