Check out Part I of this article!
Sooner or later, everyone will have Hyperautomation tools—the only question is, which ones?
We believe that all companies will one day soon be leveraging Hyperautomation tools. However, we are afraid that these tools will just be used to generate applications—which they do well. But that is like using a dragster to haul apples. It will do it, but it was a racing innovation, and it started a whole new type of racing (drag racing) and a whole new industry because it could do so much more than haul apples. It just took some innovative people to try something new. Hyperautomation capabilities and their use in transforming companies is the real opportunity. And while these technologies are great at generating low code applications, they are much more that a faster way to obtain applications.
Today it is the same with Hyperautomation—their capabilities offer much more than they are most often being used for. These technologies have the ability to change everything we do and are thus also strategic. Hyper Transformation is how companies will use hyperautomation tools to evolve. However, the approach used in Hyper Transformation is different than traditional Business Transformation—the capabilities in the underlying iBPM, RPA, and other technology will define the company’s way forward into the future as companies evolve into technology centric operations. This change is the foundation for new industries, for new ways to do business, and new ways to interact with customers.
Look around at how many things you interact with each day that are driven by AI. Look at the low-level work that has been automated by RPA. Look then at the number of things we do that are supported by cognitive computing—including our navigation systems that tell us about dangers and problems up ahead of where we are going and recommend new routes. Then consider healthcare and diagnostics, surgery, and much more. It has started and as the Hyperautomation technologies deliver ever more sophisticated capabilities, just consider what may be possible. These possibilities will change everything in the future.
From experience, we have come to believe that mixing Hyperautomation technologies will provide almost unlimited new capabilities and new opportunities—supporting a new time of technology, business, and societal innovation and evolution. That is what Elon Musk realized and did with AI, battery advances, and sensor advances and what he is doing now with the internet.
These Hyperautomation based changes will require moving to new ways to look at strategy and planning as well as your workforce and supply lines. These new approaches will be built on a new flexibility and look at change as continuous, not isolated efforts. And that is just the start. Serious change is now coming faster than ever, but few companies can take advantage of it today. Strategy takes six months to create and it is seldom fully implemented. Applications systems take months to over a year or more to build. And our legacy IT technology and applications are an anchor holding older big companies back. But that can change through Hyperautomation and Hyper Transformation.
However, the biggest thing that will need to change is the current focus on cost reduction. Heresy, maybe. But we are entering a time of investment as we change to technology centric business operations and society becomes used to new ways to leverage technology—and the old will be replaced. The future will belong to the nimble operations and to those who can respond and change quickly. In supporting this rethinking and rebuilding of our operations, automated capabilities will prove to be among the most important assets in the operation.
The question is, how? The changes start with building a vision of the future business operation based on creating an understanding of Hyperautomation products and capabilities. For ideas to help you get started, look at what others are doing and apply it.
Transformation Starts with Vision
Ask:
- Why are we interested in Business and Digital Transformation?
- What do we hope to gain?
- Who is behind this change?
- Is this a survival level need?
- Are we getting ready to be competitive in the future?
- Have Business and Digital Transformations in the past failed to deliver on expectations?
- Are we ready for a technology centric future business?
Business and Digital Transformation have a very high failure rate today. One of the main reasons is that they are seldom tied to strategy and each stand alone as isolated efforts. This separates them from a real long-term purpose that would make them indispensable and changes how they are viewed. The fact is that transformation must have a strategic purpose and digital transformation must be defined in terms of the strategic purpose of the transformation. Otherwise, the answers to the questions above are tactical and will not help much in driving future advantages. Why? Because anything tactical is temporary and market advantage requires strategic changes.
As is always the case, strategy starts with vision. What are the aspirations of the executive group and the board for the company in the next year or five years? That is the foundation for real transformation. However, creating this vision today requires an understanding of the capabilities available through Hyperautomation technologies and then looking at needs and opportunities in the market. In doing this we recommend that long held truths be questioned and the answers used to help look at the company’s future. Then, applying this information to looking at the business paradigm you want to operate in to determine the type of operational services that you will need. That information viewed creatively will define your vision of the future for the company and help prepare the company to define the technology and capabilities that will be needed to get there.
This vision is the foundation for defining a set of future state targets with high-level strategic capabilities that are needed to move from vision, a conceptual state, to a future operating model, an operational state.
This is the target operation, at a high level. The strategy then becomes how to get there. How to create this new operating model. That results in two initiatives; short term improvement to the current state operation and longer-term transformation to get to the future state business operation.
Based on this strategy, the strategic execution model can be built to accommodate both ongoing operational modifications, as well as the evolution of the company to the new strategic business model.
Getting Started
The hardest part of anything is getting started. In companies, that means approval and budgeting and the ability to get the best people assigned to the project.
Your IT Department will probably either have one or more Hyperautomation tools or be considering buying one. Although there are differences among the vendors and the tool’s capabilities, the tools in each of the main Hyperautomation vendor’s tool groupings work. That is not the issue. The real issue is training and setting the teams up to succeed in delivering transformative level new operating designs by allowing creativity and experimentation so expertise can be built and your ability to evolve becomes an asset.
It is also unlikely that you will have, or will license, tools from all the different Hyperautomation tool groups—at least not right away. So, learn what the tools you have can and cannot do and how far you can push its capabilities if you are creative.
This knowledge will be needed to support the executive visioning effort and the design of the future state business model. It will also be required to help with the detailed automation support design as the new future state business functions are designed and built.
This is the foundation for the critical project startup which must be designed to minimize disruption from the transformation program and lessen the impact of the project on operational performance and investment.
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“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Theodore Roosevelt
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We are offering a complimentary copy of our new book Business and Digital Transformation in the Age of Hyperautomation to anyone looking for more guidance on where to start with their Hyperautomation journey. For more information and for access to our free downloadable e-book, check out our recent Webcast!
