Digital Leadership through Automation – 10 Questions for Accelerating Adoption and Making Sustainable Impact in BPS

#digitalbusinesstransformation #automation #rpa #digital #leadershipinsights

In Business Process Services industry, #Automation is the key lever of Transformation today for staying competitive and creating Business Value for Customers. Outcome through Automation is the core KPI of every CXO impacting Revenue, Cost and Operating Margin.

According to the survey report published by one of the leading RPA Product providers recently –

“C-Suite is driving automation initiatives for their business, with automation responsibility rolling up to the CEO (22 percent), CTO (28 percent) and CIO (17 percent). Seventy percent of CEOs report that RPA and AI are a very high priority to meet their strategic objectives, mainly because it will make them more competitive”.

Some of the published Data Suggests -

·        38% of U.S. jobs could be at high risk of automation by the early 2030s, higher than Germany (35%), the UK (30%) and Japan (21%) – PwC Report

·        A job loss/ shifting of around 20% across US, India, Philippines and Poland attributed to Automation in Business Process world – A T Kearney Report

One can look at multiple Analysts reports today focussed in highlighting the importance and impact of Automation across industries including BPS.

Why this Article?

Automation may not define the world of #Digital Transformation, however it is certainly the core element enabling Digital Transformation. Organizations can vie for Leadership in digital world by thinking through end to end #Digital Value Chain after establishing an efficient engine and eco-system for Automation.

Idea behind putting up my thoughts through this article is not to suggest any standard solution to the #Leadership of organizations, but to highlight the areas to be looked at for establishing the ecosystem for efficient Automation engine especially from a practitioner’s perspective. Specific organizations may have different challenges based on the specific context, however my intent has been to highlight core issues by limiting myself to maximum 10 Questions. Leadership of organizations may take different approaches for resolving the issues, but it is important to understand and recognize the issues first and then address them to ensure efficient #Automation ecosystem.

Key Questions for Address and Resolution –

A.    #Strategic Need and Alignment –

1.      What is the key strategic driver? Is the focus on Automation market driven (Revenue focus) or internal efficiency driven (Cost Focus) or both? Is it primarily for taking care of current needs or for building up sustainable long term capabilities for multiple #Digital levers? Organizations need to create different execution plan based on the strategic driver. This will also depend upon – who is at the driver seat?

B.     Technology Portfolio –

2.      What technologies are being focused for Automation? Is the #technology stack covering the overall aspect of tactical automation (VB script, dot net, small utilities ) along-with RPA, Chat Bots, AI ML and other cognitive elements? Important to understand, considering the #maturity cycle of automation in Business Process industry, significant portion of automation can be achieved without much investment in tools and licences.

3.      Is there over dependence on Third Party solutions? Notably third party service providers especially for #RPA have significantly oversold their capabilities raising the expectations in market. There is huge gap between the actual revenue indicating the actual sales transactions and market valuation indicating the investor’s interest. Though there is huge potential, third party solutions are still evolving.

C.     People Focus

4.      Is there capable workforce with good mix of people from IT and Business? Organizations require a good mix of workforce of Developers, Business Analysts, Solution Architect, Infrastructure SMEs and Program Managers for driving the Automation program effectively. Balance needs to be ensured between resources from Business background and technical background to effectively create a techno functional outlook.

5.      Have people been kept engaged on Automation projects providing them opportunity to learn and explore? Today there is huge demand of experienced resources in the market. People, especially with few years of experience immediately jump to the market considering the compensation upside potential. Important to work out a mechanism to engage the workforce in-between projects to minimize attrition and avoid surprises.

6.      Has the organization ensured internal mechanism of creating technology capabilities? With changing technology stack, it is not difficult for people within Business to learn the application based technologies and start using them for Automation. Business leaders need to work out a mechanism to run an execution engine for developing techno functional capabilities. Remaining dependent on tech specialist team for creating automation solutions may prove detrimental to Business growth.

D.    Process Setup

7.      Has the end to end process been setup from Automation Opportunity identification to Execution, Deployment and Closure along-with identification and engagement of stakeholders? This aspect of developing the eco-system involves looking into multiple aspects and answering multiple questions. Some of them are – How the Automation opportunities are being identified? Which functions are involved in opportunities identification? What is the criteria of selecting the right opportunities? Is Automation an isolated lever or part of overall re-engineering? Has the handover mechanism between different functions been established? Have all the stakeholders been identified including – Customer, Business, Sales/ pre-sales, Infrastructure, Solution Delivery? Who is responsible for solution development and deployment? What mechanism have been set for post-production support and breakdown of automation solution?

8.      Has the mechanism been set for handling third parties, license providers? It’s a dog eat dog world out there. Considering the huge growth potential, large investments are coming into this field proposing different solutions for end to end process automation. Claims and counter claims are being made to capture logos and market share. From the perspective of implementation - Existing solutions are yet to mature, #intelligent solutions are yet to be formulated especially in the area of handling unstructured data, making intelligent decisions, predicting the outcome, executing prescriptive actions etc. Organizations need to establish a mechanism to understand market offering through Third parties, differentiate between the solutions and find out appropriate use cases for implementation. Will also be good to create a multi-vendor scenario for getting the best of the solution world.  

E.     Continuous Learning and Sustenance Mechanism

9.      Has the mechanism been established for continuous learning? Field of Automation is changing at a drastic pace. We never know, an optimized solution today may not remain the best solution a year after considering the evolution happening in this field. I am really expecting a disruption in the field of RPA around licencing expenses, which can change the market in a big way. In this context, it is important for organizations to work out a strong mechanism of keeping the eye on evolving solutions, capturing existing knowledge as well as educating the automation/ business community at fast pace. This will require strengthening Knowledge platforms, running a POC engine to test out the solutions, creating reusable code base, engaging customers in creating success stories, making the learnings accessible to masses etc.

10.  Has the organization worked out a system for celebrating success and recognizing contributors? Success brings success and it is important to celebrate success and recognize people contributing to it. Key aspect is – recognition has to be at the bottom of the pyramid considering the knowledge intensive dimension.

Pl note, this article is not intended for people looking into specific technological solutions for Automation. Though there is a lot to write and convey, I have deliberately not included the effort and focus required for customer acquisition, sales, marketing, branding etc., keeping my input limited to establishing the Core of Automation engine ecosystem.

I hope, this article provides some input to Leadership in the process of thinking through the efficient #Automation eco-system. Would be happy to hear feedback, comments.