Today’s businesses are required to navigate a highly uncertain economic and political landscape, which includes factors such as the fourth industrial revolution, COVID-19, war, remote working and the ‘great resignation’.
This results in increased pressure to do more with less, faster. Business as usual has become very unusual.
According to Forbes, one notable trend expected for 2022 is the balance between human workers and intelligent automation as a key enabler to ensure resource capacity and value delivered is optimally leveraged.
Businesses require capacity, focus and time to be spent on ensuring business sustainability and resilient operations, increased agility, optimising employee experience, being authentic and ensuring organisations exist to serve a meaningful purpose. To do this requires new thinking and for non-human skills and expertise to be digitised.
To not only survive, but to thrive, it’s time for businesses to adopt and combine digital workforces at scale with their current human workforce.
Digital workforces, a common term used to personify automation, has been topical for many years. Adoption rates in Africa, however, are much lower than our global counterparts. Several local businesses have invested and reaped the benefits, but these are typically limited to the larger corporations which can afford to do so.
How do we then create a similar opportunity for other businesses to do the same? How do we democratise the digital workforce?
The importance of digitising operations cannot be underestimated.
It’s important to understand the factors that have inhibited others before. Based on my experience, the most common challenges to establishing a digital workforce include:
- Not having the correct executive sponsor with the right mandate and targets to maintain commitment.
- Not having the right skills and experience to successfully identify, automate and operate the automations once in production. If these resources are not already in the business, then they will need to be recruited and will need time to be properly integrated, which reduces time to impact.
- Taking a technology-based approach to a business capability. The objective should be about fundamentally shifting operations and not simply looking for an opportunity to test a new tool.
- Underestimating the required investment in licences, developers and other key resources at the initiation of the automation journey.
- Underestimating the time and complexity of setting up the digital workforce in relation to aspects such as access, credentials and security.
- Placing all the effort on the identification, development and implementation of automations, as opposed to running, operating and enhancing these processes once in production.
The typical duration to implement the first process can take between four to eight months dependent on the implementation team, level of business support, IT involvement and the experience of the company’s partner.
This is a tremendous investment before any returns are achieved. The lengthy duration often results in a reduced return on investment percentage and the business case often failing.
Experience has also shown the importance of having flexibility around the technologies used to solve for the various use cases. For example, some object character recognition capabilities may work better for some use cases than others.
Similarly, moving into the realm of self-service, chat bot functionality must evolve from the common state of being a pure information provider, to a capability that can solve and process a query.
Instead of having a typical chat bot that is commonly available on websites and able to provide information, links and forms for predefined query types, rather consider a capability that can interpret a request type based on free text, is able to ask the right questions to source the correct data points required, and then execute the process on your behalf, notifying you once complete.
The above example may seem simple but the challenge experienced is that once committed to the technology that has been implemented, you are bound by its capability.
Conversely, taking a technology-agnostic approach provides more flexibility, much like the various capabilities that would be required to automate the chat bot use case introduced above, which would leverage natural language understanding, conversational agents and robotic process automation, to name a few.
So, in order to democratise automation, the following criteria should be considered:
- Set a clear objective for what is aimed to achieve in the short-, middle- and long-term, and secure the necessary mandate.
- Partner with the right skills, expertise, and most importantly, experience to ensure value is realised quickly.
- In the short-term, consider a delivery model that provides the flexibility to pay for the value received and for the capabilities used. An example may be managed services − this still provides the flexibility for the capability to be evolved into a fully-owned and operated function when ready to do so.
- Take an ecosystem approach that provides the flexibility and access to the right capabilities, skills and experience based on objectives.
- Spend as much time and effort focusing on change management and the run and operate function as on identifying and developing the right processes.
- Consider evolving the capability from a cost centre to a revenue-generating function. Once companies have invested in processes and intellectual property, it’s possible to productise those processes and provide them to other business units on a transactional fee basis.
In summary, the importance of digitising operations cannot be underestimated. For business to not only survive but thrive, we need to consider how we optimise and elevate the role of our most valued asset − our people. The time has come for traditional operations to learn new tricks.
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