Enterprises are facing an unprecedented threat (and opportunity) from disruptive digital business models, ever-increasing customer expectations and an unprecedented data explosion. To this end, a recent HFS study of 350 digital leaders shows a third of them have seen their top two competitors change over the last couple of years – and a similar number is expected in the next couple.

Cost reduction alone no longer ensures success; driving top-line growth is equally important. The Triple-A Trifecta of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and smart analytics has compelled the C-suites to address their business objectives. Goals from the trifecta technologies are ambitious, and expectations are unrealistic. Most enterprises want to achieve industrialization of their initiatives across the trifecta within two years!

However, in reality, the industrialization questions are largely unanswered. Scaling up intelligent automation (IA) initiatives is the single biggest challenge. Solutions remain siloed and piecemeal. While 60% or more of enterprises are leveraging multiple IA technologies, only 11% are leveraging an integrated solution approach (see Exhibit 1). Data quality, organizational culture, and talent questions are holding us back from reaching the promised land.

HFS believes that integrated solutions at the intersection of automation, AI, and analytics balanced with an adequate focus on people and processes are necessary for making progress on this journey to enterprise-wide digitization.

Exhibit 1. The solution approach to automation initiatives continues to be piecemeal

_{Source: HFS Research, 2018
Sample = 590 Business Leaders including 100 C-level executives}

On this quest to unravel the mysteries behind successful enterprises scaling up their automaton initiatives, we analyzed emerging technology solutions and juxtaposed their solution approach against the key challenges behind automation industrialization. One such promising solution is arago’s HIRO. 

Industrializing intelligent automation with HIRO shows great promise, due to its scalable platform and its ease of adapting to change across IT & business processes

Arago is a Germany-headquartered pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and one of the few companies worldwide to offer a commercially proven horizontal artificial intelligence platform, HIRO. We spent considerable time over the past few months with arago’s leadership and its clients, probing them on their approach to countering challenges industrializing automation. HFS’ noted five stand-out dimensions of arago’s approach for helping clients rapidly scale up their automation initiatives (see Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2. HFS perspectives on HIRO’s ability to rapidly scale up automation initiatives

_{Source: HFS discussions with HIRO clients and arago’s leadership, 2019}

1.   Dynamic automation. Most automation solutions (such as RPA and Runbooks) are designed to automate static environments with repetitive processes. The result is often a brittle script that is prone to breaking down when its underlying process changes even a little bit. Machine learning-based solutions do a better job by handling variability in inputs, but they still work best with static, controlled environments with predictable outcomes. Each variation needs a new model. HIRO uses heuristic intelligent optimization combining machine reasoning along with machine learning, rather than deterministic and static rule-based RPA-type automation. HIRO divides a process into “atomic steps” with conditions, then recombines them using machine reasoning and machine learning to automate a task. HIRO allows users to arrange any process into patterns like scheduling, filtering, orchestrating, and prioritizing to drive use cases that are resistant to change and allow scalability (see Exhibit 3)                         

                                                         Exhibit 3: HIRO’s business process automation approach 

     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

                                                                                                              Source: arago 

   2. Capturing and codifying knowledge. We live in a world that some researchers say generates a “tsunami of data.” Enterprises have always struggled to manage internal data and are now hard-pressed to respond to the digital data explosion happening inside and outside company walls. While enterprise-wide demand for analytics and AI has skyrocketed, ensuring quality data remains the Achilles’ heel. HIRO tries to address this problem by capturing and codifying the knowledge of specialists and experts who troubleshoot operational processes and changing environments. After HIRO learns an initial pool of knowledge, it reuses its knowledge base to solve tasks dynamically, achieving significantly higher automation rates. HIRO’s approach creates a clean data landscape while it is working, but a clean data landscape is not a prerequisite. Also, HIRO’s data ingestion has no limits, and its knowledge-driven approach enables it to scale up quickly and effectively. It focuses on the quality of knowledge items, not just the quantity.

   
   3. The glue between business and IT. For most organizations, IT’s chief data officer and chief information officer are in the main decision-making roles for automation related initiatives. However, it is often the business operations leaders and departments that have the most critical needs for automation. Coordination and collaboration between IT and business stakeholders is crucial for any success. Only 35% of enterprises, according to our latest research, consider their IT-business alignment to be excellent. We categorized study participants as leaders (companies leading in financial performance on the top quartile) and laggards (everyone else i.e. companies lagging behind in terms of financial performance). Over half the leaders (54%) report having excellent IT-business alignment, compared to a mere 12% of laggards. This is where HIRO is also uniquely positioned—it is IT and business agnostic. It has general applicability and trainability of different models in diverse operational contexts. Focused on solving problems, HIRO is process and industry agnostic, and it can be used across an organization to orchestrate its automation tools and accelerate digital transformation.

   4. Integrated automation platform. Business problems are solved not by one standalone technology, but by a combination of technologies. However, only 11% of enterprises are currently integrating solutions across the Triple-A Trifecta (automation, analytics, and AI). While clients realize the need for integrating their automation initiatives, the product landscape continues to be fragmented and piecemeal. HIRO manages this complexity of digital operations with one end-to-end engine. It is designed to ringfence—not supplant—clients’ investments by acting as an orchestrator of automation and AI tool sets, by providing connections to leading enterprise software applications, and by providing a development platform for clients.

