How to get your org ready for Cognitive business automation

Executive Summary

$596.6 billion - That's the market size or opportunity for Hyperautomation in 2022 as per Gartner's estimate. You might have heard or even have a high level understanding of Hyperautomation, Cognitive Automation, Intelligent Automation, Robotic Process Automation, etc. Your business unit counterparts or your competitors might be leveraging these technologies to different degrees. This article is of interest to you, if:

1. you are a leading decision maker in a line of business or a business unit
2. you ever wondered whether these technologies are right for your business operations
3. you are interested in implementing these technologies but do not know the most optimal path for achieving returns
4. you are interested in growing revenue or reducing your operating costs

Market Forces

One of the very few positives from the Covid-19 pandemic has been the accelerated adoption of new business models driven by digital transformation. Partners and competitors alike have adopted digital automation tools in droves and have upended the market conditions.

As per a Mckinsey survey, 67% of the business executives said that they have adopted or accelerated application of automation and AI in their operations.

When your partners or competitors have adopted automation, your organization or business unit cannot be the lone hold out against automation. Consumers expect faster turn around time for their services across the market. The market is essentially forcing your organization into automation, lest you end up seeding market share to digitally enabled competitors.

Suitability of Automation Technologies

Each one of Hyperautomation, Cognitive/Intelligent Automation, Robotic Process Automation technologies, etc., deserve an entire article devoted to them. I will write about the nuances and capabilities of each of these technologies in an subsequent article. For this article, the focus will be purely on the business conditions that lend themselves to the applicability of these technologies. As a decision maker, here are some of questions to assess these technologies:

1. Is my line of business or business unit currently meeting its operational metrics?
2. What are the future targets for our line of business or business unit ?
3. What is the delta between current and target operational metrics?
4. Do we have the necessary tools & people skills to meet the new operational metrics target?
5. What roadblocks are or will prevent us from meeting or exceeding those metrics?
6. What is the % savings expected from our line of business or business unit for the coming fiscal year?
7. What is the turn over rate of my current employees?
8. Do we have the necessary skill sets to meet the new revenue or cost targets, given the expected headcount next year?
9. Will applying automation eliminate some of my current or expected bottlenecks in my operations?

Before choosing an automation technology suite for your line of business or business unit, it is necessary to have a grounding on the definitions of various automation technologies.

Hyperautomation: As per Gartner, Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms. This encompasses usage of AI, RPA, low code-no code, machine learning, business process management, etc.

Cognitive/Intelligent Automation: As per IBM, Intelligent automation (IA), sometimes also called cognitive automation, is the use of automation technologies – artificial intelligence (AI), business process management (BPM), and robotic process automation (RPA) – to streamline and scale decision-making across organizations. Intelligent automation simplifies processes, frees up resources and improves operational efficiencies, and it has a variety of applications.

Image credit: Mantra labs

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): As per Gartner, Robotic process automation (RPA) is a productivity tool that allows a user to configure one or more scripts (which some vendors refer to as “bots”) to activate specific keystrokes in an automated fashion. The result is that the bots can be used to mimic or emulate selected tasks (transaction steps) within an overall business or IT process.

Business Condition Assessment

Given the nuances in capability & suitability each of these technologies, here is an brief overview on the business conditions that lend themselves to specification applications. As a LoB or BU decision maker, you need to be aware of the specific business conditions that exist in order to make an informed decision.

Leading Market Players

Enterprise solution providers like Pega systems and IBM offer platform suites that encompass all of the above, so that organizations have a one stop shop to meet all of their business automation needs. These platforms address a wide variety business needs related to automation:

1. Need for serving across various channels
2. Ability to connect with other enterprise data sources and real time data
3. Data redundancy
4. Security & governance
5. Automated decision making
6. Low code development for citizen developers
7. As with most enterprise software these days, available on cloud on a subscription basis

Pega Systems:

IBM:

Skill Force Assessment:

The workforce of yesterday will not help you meet the needs of tomorrow. Your existing employees will likely need to transition from data collecting and processing to value adding activities of decision making.

In my view, an organization of the future is one whose employees are free to innovate to serve the consumers. Customer service will be the key differentiating factor. So there is a need to train your employees in operations to become more business savvy, understand the changing customer needs better and help meet the new operational metrics. The employees need to get comfortable working with system assisted decision making, build & deploy bots to get the data needed for processing and transition into customer facing roles. Most of the knowledge on business scenarios rests with your employees. So its up to the leaders to harvest this business knowledge and automate non value adding tasks, while leveraging the workforce to standout in the eyes of the end customer.

Closing Comments

These sure are exciting times to unlock the potential in organizations by adopting automation tech. By assessing your true business conditions/needs and by selecting the right technology suite, you can not only meet but exceed your operational metrics compared to industry average.