Page 22 - Bizmod Thought Leadership Articles 2020

MARKET TRENDS
which ultimately means the culture of the organisation.
A standard first level approach
by business is to assess the ‘low hanging fruit’ across the processes.
These are elements that are
typically easy to automate. However, automation is then undertaken
in an isolated process at a task
level, and even though it may
be a good approach when first starting out with IA, it becomes
very difficult to calculate ROI. For many organisations, one of the key reasons to embark on an automation journey is to reduce the number
of human resources involved in
the process. When tasks across a variety of processes are automated, the “benefit” is calculated in terms
of minutes saved per process. But
as human resources work across
a variety of processes scattered in the value chain, this approach rarely results in reducing the required human resources.
Process visibility and having a clear understanding of where in the process the work is being done by digital workers is also overlooked by project teams who tend to focus on implementation from a technical perspective.
The technical teams understand the processes and have an even better understanding of which parts of the process are automated, but somehow this knowledge is not transferred back into the business. The “business”
people that work in the process on a daily basis don’t have a clear view of their process and an understanding of which elements of work are being done by human workers and which by “digital workers”. To keep track of the automating process steps across functions, process visibility is key. It is difficult enough to monitor what is being automated where, but when you are doing this across functional automation it is an absolute necessity.
Historically work has always been done from a human perspective with the basic assumption that humans do the work or manage other humans doing the work.
Robotics and IA projects are slowly replacing the need for humans to
do the actual work but very little attention is being given to what it will take to manage “digital workers”.
The technical skills required for the maintenance of “digital workers” often lies with the technical implementation team and in most cases the business is not equipped or skilled to deal
with this maintenance. The challenge being that the business needs to create these skills in the business whilst implementing the programme. This requires large scale upskilling of existing human workers to be able to build and maintain bots and in this way retain visibility of “work” being done in their area. It also opens up a host of questions not currently being addressed by businesses on “what do we do with our people now?” In this case imagination is the limitation.
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