Democratizing Hyperautomation

Is it a political issue?

In the 2019 report "Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends" (1) Gartner presented Hyperautomation as the number one trend. In the same report Gartner listed “Democratization” as one of those trends and defines it as:

“Democratization is focused on providing people with access to technical expertise (e.g., ML, application development) or business domain expertise (e.g., sales process, economic analysis) via a radically simplified experience and without requiring extensive and costly training.”

Following this trend, business users are empowered, for example, by new user-friendly versions of Process Mining products to allow them higher process visibility so they can improve and monitor those processes. Also, iBPM tools offer end-users different functionalities to automate some tasks and generate reports.

This Democratization tech trend has a large scope, deals with application development, data science, machine learning and other technologies and disciplines; here we will focus on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA was already a strategic priority before the pandemic; its adoption has been accelerating ever since. I used the word “hyperautomation” because this construct also implies an organization-wide adoption of process automation (see my article about hyperautomation).

Democratizing hyperautomation means that organizations enroll and upskill a group of employees, business users, to allow them design, develop and implement software robots or, to be more specific, business process automations. These individuals are known as “Citizen Developers” (CDs). UiPath, one of the leading RPA platform vendors, defines a Citizen Developer as:

“A non-technical user that creates simple automations for themselves and their departments.”(2)

Benefits of Democratization

Scaling automation

The number of automations developed and deployed by an organization is constrained by the available time and resources of the IT teams and the members of the Automation/Digital Transformation Center of Excellence (CoE). Typically, those groups include a few employees and external consultants, so their automation capacity is likely to be insufficient in an emergency such as the pandemic we are facing nowadays. In this scenario, the IT team and the CoE need to find new ways to keep up with automation demand and increase their capacity. In other words, they can use all the help they can get. It′s then that the intervention of employees (business users) can make a big difference by:

• Freeing up the CoE of simple automations that distract resources from critical, strategic company-wide automations.
• Taking simple automations on their own hands; most of them regarding processes and tasks they are responsible for and know better than anyone else.

Magda Neagu in one of her blog posts (2) mentions three reasons CDs are needed to scale automation:

1. There’s a whole world of automation beyond company-wide robots.
2. Your IT team’s pipeline won’t have room for every automation request.
3. The people who know your ground-level work the best are the ones on those teams.

Since Change Management is one of the most challenging components of any hyperautomation program; it′s important to notice that besides helping to scale automations. CDs play an important role in building a hyperautomation culture within the organization as nearby witnesses of the RPA benefits and, also, as RPA evangelists.

Agility

Not only CDs will reduce execution times of processes and tasks without making any mistakes. They will also develop automations that will be in operation in a few days so they will reduce manual work significantly and meet unforeseen new needs. Also, they will be able to cope with expected or unexpected peaks of activity.

Resilience

In the event of an unfavorable situation or economic context, CDs will help to reduce operational costs, quickly deploy new strategies that reduce negative impacts and those that allow growth in such circumstances.

Organizations always will welcome all the help they can get from their employees; specially when an upsetting and unexpected event arises.

Satisfy the current lack of RPA developers

In a recent Gartner Webinar about RPA (3), Kristin Mettraux dispelled some of the common RPA misconceptions; among them the “Our business doesn’t have the skills for RPA” one. She points out that the demand in the labor market for RPA skills has grown significantly. She also shared that TalentNeuron? (a division of Gartner providing data and analytics on the labor markets using jobs posted on line in the US) reports that from 2016 to 2019, before the pandemic, the overall demand for RPA skills grew 123%; in both years, 2016 and 2019, most of those jobs were offered to be assigned outside IT. That means the lines of business require so much help that they need to complement what their IT areas can deliver hiring more staff. That is an indication of the urgent need for more Citizen Developers. These numbers come from pre-COVID-19 times; now the demand should be much higher.

Citizen Developers and the Future of Work

Employees are concerned with the current trend to automate some human work with physical robots in manufacturing environments and software robots to execute back-office or front-office business processes. When you have experience with software robots in particular, you realize that they cannot replace humans; they can do repetitive non-value-added tasks and some very specific cognitive tasks; but can hardly substitute humans for tasks involving good judgement, unexpected activities, lacking specific rules or those which require to think out-of-the-box. It′s true that some tasks will inevitably be delegated to software robots, and that employees must reskill and upskill themselves to keep up with the current and evolving demands of the new more digitized world. A CD program is the answer to dispel this kind of employees’ concerns.

Democratization may be an act of justice to honor the “social contract” (4) between the organization and its employees. Organizations cannot promise a lifetime job any longer; but they can help employees to stay relevant in the organization as well as develop skills and have job experiences that make them more valuable in the labor market.

From another point of view, a CD program is aligned with the “Stakeholder capitalism” (5) because it helps employees (one of the economic stakeholders) to advance their careers and ensure a long-term livelihood.

