What organizations are earning the highest gains from their digital transformation? McKinsey finds that the big winners are those that use a broad range of the most sophisticated automation technologies. The tools leading the charge are those that make up hyperautomation: artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, Internet of Things, and machine-learning tools.
Hyperautomation injects automated technology into every aspect of the business, as opposed to a one-off exercise. Hyperautomation isn’t limited to the tools used in the execution of a process itself, but explores technologies that support each stage of process automation including:
- Process Discovery: Use enhanced task mining tools to monitor systems and analyze user behavior to find the most streamlined workflow.
- Analysis: Constantly identify inefficiencies or roadblocks in your systems.
- Design: Leverage dynamic what-if and digital-twin scenarios, modeling whether changes and tweaks can create systems that better meet your objectives.
- Automation: The tech behind automating manual, time-draining processes.
- Measure and Monitor: Learning how to improve strategies based on feedback and analytics,
Practitioners of hyperautomation design an entire ecosystem of automated strategies, constantly looking for fresh opportunities to enhance productivity.
How do you design a hyperautomation roadmap?
As with any business initiative, the degree of success relies on the quality of planning. Designing a hyperautomation roadmap helps cement your overarching goals and focus activities. Here are the four steps to a highly effective hyperautomation roadmap.
1. Identify your desired business outcomes
It’s important to start with the “why.” Implementing hyperautomation for the sake of exploiting a new trend is a recipe for disaster. In fact, almost 4 in 10 technology projects fail simply because teams neglected to form clear goals at the outset.
In what ways can hyperautomation most benefit your organization? Are you looking to leverage error-reducing technologies to mitigate risk? Boost revenue by offering up more convenient and captivating customer experiences? Perhaps cutting costs is your primary objective. In order to make a rock-solid plan for success, it’s important to determine the specific goals you’re looking to achieve through hyperautomation.
The key to a successful hyperautomation deployment is the adoption of a holistic view; a sweeping vision that encompasses all individuals, departments, and processes. It’s impossible to form a hyperautomation vision in silo—in fact, process experts find that 70% of siloed digital initiatives fail. Take the time to establish how hyperautomation can benefit your entire organization, not just an individual team or process set.
2. Optimize your processes for scalability
Hyperautomation involves a wide-scale adoption of automation strategies, so it’s important to consider every opportunity through the lens of scalability. How can you streamline operations to grow other aspects of your business, or expand further down the line? Hyperautomation requires a holistic approach, so it’s important to find ways to future-proof each step along the way.
3. Research a purposeful mix of tools
Ignore the temptation of buzzworthy technologies and make sure each chosen tool aligns with your desired business outcomes. Remember, the best hyperautomation strategies are not meant to completely supplant humans. Instead, hyperautomation frees high-value workers from the productivity handcuffs of rote tasks, so they’re available to take on projects where their skill sets truly shine.
For example, RPA and machine learning tools produce troves of data insights polling customer sentiments and evaluating user behaviors. But, a marketing team still needs to turn these findings into creative promotions to capture new business. Similarly, artificial intelligence can prioritize your incoming customer service calls, sending low-priority calls to chatbots and virtual assistants. This allows your ace representatives to take on more layered customer problems that require a more nuanced approach. Find the right combination of tools for your objectives and fold them into your organization in purposeful ways.
4. Bring together your chosen tools into a bulletproof digital operations toolbox
At the helm of your digital transformation is your digital operations toolbox. When assigning automation tools to a broad range of activities like discovery, analysis, design, automation, and evaluation, there is an endless list of options. Consider your overarching goals and unique business use cases when finalizing your technology selection. Review technologies like:
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): These bots are expert rule followers. They can quickly read and understand structured data to perform filing, reporting, rekeying, and copy and paste duties.
- Intelligent Business Process Management (iBPMS): A centralized “brain” infuses an organization’s data, systems, and people with AI, enhanced logic, and real-time analytics.
- Intelligent Platform as a Service (iPaaS): Manage the flow of integrations within the cloud and between the cloud and enterprise.
- Low-Code Tools: Accelerate the speed of app and service development by using suites of low-code tools. Instead of relying strictly on IT or esoteric programming languages, everyone on your team can contribute to development using easy, user-friendly visual building blocks.
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: While RPA is the leading expert at applying strict rules to structured data sets, AI and ML can learn from more freeform, unstructured data. This tech can learn from behaviors and outcomes to adapt and improve its knowledge base over time.
The orchestrating HQ of your hyperautomation initiative, this trove of tools contains everything you need to reach your objectives. These are the leading factors business leaders and process architects must consider when designing a hyperautomation roadmap. Using these steps to formulate your deployment strategy, you’re well on your way to achieving large-scale success with hyperautomation.
