Digital-first, automation-first frees humans to do true value-add work.
I had the opportunity to speak with Jason Kingdon, Chairman and CEO of Blue Prism prior to Blue Prism World and the introduction of their new intelligent automation platform. The platform strives to make it easier for human workers, digital workers, and business systems to work together to solve business problems and automate business processes regardless of infrastructure and software.
Intelligent automation is a key driver of digital transformation and for reworking core strategic business initiatives. In order to be truly transformational, companies need to think about solving business problems and providing a better UX and CX rather than just automating legacy business processes. This is how Uber and Lyft displaced taxis and Airbnb became worth more than the three largest hotel chains combined.
As we emerge from COVID, we will see companies using data, technology, and automation to disrupt legacy business models.
According to Jason, if you talk to the people who run centers of excellence, a major blocker to innovation and automation is c-level sponsorship. More vision and leadership are needed to understand the strategic implications and possibilities of technology and automation. Any business process worthy of description can be automated. Progressive companies will aggressively evaluate what work can and should be handled by a digital worker versus a human worker.
The other blocker is IT's understanding of their ability to give the organization much faster access to work. Security in place, persona-based security management, and empowering teams of workers to go live, triage, deviations, adapt, and add more processes and work.
Organizations today are extremely complex and use a myriad of technology and software to operate. By giving capabilities to those beyond IT, making systems interoperable, and repurposing human interfaces with machine interfaces, you can democratize all of your legacy and third-party technology. It doesn't matter what software you are using, you tell the digital workers how to interact with Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, et al to automate your business processes for predictability, cost control, and improved service quality.
Forward-thinking banks are approving loans in three minutes versus three days or three weeks. Intelligent systems are able to read MRIs more quickly and accurately than a human. During COVID, consumers' expectations have increased and businesses need to use technology to meet these expectations.
Automation Enlightenment
There's a three-step process to enlightenment: 1) start by automating tasks and processes; 2) see automation as a core technology that you make available to all operations groups; 3) automation becomes a core capability. Automation becomes the de facto way future business processes are implemented. Core business processes are delivered through a digital workforce while the human workforce is focused on improving UX and CX while interacting with clients and prospects to better understand needs, wants, and desires.
With Version 7 of its platform, Blue Prism is working to enable organizations to respond faster and work smarter by orchestrating the work of human employees seamlessly with software robots to increase productivity, employee engagement, growth, and a competitive edge.
The re-architected platform supports forward-thinking enterprises that will rely on speed and agility provided by automation, as well as creativity, innovation, and one-to-one attention of human employees.
"Multi-tasking software robots that automatically scale and carry out end-to-end complex process automation move us away from current RPA definitions towards a greatly enhanced model of robot productivity. This, along with strategic business outputs and support for broader digitization and automation capabilities is the path." -- Jason Kingdon
Easier application building and modeling capabilities in Blue Prism Version 7 give more visibility and control, making automatic scaling of an end-to-end digital workforce faster. As companies look to the future, the following competencies will give them the scope to orchestrate a future workforce that is agile and productive, able to navigate ever changing market conditions:
Greater Scalability: A new secure server-based digital worker architecture with faster Control Room performance, giving data at a glance, will make it easier to expand and orchestrate the digital workforce across end-to-end strategic automation.
Greater Extensibility: An expanded API framework allows organizations to extend digital worker capabilities with artificial intelligence, with direct plug-ins into the wider ecosystem and a vast choice of best-of-breed applications and technologies, making it easier to build complementary technology on top of Blue Prism.
Greater Usability: The new browser-based Control Room provides always-on, real-time visibility into a company’s digital workforce from any device, anytime, anywhere. Operators can access intuitive dashboards and data views that give them valuable insights into digital worker performance, to address any issues immediately.
Now companies can easily double their digital worker capacity while delivering greater business agility, with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and a faster path to value.