Hype or Automation?

That’s a good question, as there seems to be a wide range of answers. However the basic idea behind HyperAutomation to envision your automation journey as travel upwards to higher levels of automation that build on the capabilities introduced in the previous levels.

1. The ground floor starts with previous years’ Gartner darling, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is essentially the application of small simple rule based programs which can automate repetative work.
2. Now, imagine if you could apply RPA to all your low level business processes? Not only is the repetative work automated, but beyond that now every single process and/or transaction can also be captured as a digital event and the structured data associated with that event.
3. These events could be analyzed by a digital ‘brain’ that could then apply logic of arbitrary complexity and automatically trigger other business events without human intervention or with human approval if required. Rich workflows could be created to orchestrate complex interactions between dozens of disparate business processes via these events.
4. On top of the previous layer of transactional automated business processing, Machine Learning algorithms can analyze the raw business event stream to generate new insights into what makes your business tick, and provide N-dimensional reporting and forecasting in realtime for human consumption.
5. Furthermore this stream of digital events and the complex interactions between the constituent parts could be thought of as a Digital Twin that exactly maps to your real world business.
6. Data Science can be used to analyze this Digital Twin, to unearth relationships between component business processes beyond human intuition.
7. Modern Artificial Intelligence can apply a wide range of cutting edge optimiztion algorithms, run millions of simulations of what would happen to your real world business if a given change is made, select the best outcomes ranked along any chosen weighting criteria, and then provide recommendations for C-level executives along with the data to back it up.

Let me be clear this is not science fiction, this is not a pipe dream, this is not just hype and buzzword bingo. However this is also not new to 2020, in any shape, form, or fashion. This is the self same ‘digitial transformation’ that has been chased for almost 2 decades at this point. The main difference between this year’s take on ‘digital transformation’ and the previous years’, if there is one, is the idea that the transformation starts at the leaf nodes. It starts at the low level business processes being taken over by RPA. There is a certain compelling rationality to this.

Instead of going for the incredibly complex migration to a new multi-multimillion dollar CRM or ERP platform, building out a risky (Micro)Service Oriented Architecture that might never actually see adoption across your enterprise even if successfully developed, or any of the other big bang top down approaches to digital transformation why not go at it from the opposite direction? Start with digitizing the dozens or even hundreds of simple processes that make up your business with RPA. Each individual automation of a single business process is a relatively small but concrete win that provides immediate real world bottomline value to the business. The best thing about this approach is you can afford to fail on a given automation attempt, still reap the benefits from your other successful automation attempts, get up, dust your knees off and try again. Once you have completed this leaf-node automation phase, proven your capability and aquired digital transformation competence, then take on the more complex components. Honestly this is just the proven industry standard iterative development philosophy writ large.