The Psychology of Hyperautomation

There is a lot of ‘hype’ (pardon the pun) around the term Hyperautomation. It is as large a tag as Digital Transformation and much of the IT market players are wrapping their own definitions around the title, adding to the confusion for businesses wanting to understand what can be achieved.

Put simply, one should imagine a world where ‘automation’ technologies are playing a far more active role within our business operating models and our lives in general over the course of the next 1-10 years, whether at home or at work, to the point where they are part of our social DNA. Just as Cloud Computing is now a commonly adopted technology and understood by the majority of us, the timing for adopting technologies that extend the automation of low value human tasks is upon us.

The challenge for Boards, C-Levels, Management and Staff is to actually think differently from historic frames of thinking. To demonstrate at one level, we have historically thought that best practice in adopting Digital technologies and IT enabled change, is to consider all 3 x layers of People, Process and Technology for successful deployment and adoption.

For Automation, we must go up another level, as historic thinking does not consider the level of consciousness required by an organisation before taking on the change. To explain, we take a more in depth look into the historic lense below and how this must change.

At the Psychology layer, we must consider the Emotional Quotient (EQ). IE the emotional impact to our staff and what their future roles will look like. The conscious impact on managers having to manage not just human staff, but the management of Digital labour within their processes, must consider the Intelligent Quotient (IQ) or Intellectual Property, required to maintain business operations.

The Operating Model & Process layer not only considers the impact and benefits to business process, but one must now look at the inter-operability of the entire operating model, as the inputs and outputs of these processes, may well hand-over to Digital Labour for next action, rather than Human staff. Therefore, one must consider the impacts on the entire operating model, when designing and deploying automation within your business.

The historic Technology layer must follow the impact analysis across the operating model and therefore the enterprise level architecture must be mapped for impact and overall interface and integration design. The adjacent consideration for automation technologies to completing an impact analysis on the Enterprise Architecture, is to consider the potential risks to continuity of business operations and therefore service design is of hyper-importance to Business Continuity Planning.

The above, is just one example of having to take the corporate and individual consciousness up a level, that is often not realised by most businesses investing in automation technologies.

If you wish to understand ‘how’ to best approach the adoption of automation within your business please feel free to get in touch with me.

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