Mazes and Journeys: Different Routes to Automation
- New Island Technologies
- No Comments
- Blogs
This is a story about the many different routes to automation.
This blog series will guide you on your digital transformation and digital business automation journey.
It is no secret that all businesses today find themselves on a digital transformation journey. A journey that will depend heavily on the right automation strategy, skills, technology, and a solid plan to build and evolve the business.
Fact is “No business wants to automate less!”
First, I want us to think about mazes, labyrinths and puzzles…all challenges that people love.
A maze is filled with dead ends, loops and monsters. Often there are clues that help you find your way and alleviate frustration, but the idea is to get lost (Innovation Mindset) a few times before figuring out the terrain and finding your way.
People just love the challenge of beating the maze…it could go well for you, or it could be an adventure gone wrong.
To master the maze you need a strategy, knowledge about the maze, you need to get the right team with the right skills and much more.
Before jumping headfirst into the maze, it is best to know where you are.
Look for alternative entry points and decide on a partner to join you on your journey. It is also important to keep track of routes that led to dead ends and routes that are yet to be travelled. Along the way you will collect rewards, or interim successes that will lead to the ultimate prize…beating the Maze!
Automation works in much the same way.
Where to start your automation journey?
If we begin to unpack the automation opportunity, we quickly see that a sound strategy with a human-centric approach is key to creating new value and realizing growth. Only about 15 to 20% of what could be automated has been automated in businesses that claim to have embraced automation. Make it about the people and not about the technology and you will succeed. This is important to remember as we engage and evolve our automation strategy.
When we look at the business landscape, we can quickly understand why businesses today, more than ever, need to build automation into their technology stack in a purpose driven and well architected way.
The customer behaviour and expectation has changed…customers want it perfect, right now and expect miracles at the drop of a penny…and businesses want to deliver on these expectations…
Business landscapes are intricately intertwined and interconnected both internally and externally…regardless the industry vertical.
It seems like the automation answer can then be simple…but it is not…because every business is on a different point of maturity on their automation journey. This position of maturity will define how and where the business will look at and embrace different types of automation.
It’s not only about saving costs, but also very often about creating new value and differentiated customer experiences that puts the business ahead of its competition – a great example of this is Sixty60 vs the rest – being quick, early and efficient with a customer-centric solution gives you an advantage that is hard to lose.
Automation Opportunities:
- Retail – integrated offerings and accelerated services
- Mining & Manufacturing – Intelligent mining and extended supply chain optimisation
- Banking and Financial – Extending fintech partner ecosystem, intelligent advisory, personalised services
Maturity scale for automation
Automation goals are different based on the business area and business drivers. It is also affected by where an organization sits on the automation maturity scale.
Many surveys today find that organisations have already embarked on their digital transformation journeys, and it is now, more than ever, important to lay the right automation platform foundation to ensure that this journey is sustainable and can scale.
The goal of the ultimate intelligent innovation needs the right foundational blocks in place, and it is important for organisations to clearly outline where they fit in this maturity scale.
There are essentially 5 levels towards intelligent automation that can be highlighted as follows:
Foundation – A Tools Driven focus
Here we find application of scripts, islands of tools and tasks level focus to apply automation
Optimize – Process Driven
Organizations start to focus on optimized business processes, defined automation methods and standards
Efficient – RPA Driven
Here the focus is rule based, analytics driven and starts to leverage pattern analytics based on underlying datasets. At this point we see organisations establishing their Automation Centre of Excellence – a critical component for your automation journey.
Intelligent – AI Driven
In this ultimate maturity level, it is all about the business focus and the human focus. It takes model-driven decisions, it is self-learning, and it combines human and machine for value driven solutions.
At this point it is crystal clear that automation never ends and that a continuous innovation cycle needs to exist to continuously move different parts of the organisations up in the maturity stack.
Barriers and avoiding or overcoming them
Just like a maze, the automation journey can be filled with dead ends and roundabouts.
Some barriers are real, and some are perceived as barriers but and are in fact not barriers at all.
- Barrier – Shortage of Talent and Skill
- Barrier – Organizational Resistance
- Barrier – Process and Policy Issues
- Barrier – Tech Environment Built for a Previous Era
- Barrier – Lack of Strategic Alignment
- Myth – Our Customers aren’t ready for it
- Myth – Succeeding in Intelligent Automation is a Tech Challenge
- Myth – It is best to not be a pioneer
- Myth – If it has been automated, we can stop
Your automation plan should consider these ahead of time to ensure they these challenges do not materialise unexpectedly during the digital transformation journey.
When we look at the BMC ADE model it supports the principle of multiple, distinct yet interconnected types of automation.
Reach out to me to talk about the BMC Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE). The ADE is the framework for the successful future enterprise.
TAKING A PLATFORM APPROACH TO AUTOMATION
When designing your Automation Enterprise Architecture, you must look across the entire business and you must also consider your digital transformation goals to ensure you build a solution that will scale. The last thing you want is to invest in solutions your business will outgrow.
A platform approach will ensure that you consider all aspects of skill, technology, and organisational structure elements to deliver the right solution for now and for the future.
Understand the technologies in hand and each one’s strengths and limitations, ensure you have an end-to-end solution that offers a single point of orchestration, visibility and control that can integrate easily and seamlessly with other niche automation solutions and systems to eliminate silos within your business.
Drive self-service. Ensure that your solution offers the right capabilities to allow for a diverse range of end-users.
Business users should leverage self-service interfaces to easily create automation workflows that are governed by standards, security and policies that are created and owned by IT Operations.
Developers should be able to leverage modern programming integration methods and language to deliver jobs-as-code where automation becomes part of the application.
And of course, at the Automation Centre of Excellence you will have automation gurus that will want a powerful tool to design, build, monitor and control all aspects of automation across the entire business (where boundaries can stretch beyond the boundaries of the organisation).
In this blog series we will dive deeper into how you can build a roadmap to support the evolving business and to take a platform approach to automation. We will also look at real world successes and the value of automation in Big Data & Analytics, Business Process Optimisation, ERP system integration and process automation beyond the borders of isolated systems, Cloud and beyond…
Please reach out to André Esterhuysen at New Island Technologies to explore the possibilities that can be unlocked by defining your routes to automation.
