Vasion is a Business Reporter client
Recently we were sitting with a CIO – we’ll call her Nadine – talking about the widening automation divide she sees between organisations such as hers, which has pockets of automation with an ROI that’s hard to quantify, and digital elites that have managed to automate entire processes or value streams and capture the economies of scale that come with them.
Bain & Company frames the automation divide as a difference in investment. Look closer, though, and the divide is not just about how much technology organisations buy. In our work helping companies such as Nadine’s deliver concrete gains from workflow automation, we see the biggest results come from combining people, processes and technologies to make automation ubiquitous and scalable and unlock the potential of human beings across the organisation. We call that orchestrated automation.
We’ve developed approaches that help Nadine and her peers achieve orchestrated automation and shift their organisations from the slow to the fast lane of automation. The first step is identifying automation problems inside organisations and then to address them with an orchestrated automation solution.
Why some organisations struggle to see value in automation
Every organisation has some automations. Even when they are built with the best intentions, knowledge and technology for the time, however, many of these fail to produce measurable returns for one or more of the following reasons:
- They’re too limited: early automation efforts focused on solving routine manual tasks that are part of an unautomated larger process or value stream
- They’re too isolated: automations are often siloed within a business unit or function, and even within a specific application, containing efficacy to a discrete area
- They’re too one-off: linking limited and isolated automations to other processes that use the same output often requires custom development, which is expensive and requires frequent updates, inherently reducing the number of automations the business can implement and maintain
These automation approaches are unsustainable – especially for leaders that see a growing digital divide between the business and the demands of the market and understand the existential imperative to narrow it. And despite how common these approaches to automation are, they are fundamentally unnecessary.
You can overcome the challenges of limited, isolated and one-off automations with an approach that leverages what you’ve already done and establishes a framework for linking existing and future automations. Doing that can transform digitisation from an elite, out-of-reach capability into an accessible, ubiquitous resource for everyone. That’s the value of orchestrated automation.
Capturing the benefits of orchestrated automation
With orchestrated automation, organisations can deliver ROI on the active automations they already have; add new, manual and repetitive tasks to their automation inventory; and effectively empower citizen automators within a context of flexible IT oversight.
Best of all, orchestrated automation is available to everyone. It’s not just accessible for large, high-profit commercial enterprises but also for legacy businesses like the one Nadine works for: regional financial institutions, government agencies or small businesses, regardless of location, regulatory requirements or current state of digitisation.
We’ve seen the impact orchestrated automation can have even on nonprofits such as the John Boner Neighborhood Centers in Indianapolis, which operates that city’s energy assistance program for low-income residents.
John Boner worked with Vasion to automate the program registration process. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, there was an avalanche of job losses in the communities where John Boner operates. The nonprofit was asked to apply the same infrastructure used for the energy assistance program to the city’s Covid-19 rental assistance program.
The need was acute and immediate: the community could not afford to wait for an implementation of years. Within six weeks we had John Boner set up, ready to enrol and process the 10,000 rental assistance applications it received in the first three days of the program launch – a workload that would have taken months and significant resources if those applications had been delivered on paper.
There are three lessons we can take from working with the John Boner Neighborhood Centers about what it takes to achieve success with orchestrated automation.
Lesson one: cultivate a change-ready culture
Change is a given. And in the digital automation era, the pace is accelerating. Individuals, teams and entire organisations will be asked to examine how they work and transform to capture the benefits that automation can offer. Change may be hard for some organisations due to a combination of fixed mindsets and change fatigue. Leaders can overcome resistance, however, with patience and empathy applied to communicating the benefits of having a change-ready culture, cultivating agility and rewarding desired behaviours.
Lesson two: optimise processes and value streams
Automating all or part of an inefficient process without considering the whole is a guaranteed recipe for low ROI from automations. No one would do it on purpose, though it does happen, especially when organisations approach automation as a one-off technology project rather than as an end-to-end effort to optimise the value stream. The latter requires strong collaboration between IT and business leaders, agreement on objectives and an end-to-end view across an entire process.
Lesson three: leverage cross-functional orchestration technology
Organisations must move away from the view of automation as something that comes embedded inside a single-function packaged application. Orchestrated automation bridges the divide between the physical and digital worlds. It can also bridge the various functions of the business through a comprehensive platform that includes a suite of widely applicable functionality, including: data capture and ingestion capabilities for both physical and digital data sources; functional AI application; a drag-and-drop form and document builder; a no-code workflow builder; digital signatures; universal content search and storage; analytics and reporting; compliance and audit readiness; and world-class security. Of course, every modern orchestration automation platform will also need AI to ultimately enable autonomous automation – the next generation of automation maturity.
Planning for autonomous automation
The momentum toward automation is not slowing down for organisations such as Nadine’s. That’s why we’re helping her, and leaders in organisations everywhere, capture the existential benefits by discarding siloed approaches and embracing orchestrated automation, to unlock the true potential of automation.
Only orchestration will set leaders up for the next wave of automation: leveraging autonomous AI to surface automation opportunities, enabling the business to more fully capture value from digitisation and open up the incredible potential of people partnered with systems to scale beyond what’s possible today.
Unlock the true potential of orchestrated automation with Vasion.
