Optimizing the Intersection of Intelligent Automation and Manual Work

Much of the discussion around Intelligent Automation is focused on the notion of fully automating or robotizing process steps. Yet, many complex IT projects continue to require large-scale manual work. Such projects include enterprise release management, incident management and disaster recovery activities. Cutover is a SaaS platform that focuses on those activities by providing safeguards and controls for critical enterprise IT change events. HfS came across Cutover because it was among 15 startups selected by Accenture’s FinTech Innovation Lab as part of its mentoring program.

The Cutover platform comprises of four core elements:

• Planning: Pre-planned communications and the mapping of interdependencies that are particularly relevant for distributed teams allowing them to rehearse their exact activities for the event and collaborate remotely
• Live run: When users get real-time communication through SMS and Email to prompt activities and to help choreograph the event
• Visualization: The dashboards that give stakeholders access real-time data, thus allowing to spot bottlenecks and critical issues
• Post event: Black box systems of record that provide an audit trail of activities.

The ability to manage large-scale teams in real time without directly interfering with the actual work, is strongly aligned with the notion of the As-a-Service Economy.

Cutover’s goal is to provide executive stakeholders with a single pane of truth that enables prioritization, matching of demand and supply and minimization of risk. There are competitive offerings for project management, but none of those focuses yet on live events. In HfS view, a critical element in the value proposition of Cutover is the ability to provide audit trails of activities. Thus, their approach shares the crucial features of RPA and Autonomics tools. At the same time, Cutover enhances automation platforms such as ServiceNow. In the words of its executives, ServiceNow orchestrates scripts, while Cutover orchestrates human interaction. From over 500 companies, Cutover were selected to be part of the Barclays Techstars Accelerator and they have been exploring the use of their platform with the bank. Cutover also have Capita ITPS as a customer and a partner for a number of deployments of their software

Should Cutover be able to deliver on its roadmap milestone to advance DevOps Visualization, it would support broad scale Agile projects even in more complex environments such as comprehensive outsourcing contracts. Thus, it would enhance test automation but with focus on optimizing human interaction – not the elimination of it. As such, it should be seen as an additional instrument in the ever-increasing automation tool box.

HfS would welcome the discussion of other innovative approaches to Intelligent and Test Automation. Should you be interested, do get in touch: [email protected]