Transforming the enterprise around the digital workforce
When discussing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), there is much conjecture about the impact of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation on people and jobs - from ‘taking the robot out of the human’ and releasing them to higher value roles, to the scare of mass redundancies - but not so much about how the digital workforce poses a fundamental challenge to organisation design principles. As we scale intelligent automation, so organisations must reorganise to create integrated human-digital workforces. And the change will be profound.
Our current organisational practices have evolved since the industrial revolution, drawing on thinking from the likes of Taylor and Weber in the 20th century, to optimise production while recognising the limitations of human labour. We’re talking the working week, shifts, breaks, hierarchies, spans of control, organisational siloes, workflows, controls to guard against malfeasance and human error and incentives to encourage higher performance. Digital labour, by comparison, is unconstrained by such human limitations. Software robots work at unrelenting pace, 24 hours a day, only do as they’re told, don’t make mistakes and work tirelessly and without prejudice for whoever they’re contracted to work for, without the need for individual reward or collective benefits. Increasingly, human workers cannot compete with digital labour as a unit of productivity. The opportunity then is to redefine work, with bots doing the machine-like, mundane, rules-based activities and with people doing things that people should do, drawing on human qualities such as creativity, problem-solving, empathy and communicating with nuanced understanding, empathy and humour. Customers value human experiences, and the savings realised through automation can be invested into improving them.
Software robots grouped together create a digital workforce. A digital workforce - at least when built on Blue Prism and its Robotic Operating Model - comprises three components; automated processes, software robots and a control room which schedules the work, passing processes to bots. The bots themselves are ‘dumb,’ just mere capacity waiting to be given a process to run, at which point they spring to life with a new persona. When given a process they are given access to the relevant systems and applications as well as the mandates necessary to make rule-based decisions and take actions, just as human workers are given responsibilities, passwords and discretions. The bots orchestrate activities to join-up networked enterprises, compress value chains and streamline end-to-end processes, working across geographies, organisational boundaries and hand-offs, from the first customer conversation to fulfilment, interacting with any application for which they’ve been granted access without need of systems integration and without care for turf or politics. With the bots running rules-based transactions, staff are released to higher-value, people-focused and more complex work. The digital workforce is a heady capability that enables unprecedented levels of operational agility, the potential of which we are only just beginning to realise.
In DigiBlu, our vision is for the multi-purpose digital workforce as a strategic enterprise asset. It’s a mouthful of words, but the import of them is meaningful. We are fortunate to be partnering with some of the most forward-thinking companies who see their digital workforce as a utility, able to conduct administrative work from anywhere in the organisation, orchestrated around the clock for maximum productivity, scaling bots up and down and switching tasks immediately to meet planned and unpredicted demand. During the day, for example, the bots may be responding to customer needs at super-speed and accuracy – opening accounts, changing circumstances, paying out – and by night they may be catching up with reconciliations, remediations and data cleansing. One minute the bot is working for operations, the next it is working for HR and then finance etc. Once a process has been configured and deployed then every bot can run it, scaling in an instant without need to recruit and train extra people. And this supreme operational agility is complemented by speed of implementation, as processes are automated and deployed in just weeks, without need of heavyweight IT support.
This new capability is ubiquitous, and will be pervasive, applicable to all industries and organisations. The use cases may differ but the opportunities for intelligent automation are myriad, though the operating model and methods for the digital workforce share common characteristics. In our experience, maximum speed of implementation and operational productivity is achieved though common standards and best practices, and the higher the level of optimisation (line of business > enterprise > extended enterprise) the greater the benefit. We’ve been astonished by how quickly processes can be deployed when individual objects are re-used, but more, how productivity can be lifted when activities are consolidated. The processes for customer on-boarding or payments, for example, can be rapidly standardised, automated and customised for multiple products across many customer segments.
Just as the benefits of the multi-purpose digital workforce - such as operational agility, speed of innovation and improved customer experience - can be leveraged by companies for competitive advantage, so the same capabilities can be leveraged by BPO service providers to reinvent their offerings and pass on the benefits to their clients. If they don't, they face the threat of extinction because no matter how cheap the labour, the bots will still be cheaper. With a digital workforce, the value proposition isn’t built upon labour arbitrage, but on low-cost, super-agile, fast, accurate services, delivered with rich management information. Add cognitive capabilities (such as chatbots and OCR) and you extend the reach of digital workers to provide fast fulfilment of customer requests, through self-service and contact centre agent augmentation, for example. Adding cognitive with software robotics capabilities also means that services and processes can be reimagined, which creates the opportunity to create new value and improve margin too. It is with this in mind that DigiBlu has launched its own Robotic Operations Centre, in Cape Town, that provides digital workers to deliver Business Processes-as-a-Service, over the cloud, for organisations around the world.
There is an old adage that says, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” In DigiBlu, we’ve seized the opportunity to implement and deploy digital workforces in South Africa and internationally. We don’t know where the journey will ultimately take us, but we’re off on the right foot, excited to be innovating new business and operating models.
DigiBlu is a Blue Prism Partner of the Year and a certified delivery and capability partner for Blue Prism and Thoughtonomy