At our recent WhatNext? roundtable we asked business leaders to share the biggest challenges they’re currently facing in delivering what we call profound transformation – the seismic change to a business that delivers immediate and long-term impact - and despite no shortage of news, information and vendor-led hype, the subject of the advanced technology toolkit and specifically the role of Intelligent Automation, was one where confusion and frustration remain high.
This is the state of play and how to manage it, straight from our CEO and head of technology, David Poole:
It’s interesting, but not at all surprising, that there is still huge confusion among clients around what intelligent automation is.
I like one Googled definition of Intelligent as it relates to a device being “able to vary it’s state or action in response to varying situations and past experiences”
Automation being, to quote another selectively chosen Googled answer, “the use of machines and technology to make processes run on their own without manpower”
This is complicated enough without the raft of other different conflicting and confusing terms that have sprung up in the Enterprise software market – For example “Hyper Automation” defined by other super wizards and analysts as the having the goal of developing a process for automating enterprise automation – I suspect so that more technology vendors can get in on the automation act.
Under any of these definitions it is well recognised that there are quite a number of different types of tool required to bring about effective automation of work at scale within the enterprise environment. Here is a sample list :
- Process mining / Task mining
- Document ingestion and character recognition
- Workflow and work / process management
- Decision and logic engines
- Robotic Process Automation
- Desktop Automation
- Integration tools / API’s
- Data warehouse / hubs / mesh
- Conversation tools / chat bots
- Portals
- Security tools
- Testing tools
- Analytics and reporting
- Text generation
- Speech recognition / text conversion / speech generation
- Cloud services
This is not a comprehensive list by any means but it does serve to illustrate one of the main barriers to success to scaling with intelligent automation, which is complexity.
There is no one stop for all of these technologies and even sizeable IT teams cannot have deep expertise in all of these tools. However, the software vendors are all out there pushing their products to solve fragments of the solution. There are certainly some companies that can sell you solutions for a broad range of requirements. I’m sure Pega or Service Now will suggest that they can cover all of these but these all-encompassing solutions are not for everyone and can certainly be out of reach in terms of investment for much of the mid or even upper mid-market. The RPA market is bursting to capacity with sales teams that can reassure you that they have all the solutions you need. But in reality, the fact remains that only a handful of companies can claim to have substantially automated a significant part of their business processes.
Emergence Partners is making sense of this complexity by creating what we call a Collective; of best-in-class software vendors across these different domains, that between them can deliver a re-useable, “shareable” blue print of a generic process-as-a-service model or Digital Operations Framework.
As great fans of the HfS OneEcosystem, we believe the ability to share ideas and create open cross-industry collaboration will help the buyers in this complex environment appreciate the huge potential that exists to scale automation projects within their organisation.
The aim of our vendor agnostic approach is to help educate, demonstrate, and prebuild much of the connectivity required to make these systems interoperable and, ultimately, to help scale the industry and create a win-win for vendors and buyers alike.
Find out how we can support your business with our unique and transparent collective approach to process-as-a-service HERE.
