What does automation look like in a world that’s increasingly unpredictable?

The early days of process automation followed a predictable pattern: a, then b, then c, and if then, d, e, and f. But as the world has gotten more complex, so have the processes that make doing business more convenient. Like being able to buy a car online, tour a potential new home virtually, or quickly replace a stolen credit card. Today, people are widely dispersed physically and organizationally but more connected than ever. Information is collected from a range of different devices. And businesses increasingly must coordinate with multiple vendors and partners to deliver on the promised outcomes for their customers. The linear processes organizations used to depend on are too limited for today’s decentralized, complex ecosystems and too cumbersome for the customers, employees, partners, and IoT devices that operate at the edges of the process. Instead, organizations need processes that are tightly inter-related but more fluid and flexible. This is the world we’re moving toward, and it means we need to look very differently at what a process is and how it’s automated.

In nature things may seem unpredictable and completely disconnected, but when you stand back from a distance you can ultimately see a pattern. The way trees lose their leaves in the fall. The way animals migrate south for the winter. There is some degree of choreography that happens, even if it’s invisible to us. In business, as well as in nature, there are always unexpected events that force us to recalibrate our response when we encounter them. In fact, with heightened service expectations and growing personalized communications, today’s exceptions have become the rule.

Redefining process for today

Automation today may mean millions of permutations happening at lightning speed and at massive distribution, but that doesn’t mean it’s haphazard. Some process is necessary to keep things moving, but if you apply too much, it becomes restrictive, and customers will start to circumvent it.

Organizations must apply “just enough” process to be responsive, without forcing users to conform to an inflexible pattern. Some transactions require more process than others – such as auditable regulatory processes – but general customer queries may require only what is needed to make it ridiculously easy for the customer. Ideally, businesses should provide just enough process to create simplicity without adding complexity.

The easier the experience, the more sophisticated the technology

Customers don’t usually care how or why something works or what’s happening behind the scenes. They care that their experience is easy. For instance, today’s cars are more complicated than a Ford Model T, but they’re also a lot easier to drive. You don’t have to think about clutches, or chokes, or starters. And the latest automotive technology helps you automatically stay in your lane, break to avoid collision, or will even drive your car for you. But creating this simple user experience requires sophisticated layers of technology. If the goal of technology is to make things easier, a complicated, distributed, unpredictable world requires just enough process to thread it all together. For that to succeed, process automation technology needs to function like a fabric, tying all the distributed pieces together to create a coherent process, oriented around the outcomes a customer or a business is trying to achieve.

Some in the industry are calling this new approach “hyperautomation.” Whatever you call it, it will demand that we bring together technologies like RPA, AI, and low code in a coherent way to streamline experiences, making them better for the customer and more efficient for the business.

No need to delight, just make things easy

The more complicated and distributed a process, the easier the end user experience must be. Tasks don’t always happen in the same order and customers often want to take control of their own processes – which channel they use, when they contact you, what they communicate. We often hear people talk about delighting your customers, but Paul Greenberg, Managing Principal of The 56 Group and author of “CRM at the Speed of Light,” says you just have to make the ordinary things easy for them. We don’t walk into our bank expecting to be delighted. We just want to be able to check our balance, deposit a check, and transfer money without a hassle. We don’t want process to get in our way.

Because today’s processes are happening out of order in an unpredictable way, loosely choreographing them provides just enough structure so the system intervenes when necessary, but not so much that it hinders the customer experience.

Organizations can’t possibly anticipate every single task that occurs in a particular process, so today’s technology needs to identify patterns using AI and real-time data, connect the dots through APIs, and streamline processes using bots. It needs to be event-driven – whether the events come from customer behaviors or the growing flood of IoT devices connected at “the edge.” And it must be fluid enough to adapt to each unique customer journey. As we head into the future, striking the right balance of “just enough” process will require a combination of insight, innovation, and open-mindedness.