Automation is about to explode into a new central role in the OneEcosystem™

The Situation: The automation revolution has hardly begun. In the next few years, we will see an explosion in its application and the scale of technology’s ability to interact with human workforces—according to Blue Prism Ventures CEO Terry Walby in a conversation with HFS CEO & Chief Analyst Phil Fersht for a freshly published HFS Videocast.

Fersht agrees that we are on the edge of a period of rapid change. He sees automation taking a central role in making the live and real-time connections and responses required as organizations build out their HFS OneEcosystems, where we venture beyond the walls of our organizations to collaborate with like-minded partners with common objectives. Discover more about OneEcosystem™, here.

The pandemic’s forces brought new horizons closer

Walby and Fersht discuss how the pandemic’s forces have rapidly brought new horizons closer to us in the context of recent insights delivered in the HFS report (supported by Blue Prism): Seven Lessons That Have Shaped Today’s Automation Leaders. Walby sees the report as a call to action for enterprise leaders, who must now ask themselves, “What should I be doing?” and “What can I be doing?” as we move toward a future in which human and digital workforces combine in a hybrid, digital-human execution platform.

The pandemic not only accelerated the race to digital, but it also powered a rush to the cloud to respond more dynamically to demand changes. Walby argues the Blue Prism platform removes barriers to adoption that may hold up traditional infrastructure deployment programs, enabling the interoperability demanded to access a wide range of data sources.

“Increasingly, what we are seeing is that the data a business is run on is not just data that is internal to their organization; it is data that exists in their partner ecosystem and in their supply chain, in their customers.”

Data is your strategy, and interoperability is the key

Similarly, Walby argues we cannot view automation as a standalone technology. It is, he asserts, part of an ecosystem in which it must focus on interoperability.

He supports the HFS OneOffice view that data is your strategy and that having a plan to access and interoperate data is now business critical.

In our videocast, Walby also outlines how automation has become foundational to an organization’s success because of the pandemic’s challenges. But he acknowledges that without C-suite endorsement, automation programs are doomed to remain confined to one-off and ad-hoc projects. With strategic endorsement comes value that scales, he says. That assertion aligns squarely with the findings of our previously mentioned Seven Lessons study into automation in the enterprise.

“Departmental deployment of automation in a tactical way still exists, but that’s the low-hanging fruit, easy quick-wins stuff, because technology can leverage existing systems in a frictionless way through manipulating interfaces and executing process flow. Some organizations have stopped there,” said Walby. He says the real impact comes when the enterprise looks at what is important to business performance—customer experience, patient experience, 24/7 operations, or scaling up and down to meet unpredictable demand.

The seven lessons of automation leaders show heroes are pushing boundaries

If we consider automation to unlock solutions for meeting critical KPIs, it moves beyond productivity gains toward something more strategic, he maintains.

Beyond the second horizon is a third horizon, where the technology is applied to deliver outcomes that would have been impossible, unviable, or inconceivable without the capabilities now available to us through automation. The automation heroes found in the HFS report are pushing into the third horizon’s boundaries with a completely different mindset, said Walby.

In the report, you will find the seven lessons learned by “automation heroes”—those creating the greatest enterprise value with automation.

The webcast takes a deep dive into these, too.

The Bottom Line: Automation must fulfill its promise for interoperability to make a noticeable impact on how enterprises build out their OneEcosystem™

Automation increases the range of things we can do and the strategies we can deploy. It will have a significant impact on how we build out our OneEcosystems. Automation technology allows you to access all the new capabilities and intelligence available, offering you a platform to underpin how you use systems and deliver outcomes for your business.

Its potential for interoperability with data, systems, and processes places it front of mind for the next OneEcosystem™ revolution. We stand at the brink of a huge period of change in which success will demand the coming together of customer experience, employee experience, and partner experience.