The organization can finance and support its employees because hyperautomation combined with a CD program is a win-win situation; for the organization is a way of scaling automation to attain its strategic goals; and a way of advancing its employees’ careers and their labor market value. This is especially true during uncertain times. Companies, now more than ever, need to mobilize their employees′ talent and energy to survive and thrive; and, employees need to stay relevant in an organization that can stay in business in the long term.

A success story

The global consulting firm PwC decided to upskill its entire US workforce (55,000 employees) a few years ago and developed a CD program mixing soft, technical, and digital skills (6). Among those skills, employees learned how to develop RPA robots.

They started training 1,000 employees out of a pool of 3,500 applicants. Up to now they have automated around five million hours of non-value-added work. A huge number of hours, which are a proxy of all the benefits they may have attained in terms of cost reduction, customer experience, employee experience, risk mitigation, new available services and so on.

How is it possible?

Two of the foremost leaders in the RPA market space, Automation Anywhere and UiPath, foster and support the Citizen Developer movement and clearly state that commitment in their vision and mottos. Automation Anywhere vision includes the phrase “…We see a world where every employee will work side by side with Digital Workers,” and reinforces with a statement such as “Automation is for everyone.” UiPath most recurrent motto is “A robot for every person.” Both companies have worked thoroughly to provide tools as user-friendly and low-code as possible so that any person with a minimum of analytical skills can develop basic and useful automations.

A special case is Blue Prism; another leading RPA platform vendor. Blue Prism positions its platform as a secure and scalable intelligent automation solution (7) and argues that traditional RPA and Robotic Desktop Automation (RDA) suffer from various shortcomings; among them, that the record-and-replay functionality generates tactical automations that do not scale and that there are some security risks due to desktop bots sharing credentials with users. That′s why Blue Prism does not offer tools customized for CDs.

You must notice that automations developed by a CD are typically RDA implementations and, for sure, are not meant to scale organization wide. Also, vendors like Automation Anywhere and UiPath offer a credential vault functionality to securely store user IDs, passwords, and other sensitive data. Furthermore, if necessary, those RPA platforms can interact with robust and well-known Privileged Access Management solutions such as CyberArk.

In my opinion, this Blue Prism discussion feels like déjà vu. It reminds me the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) affair. Finally, the benefits of connecting employee-owned devices to the network pushed companies to adopt technologies and practices to attain those benefits in a secure way. Nowadays, some RPA vendors offer the tools to allow companies to securely implement a CD program.

A collaboration platform for CDs and CoE members

Some platforms can facilitate the collaboration among the stakeholders of an Automation initiative. Just to mention two of them; a company can adopt a collaborative tool like Shibumi or a specialized platform such as UiPath Automation Hub. Shibumi is a wider scope platform positioned as a “Strategy Execution Software” allowing to manage, monitor, and scale different transformation programs such as RPA initiatives or a post-merger integration process. UiPath Automation Hub is more specific to facilitate collaboration in a hyperautomation environment. It′s important to notice that nonetheless Automation Hub is a UiPath product, is Platform agnostic. It can be used with other RPA platforms.

Tackling some security concerns

Some RPA platforms can enforce automation governance policies in such a way that CDs can only use some functionalities, applications, and digital assets so that they do not expose the organization to some cybersecurity risks. As far as the CDs automations are managed and monitored by the RPA platform console; all the automations are necessarily aligned with customized policies and constrained to follow secure practices.

Crowdsourcing automations

The Macmillan online dictionary defines crowdsourcing as:

“to get ideas, opinions or help to develop something from a large number of people, usually members of the public using the internet.”(8)

The fundamental idea behind crowdsourcing is to define a problem or a task, publish it online to the crowd, ask for help and wait for answer or solution submissions. In our case we share the need of automations to employees within our organization using a collaborative platform or repository in such a way that CDs can get some support to clarify their doubts or get some resources to complete the automations and publish them on the platform for their own use or for other employees (CDs or not) who may leverage those automations to get rid of manual tasks.

A well-known crowdsource success story happened in 2009 when Facebook needed to translate its website to appeal to the non-English speakers (9). Facebook used crowdsourcing to translate its website and reach as many countries as possible. An amazing accomplishment was the website translation into French within just 24 hours by engaging around 4,000 native French speakers

In a recent UiPath webinar called “It′s time to automate” (10), Oleg Royz, VP of Global Digital Transformation at Nielsen, mentioned that Nielsen just launched a Citizen Developer program and gave an example of the impact that one automation may have in the organization. He referred that the automation idea developed by a Polish girl can be adopted across 3,000 people quickly. Imagine all the working hours this automation can save.

