Enterprise operations are rapidly transforming, seemingly becoming more complex with every week that passes. The drive to a digital-first way of doing business means more apps, devices, channels, data and integrations to manage. And the pressure is on CIOs and C-suite leaders to make it work.
That’s not to mention countless changes to the employee experience over the past two years. Rapidly shifting attitudes towards hybrid work, widespread redundancies, lockdowns, employee burnout and an expanding skills gap, have resulted in a disrupted workforce which now exists under constant analysis and speculation from industry experts.
Remote work has placed new pressure on the way organisations enable, support, and manage their employees when face-to-face interactions are limited; meanwhile, employees want new and improved employee experiences. That means organisations now more than ever need to be mindful of what an employee faces in their day-to-day operations, and find ways to remove obstacles, speed bumps, and frustrating menial tasks wherever possible.
A 2021 Pega study found most business leaders recognise intelligent automation holds the key to streamlining operations and improving employee experience. With technologies like RPA, AI, BPM, email bots, chatbots and natural language processing combined on a scalable, low-code platform, intelligent automation can be widely implemented to improve all components of a business.
Leading businesses are applying intelligent automation to people, processes and technology to improve the employee experience and stay ahead of the competition. Here are three key things they are doing to get the most benefit from intelligent automation.
1. Include everyone
Industry-leaders take a collaborative approach, inviting workers at every level to be involved with intelligent automation. From identifying business objectives to using low-code development tools to build out essential processes, leading enterprises are fostering collaboration among a diverse range of roles in business, IT and other areas of their organisation.
Organisations furthest along in their implementation and adoption of intelligent automation technologies have a higher percentage of business users contributing to low-code app development and active collaboration between those users and IT departments. So, the more business users are involved in the planning and development of business processes, the more likely an organisation will succeed at adoption of intelligent automation and utilise it in ways which benefit employees.
2. Apply governance
Being collaborative is fantastic in theory, but without a proper framework in place it can quickly result in chaos for IT. To help get the best results from collaboration, leading organisations have strong governance structures in place.
By defining systems, strategies, guidelines and guardrails, leaders are enabled to embrace agility and reduce the risks of shadow IT. However, only 30 per cent of C-suite executives say they have adopted a formal governance structure for intelligent automation projects. Even in organisations where only a handful of non-IT workers are involved in app development, a coordinated governance process better positions the enterprise for production at scale.
3. Build with best practices
Speaking of scale, leading businesses are already baking a comprehensive intelligent automation framework into their future plans by establishing Centres of Excellence (COEs) for their process infrastructure.
COEs play an important role in defining, educating and updating workers on standards, policies and best practices for intelligent automation processes. They also facilitate adoption, help drive efficiency and provide a framework for resiliency – helping organisations more quickly respond to changing needs by fostering a culture of innovation. It’s no wonder 81 per cent of organisations that take an executive team approach to oversight say they already have a COE in place.
Implement intelligent automation now and reap the benefits
Intelligent automation is developing at fast pace, and enterprises that are not constantly updating their tech are falling behind. Leading organisations will continue to implement smart automations as a competitive edge, not just for business practices but for employee experience. The question is, are these automations being built to be tomorrow’s silos or creating a foundation for true digital transformation?
No matter where your organisation is in building automations into your operations, you can take simple steps now to drive results in both the short- and long-term.
First, it’s important to develop a holistic plan around the people, processes and technology that will make intelligent automation work for you. Next, focus on bringing your business and IT workers together on a collaborative, low-code app development platform that allows you to define the guardrails and governance specific to your business needs. Finally, restructure your business architecture to connect all of your processes from the centre out – with AI-based decisioning and case management driving the connections down the stack to your systems of record and up the stack to the channels and devices you need to reach your customers.
