HFS Highlight: HCL’s DRYiCE software progresses toward the OneOffice

The Covid-19 pandemic is forcing all organizations to take a much more honest and realistic re-evaluation of their progress with digital transformation as well as of establishing digital workforces. Incremental progress is just not good enough anymore. To safeguard service delivery, we have to pivot back to outcomes and a holistic end-to-end process view. Against that background, it was pertinent to catch up with HCL’s leadership to talk about the progress with DRYiCE.

DRYiCE is HCL’s umbrella brand for a heterogeneous set of proprietary AI and Automation solutions. They form part of HCL’s Mode 3 offerings that aim to co-create products and IP with clients. Together with Actian and the software assets acquired from IBM, they represent its products and platform portfolio that is the fastest-growing part of HCL. The discussions with HCL provided both an update on changed client interactions in the wake of COVID as well as an overview of the progress with the portfolio of DRYiCE assets and solutions.

COVID necessitates a pivot toward end-to-end automation and usability

The consistent messages across all discussions focused on two issues. First, HCL suggested a strong acceleration in demand for DRYiCE assets in the wake of COVID and second, a shift of demand patterns that led to a re-design of some of their offerings. Those shifts are summarized as followed:

• Digital Workplace as the frontier to Digital Transformation
• Simplicity and time to value will be key for AI adoption
• Humanizing AI critical for progress with transformation

HCL executives view Digital Workplace as the first frontier to enterprise Digital Transformation. The offerings responding to that are their Lucy chatbot, the iAutomate AI-infused runbook automation, and OptiBot which is a workplace and end-point automation optimizations software. One way to think about this is that for HCL the North Star is the enablement and automation of self-service rather than end-to-end automation. Thus, the emphasis is on providing agents and admins with the best possible set of options. Figure 1 provides an overview of the assets encompassing the DRYiCE brand:

Exhibit 1: Overview of the HCL DRYiCE portfolio

Source: HCL 2020

For HCL the key to scaling those assets is the adoption of AI technologies and methodologies. Executives were frank that agents find current products complex and difficult to operate.  As a consequence, the existing offerings of DRYiCE Lucy and DRYiCE iAutomate were redesigned and two new offerings were launched (DRYiCE ROAR and DRYiCE GoldBluePrint). The design principles were enhanced simplicity and accelerated time to value. Intertwined with those efforts is the endeavor to humanize AI. Because customers were uncomfortable working with Black Boxes and something they feel they don’t understand. To mitigate those concerns, the new versions of Lucy and iAutomate offerings now mimic how a human would do the transactions whilst providing human-readable rules. The progress with those efforts was evident in the client discussions that HCL presented.

Double down on outcomes and change management

The most compelling of the client discussions in our view was the journey of a global CPG major with Lucy. Not because the Lucy virtual cognitive agent is an accessible use case but because the experience of that client is strongly aligned with the OneOffice concept. They started their journey in IT with a traditional helpdesk scenario, yet are expanding the scope to procurement and corporate legal, therefore overcoming the organizational siloes. By achieving broad integration with ServiceNow, Teams, and SQL DB staging SAP data, users can get the status of tickets, orders, and payments among many other things. The ultimate goal is for the chatbot to autonomously address any issues. However, this requires hand-offs where the chatbot workflow finishes. Thus, the envisaged end-state is Lucy as a single point of contact, moving the strategic lens from reactive to proactive.

To some degree, albeit in a very different context, the new DRYiCE ROAR offering is also aimed at overcoming siloes. It automates ingestion from siloed multi-sourced data and reconciliation of data to provide a single source of truth.

The outcomes depicted in those testimonials should encourage HCL to add more consultative narratives and capabilities next to the DRYiCE assets. To progress to the OneOffice is all about effectively managing change. While DRYiCE is one of the most expansive Intelligent Automation offerings in the industry, probably the best way to think about it is in the context of modularity. Clients tend to procure one module for a very specific scope. Yet, the journey toward the OneOffice requires a complex orchestration of activities and technology. And more than anything else the ability effectively change people and processes.

Bottom-line: HCL has done the hard bit by building highly compelling automation assets, now it has to double down of integrating those into broader more consultative engagements.