The Pathway to Growth of Intelligent Automation

Organizations that successfully scale their automation have and do something in common. Although each journey towards the ‘Automation First’ destination is different, there are in fact seven key strategic pillars that have proven to be essential to successfully accelerate enterprise‑wide intelligent automation, scaling through subsequent stages of adoption achieving scientifically measured expected outcomes in a predictable and faster way.

Along with foundational strategy pillars and strategy pillars that aim at anticipating and overcoming the most common challenges that will emerge at different points of the automation journey, there’s one that is the quintessential pathway to growth in Intelligent Automation once the previous have been duly taken care of: the ‘Citizen Model and Attended Automation’ strategy pillar. After you’ve built an Automation Operating Model, sustained executive sponsorship, learned how to intake processes, and justified financial investment, the next step for growth is to develop an attended robot strategy that leverages citizen developers.

This is your future: citizen developers that can identify opportunities – big and small – and an attended robot strategy that can fulfill those requests effectively. Attended robots can extend automation beyond the back-office and fill gaps that unattended robots just miss.

‘Value Creation & Assurance’ and ‘Business Outcomes Process Intake’ are important strategy pillars to establish before developing this pathway because – as a prerequisite – you should already be in the mode of disentangling complex processes and tightly align to your organization’s most strategic value drivers. Once you operationalize these abilities and build in procedures for surmounting the challenges raised by the other pillars, the scope of transformation will beautifully widen.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) might not seem to apply to certain processes at first, but the right mix of attended robots and human labor can transform a process for the better. With attended automation you can inject robots into complex, dynamic processes and long‑running workflows that involve varying amounts of creative human input and rote menial work. Attended robots can, for instance, take over when a financial reporting process requires repetitive data entry; work in tandem with contact center agents gathering information to help a customer; or interface between human workers and unattended robots, passing tasks and results back and forth.

Creativity enables these use cases, but the need for creativity also limits them as in fact a siloed RPA team is too far away from most processes to identify the tasks that most vex employees across the organization. Actually, nobody is best suited than citizen developers to find these gaps and enable your organization to pursue the long tail of automation and this is the ultimate power of RPA Democratization.

Whether citizen developers are leading the way or not, of course any attended strategy also needs a governance model. Governance ensures that these new robots still follow secure procedures and align with long-term strategies. Therefore it’s also crucially essential to design governance procedures that give you control over the environment, putting you in a position to ensure that your users get the right training and operational guidance, and that no one breaks any systems of record.

In order to strategically combine citizen‑led attended automation with the appropriate governance and change management models, the following questions can help determine your best pathway to Intelligent Automation growth:

• ‘How do we extend automation capture beyond the back-office?’
• ‘How to do we strategically and securely grow automation via citizen automation?’

This will in fact be the lens through which your organization can think about doing bigger, creative things and enabling hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of users via attended robots achieving the ultimate vision of a robot for every person.

Automation is the Future of (not only) Work

With a robot for every person, how much more could businesses achieve?

This is where businesses truly embrace the ‘Automation First’ mantra: “anything that can be automated, will be; and anything that’s new, is born automated”. Thinking and acting automation first enables businesses to move faster and more effectively, serve customers better, operate more efficiently. It unburdens employees from mundane, repetitive work, allowing them to focus on solving problems and creating value while feeling less stressed and becoming happier and more productive. A work world where companies unlock the maximum potential for an automated enterprise – what Gartner calls ‘hyperautomation’ –, winning over their competitors because they are faster, more efficient, more adaptable, and have unlocked more human resources to innovate and outthink the competition.

And – as Daniel Dines said – “Maybe it’s not just a game changer for your organization; maybe it’s a game changer for society.”