Introducing The Age of Intelligent Automation
Blog: Bizagi Blog
When we first started Bizagi in 2002,
we described our software as a process automation solution.
Very often however, potential
customers would say, “We trust our people, so we don’t want to automate our
processes.” As a result, we started referring to our technology as a process
digitization solution, which actually better described our platform back then.
At the time, people were essentially
opposed to the idea of eliminating people from the processes. They simply
wanted to make their people more efficient and effective.
Jump ahead to 2012 and we saw the dawn
of the digital transformation imperative, driven by disruptive customer
experiences that new companies such as Uber started delivering to the market.
These experiences were only ubiquitously available due to the incredible rise of mobile phones, which for this first time enabled experiences tailored to the context of the individual.
Perhaps more surreptitiously, there
was a shift to the requirement for instantaneous feedback. Customers no longer
had to wait for months, weeks, or days. Now not even hours are acceptable as a
timescale for people to know if they would get their product or service.
New credit card application? Approved
or rejected immediately. Online purchase? One-click, tracked delivered to my
door in a day. Easily accessible and up to date bank, pension, insurance
statements? These are all the new normal.
Incumbent companies in every industry
were left to look from the side-lines wondering how these new players were able
to change so much in such a short space of time.
It wasn’t long before these incumbent
companies realized that their business processes and underlying systems had to
evolve for them to be able to compete.
This was – and still is – extremely
difficult for many different reasons, not least because those business
processes were running in rigid legacy systems that are very hard to change.
How do you deliver the instantaneous nature of the experience when your organization is based on business processes, which, by definition, are a series of steps that happen at different moments in time?
To reconcile this apparent paradox, I
can share with you what we saw happening at our customers around the world.
Their first use of our technology was
to digitize the existing processes, and by that, I mean to create a process
application that would combine manual and system activities to deliver the
product and service.
Many times, this process would be modified to make it much more customer centric while also guaranteeing consistency through multiple channels. By doing this we often saw, and still see, reductions in service levels from weeks to days or even hours. It’s not enough though, to compete with the Fintechs that create your new bank account in just 20 minutes, despite the fact it is a highly regulated process.
Driven by this alarming competition, our more advanced customers moved to the next phase: analyzing every single manual activity and evaluating if it could be:
1. Eliminated – “this is actually not necessary anymore”
OR
2. Postponed – “perhaps we can approve the insurance policy and if later additional manual checks detect something wrong, we simply cancel it?”
OR
3. Automated – “we can build the logic so a person doesn’t need to touch this”
Bingo. By eliminating, postponing and
automating, a complex business process becomes an instantaneous transaction –
one that can meet your customers’ expectations. This is why at the heart of
digital transformation; every organization needs process digitization and
automation.
The solution required to deliver this across an enterprise is a digital information conveyor belt (that works in conjunction with your legacy systems and can be easily re-configured). Combined with the information bots it creates a fully automated information assembly line.
Now add artificial intelligence on top
of the process (which knows both context and intent) and you have the most
disruptive vortex of new technologies. This creating the equivalent of an
industrial revolution but on a much larger scale, with the impact happening
much, much faster, as it is not slowed down by the limitations of the physical
world.
Welcome to the age of intelligent
automation.
I can’t help but to dedicate the last
few words on this short article to the huge social implications that this will
have, and the unprecedented speed at which these changes will occur.
If managed properly we will enter an era of incredible prosperity that can eradicate poverty and deliver a sustainable world for future generations. If not, we could, in my mind, soon be witness to a time of social turmoil on a scale that will not resemble anything we have ever seen before, and in this former statement I am including the industrial revolution.
Fortunately, I am a technologist and
not a politician.
Regards, Gustavo
The post Introducing The Age of Intelligent Automation appeared first on Bizagi Blog – Ideas for Delivering Digital Transformation.
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