COVID-19 – The Road to Financial Resilience – Part 4

Anchoring Digital Technologies into the DNA of your business, through blended methodology adoption

Much has been written about the failures of adopting Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. According to Gartner “By 2021, 40% of enterprises will have RPA buyer’s remorse due to misaligned siloed usage and an inability to scale.”

Why is there such a large failure rate in the adoption of these technologies today? You might ask. Again, the majority of the issues emanate from the way we tend to ‘think’ about these technologies.

Technologies of the past have largely fallen into the categories of the Network, Infrastructure and Application layers and have followed their own, fairly standard methods of deployment and support. However, we must think much more holistically when it comes to bringing these RPA and AI technologies into our businesses, as the approach to adopting Digital Workers to mimic human behaviour is very different to how we have historically approached technology introduction.

In Part 3 of this series, we talked about the approach of leveraging the traditional outsource model as the framework to consider when brining in Digital Workers as part of a blended workforce strategy.

If we now take a step back and look at tackling ‘how’ to actually bring Digital Workers in, we must consider the full lifecycle and the methodologies needed within this model to embed Digital Workers into the fabric of an organisation.

These methodologies include;

·      Business Continuity Management – (as mentioned in Part 2 of this series). I mention this here, to start with the end in mind before undertaking consideration of the level of application of the following methodologies within your organisation.

·      Change Management Methods - (Eg. ADKAR, Kotter’s 8 Steps of Change etc.) To tackle the organisational awareness, readiness and embedding the change within the organisation, considering the impacts to all functions within the business.

·      Portfolio Management – Connects strategy to prioritisation, corporate governance and execution oversight. In RPA industry terms this is referred to as the Centre of Excellence model

·      Program Management – Manages the delivery governance execution, dependencies and risks across a number of projects

·      Project Management – To manage the embedding of Digital Workers and their relevant dependencies into the operating environment (Eg. Waterfall methods like PRINCE2/SDLC etc. vs. Agile)

·      ITILv4 – In line with Service Management and Service Support best practices

To date, companies have on large looked at these technologies as add-on’s to their existing IT architecture, rather than considering that they actually need to view the operating model that surrounds the successful implementation of the blended Digital and Human workforce. The typical thinking of People, Process and Technology, has pushed Digital Workers down to the Technology layer, when they need to be considered side-by-side at the People layer.

The natural start to any trial of this technology is also normally sponsored from a single business unit and whilst this is a good place to start, the journey the corporation needs to embark on to adopt Digital Workers effectively, needs to consider all of the above methods up front, if they are going to be successful in the future adoption of Digital Workers into the organisation. Trying to get this level of sponsorship and corporate consciousness is critical at the start of these projects, if they are going to transform into Programs and into the Portfolio level and support the strategy of the business.

The methodology that is commonly adopted at the trial stage is Agile, which too, is a common mistake. The term ‘Agile is Fragile’ could not be truer in this case as it relates to Agile under it’s own.

To consider a Digital Worker at the beginning of it’s development is in direct alignment to thinking of it as a physical robot. When giving work instructions to robots, you must give the instruction at the extreme level of detail, otherwise your processes will fail. It is a case that for every Digital Worker, the Devil is most definitely in the detail.

It is for this reason that you ‘have to’ embed a prescriptive waterfall method like PRINCE2, which takes the Business, Functional and Technical requirements of the expectation of the business on the Digital Worker before kicking off an Agile Development and Delivery cycle.

On the other side of Agile delivery, sits the ITIL framework, for which you must have the right framework to service manage and support the bots. One common area of required heightened awareness is in the areas of technical Change and Configuration Management. I like to think of the end state of a good number of Digital Workers across the corporate architecture, as a game of Kerplunk. If you pull the wrong stick, the marbles fall to the bottom. IE. Your business continuity is at threat. Therefore the reliance on very strong change management and configuration management is critical to maintain a strong state of business continuity.

You can see, how all of these elements come together to make a success at anchoring Digital Workers within your business. You do not need to boil the ocean in terms of methodology application in every aspect of the above areas, but you need to carefully consider the application of each element of these methodologies as you mature your use of these technologies within your business.

The views and opinions are my own and not representative of my employer.