   5. State of the art technology. We are in a world of rapidly changing technologies that are hard to keep track of. Arago’s heritage is R&D, led by AI pioneer Chris Boos and focused on driving fundamental research into self-learning systems. Arago brings together an extensive set of AI technologies, including ML, machine reasoning, and NLP. To auto-adapt to changes, HIRO only needs information about the change. This way, it is not only ringfencing clients’ investments, but it also provides the flexibility that is crucial to managing digital operations.

HIRO automation may sometimes require more initial setup effort than traditional automation. However, its flexible and dynamic approach toward automation delivers much greater efficiency at scale (see Exhibit 4).

Exhibit 4: Comparing HIRO’s value realization versus traditional automation

_{Source: arago}

An integrated intelligent automation platform is a necessary technology strategy to achieve scale at industrial levels.

We interviewed several clients who were early adopters and that have successfully scaled up their automation initiatives. Across underlying models, the following best practices emerged as the most practical “do’s and don’ts.”

• End-to-end automation requires the Triple-A Trifecta of automation, analytics, and AI.
  It is indeed practical for you to start with small and specific task automation, like ticket resolutions in specific IT infrastructure or application towers. But you cannot achieve scale if you don’t have an accurate, end-to-end vision of a process. Once you start taking a broad view, you will need to leverage multiple technologies. Some tasks may be simple and rules-based, well-suited for automation with RPA and static or dynamic screen scraping, OCR, record-and-replay functionalities, or Runbook automation tools. On the other hand, complex tasks such as semantic extractions from unstructured text or using dynamic contextual intelligence to resolve a ticket autonomously, cannot be done without AI. A comprehensive development platform with robust data preparation and algorithmic capabilities along with analytics and automation is what it takes to make integrated automation work. HIRO offers such a platform. Therefore, to automate a process end-to-end, across both simple and complex decisions and actions, you need to leverage all emerging technologies. Unfortunately, there is no single silver bullet.
• Consider an integrated intelligent automation strategy across people, processes, and technology. 
  The real point of integrated automation is to move beyond the tools. Yes, the Triple-A Trifecta offers more functionality than the status quo, but it still does not work unless you change your business, people, and processes. The way to the promised land of integrated automation is the effective combination of technology through a comprehensive platform like HIRO, plus talent and organizational change. It requires integrating the Triple-A Trifecta change agents in your toolbox and applying them across the original trifecta of people, process, and technology. If you keep throwing technology at a business problem, you will definitely have more technology—but probably not a solution.

• Change management effectiveness is the real measure of adoption and scale for integrated automation.
  Fifty-one percent of the highest performing enterprises say their cultures are holding them back in the digital transformation journey. Scaling up digital initiatives and enabling the right governance models are also critical points. The ability to codify “business outcomes” in contractual agreements, pricing structures, and performance measures is also a vital element to drive change. While there is no nirvana around pricing, it needs to be implemented based on every client’s unique requirements and context. The flexibility to put skin in the game with innovative and non-linear commercial models is essential to drive real change.

• Integrated automation will not be effective with a functional approach. It requires an end-to-end “OneOffice” strategy.
  Fewer than 12% of the enterprises we surveyed have an enterprise-wide approach to automation. This strong focus on task-level and process-level automation reminds us that automation often takes place in functional silos with parallel but unconnected initiatives. Balancing task-specific and process-specific pilots and production instances with a broader enterprise mission and vision is certainly daunting, but it is precisely what needs to occur to enable scaled and successful automation programs. Effective collaboration between business and IT is another crucial issue. While automation initiatives require IT involvement, the programs generally impact and enhance business processes—which requires participation from business constituents who understand the functions in question. The ideal leadership mix, then, is a combination of IT and business. However, our data shows that just one-fifth of respondents have created integrated IT and business leadership teams to grapple with automation strategy and deployment.

• Celebrate and share early project successes. Then use them as proof-points to sustain the momentum for scaling and further investments.
  Without measurable and demonstrable outcomes from the initial projects on intelligent automation, sustaining the momentum for scaling and ensuring further investment pipelines for enterprise-wide programs becomes very hard. Successful leaders have been adept at articulating and measuring the impact of early projects and establishing value proof-points. At the same time, do not position your automation program as a pure cost case! Automation is an enabler for efficiency, quality, and time to market.

“Automation is not just about cost savings. Our story for automation is that we empower our human workforces with an increasingly capable digital workforce.”

—Roger Jaussi, head of automation and operational excellence, Swisscom, who used arago to save nearly 57,000 hours of work besides other qualitative, hard-to-measure benefits

The Bottom Line: To industrialize intelligent automation, you must move beyond piecemeal technology adoption, towards an Integrated platform approach

You must extend the scope of the Triple-A Trifecta way beyond piecemeal tasks and toward integrated, end-to-end process automation. The use of an intelligent, integrated automation approach is at the core of this strategy. While still rare, products like arago’s HIRO are emerging that can help on your journey to industrialize automation.