Intelligent automation has proved crucial to the ongoing enterprise transformation. The reason behind the growing importance of IA and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is the need for businesses to reinvent models to deliver business processes with greater speed, consistency, personalization, and accuracy. Most of the enterprises that invested in RPA solutions for creating and executing their IA roadmaps agree it helped them drive business acceleration, improve customer experience and make informed decisions.
While the automation journey will soon become an imperative aspect of enterprise strategy, factors like quality, price, productivity, and agility will no longer be adequate to harness the potential of IA. The key to automation success lies in human-specific traits such as the ability to drive contextual creativity and empathy, complex problem solving, and communication. This means that although automation technology poses a pronounced effect on the job market, its capabilities cannot entirely replace the human workforce. Instead, enterprises will need to deploy a unified workforce of humans and bots.
Automation Singularity: The Collaboration of Humans and Digital Workers
The concept of automation singularity proposes that humans and bots work together to create hyper-productivity, which is not possible separately. This will result in seamless collaboration between humans and digital workers rather than a battle for dominance. It will provide the employees with the freedom to focus on higher-level, more fulfilling, and value-added tasks.
In this type of human-empowered automation for businesses, digital workers will complement human intelligence to help understand and perform higher orders of work with maximum cognitive potential. The automation success could only be achieved by unleashing the power of combined capabilities: creativity and empathy of humans alongside productivity and consistency of digital workers. This will create a new class of knowledge workers empowered by their digital partners to lead the automation journey.
Automation singularity will bring with it a range of ramifications for all imaginable facets of an organization, from recruitment to training to operations management. The shift from a parallel workforce to a unified workforce will generate rich process-level data and connect customer journeys. In short, automation singularity will disrupt the way products and services are conceived, manufactured, and delivered.
Four Key Focus Areas for Setting up Successful Automation
Despite all the reforms and challenges that automation carries, businesses can ensure successful automation journeys by focusing on these four areas:
- Strategy: It can be difficult for any business leader to navigate the ever-changing landscape of innovative technologies. However, a strategy with a long-term integration plan for automation technology should enable a larger, innovative business vision. This long-term integration strategy will encourage early Centers of Excellence (CoEs) that will provide quick wins to show automation effectiveness, building momentum toward long-term goals. It will also support equal participation from all the business units, including IT and leadership.
- Sponsorship: To establish automation for businesses, organizations need to get executive-level buy-in from their C-suite and board of directors. This executive-level sponsorship encourages two-way street communication about the automation strategy. This ensures the inclusion of overall business objectives at every level of the automation program and prevents incorrect prioritization of business processes for automation.
- Skills: People are at the center of every initiative. To drive maximum ROI and automation success, the organizations will need to reskill their employees. This upskilling around automation technology will not only support agility and innovation but will also encourage them to work with software robots in day-to-day operations for years to come.
- Platform: Choosing the right platform is paramount to achieving higher goals on an automation journey. The platform should be able to handle all the enterprise concerns regarding scale, security, and reliability. E.g., peak business loads, compliance to legal and security requirements, etc.
The Path to Achieve Seamless Human-Bot Collaboration
Organizations cannot capitalize on IA’s potential without creating an efficient roadmap towards automation singularity.
1.Discover
This first step focuses on redesigning customer journeys, identifying process automation opportunities, and management of overall automation blueprint.
2.Automate
This step deals with implementing the right technology stack and selecting the right combination of attended and unattended automation. The unattended automation is strongly controlled and is used for simple, routine processes. Whereas, in Attended Automation, people and software/robots share responsibility. There are two approaches with attended automation:
- Robot helper: Each employee is paired with one bot, which provides support for high-volume and template-driven activities.
- Captain and crew: Employees are assigned to be in charge of a group of bots.
3. Orchestrate
The last step is to orchestrate the human and bot tasks by linking several processes via long-running workflows. To ensure efficiency and improved
Conclusion
Businesses will have tremendous opportunities to achieve exceptional agility, speed, and personalization with the onset of automation singularity programs across industries. However, companies will need to position themselves better to facilitate the changes in organizational structures and policies.