Citizen Development Roadmap

The CD program roadmap is a subset of the RPA roadmap. After a Proof of Concept, a typical, pre-pandemic RPA program follows this sequence (11):

1. Creation of a Center of Excellence (CoE) to start a Pilot Program.
2. The CoE provides automation to employees.
3. Employees use automation.
4. Employees submit automation ideas to the CoE.
5. CoE builds automations; some of them suggested by employees.
6. Citizen developers build their own automation ideas.
7. Citizen Developers submit their code to the CoE.
8. CoE governs automations making them secure, adding functionality and ensuring they align with best practices.
9. CoE provides automations to employees across the company (regardless of being citizen developers or not)

On the other hand, any individual can learn how to develop automations and deploy them within an organization or just for personal use. Such a Citizen Developer could use an RPA Platform in an organization to delegate her mundane tasks to a software robot. During an urgent and unexpected event such as the current pandemic, an employee may justify her personal or departmental automations as “Shadow IT”; but the best practice is to collaborate with the Automation CoE if this area exists, or promote the creation of one. Indeed, this scenario assumes the existence of one or a few proactive Citizen Developers.

In my opinion, organizations struggling with heavy loads of manual tasks and new to RPA may start creating a basic Automation CoE, adopt one of the leading RPA platforms providing user-friendly tools, build some RPA capacity, set up guidelines for prioritization, security and best practices, and, then, implement a Citizen Developer program in order to quickly mobilize the talent and energy of those employees to delegate manual tasks done by themselves and their departments. In this way they can combine a top-down approach by assigning enterprise-wide automations to a small team of RPA developers and a bottom-up approach letting Citizen developers to solve day-to-day departmental manual tasks. This is an alternative path for companies trying to cope with heavy workloads and to optimize their workforce.

Once your CD program is up and running, benefits will start to build up consistently and employees will adopt an “automation-first” mindset. Depending on your organization priorities, the next step can be a Citizen Data Scientist program, an App Citizen Developer program or a “knowledge citizen”. Remember that the RPA part is just the first step in your hyperautomation journey.

Characteristics of a successful CD program

In order to increase the likelihood of succeeding with a CD program, we should:

• Make sure all the stakeholders have a deep and clear understanding of the organization strategy and the business outcomes to pursue.
• Enroll a motivated group of analytical minded employees. Prefer people interested in learning new skills regardless of their specific skillset (2).
• For the pilot program, select participants from areas having numerous manual activities that will have a clear and measurable impact in the short term; what they call “low-hanging fruit” or “quick-wins.”
• CDs should use a Consultative Approach to avoid a mechanical task replication. By the way, the combination of an Subject Matter Expert (SME) and an RPA developer is not enough; at least one of them should have a transformative perspective or, at the beginning, the team or the citizen developer should be mentored by an RPA coach or a Senior CD. Before automating a process or a task, the CD should ask herself if the process requires to be streamlined first to avoid hiding inefficiencies that may be a future burden or “process debt” (12).
• Trainers and evangelists should have hands-on experience in a wide range of functional, departmental, and personal automations.
• Design a customized upskilling Roadmap that will include technical and soft skills starting with RPA to free up time to increase employees’ “bandwidth”.
• Centralize the CD program through a Center of Excellence or equivalent area in such a way that the whole community can share the same business understanding, can benefit from different training paths adapted to their role, skills and preferences, and to enforce the necessary government guidelines to ensure good practices and avoid exposing the organization to preventable risks.
• Let some external consultants to help you start your CD initiative. Do not let the “not invented here” attitude slow or jeopardize your progress. If your organization selects a good partner, you will implement a successful program quickly, will avoid to “reinvent the wheel”, and, with some time and maturity, your organization will be able to run the program internally.

…by the people, for the people

It’s clear that the collaborative combination of talent, energy, enthusiasm and hands-on process knowledge provided by Citizen Developers is an extraordinary resource to help organizations to attain their strategic goals and, at the same time, allow those Citizen Developers to advance in their careers and improve their labor market value.

Companies just have to enroll, train and let Citizen Developers to figure out the best ways of developing the automations for processes and tasks they know very well. The business and organizational impact will be apparent very quickly.

Having the right guidance and experience, a CD program is easy to implement and will generate a momentum that will allow the organization to become agile, resilient and prosperous, and, at the same time, employees will be empowered to stay relevant within the organization and grow as professionals and change agents.

Hoping that these ideas and perspectives can help to clarify the concept of hyperautomation and, above all, to facilitate a vision of its application in our readers' organizations, I will be ready to deal with any question or comment.

REFERENCES:

(1)       Gartner, Inc. 2019. Smarter with Gartner, “Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020.” (October 2019). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/

(2)       Magda Neagu. 2020. Understanding Citizen Developers: Your Secret Weapon in Scaling Automation. (September 2020). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.uipath.com/blog/understanding-citizen-developers-your-secret-weapon-in-scaling-automation

(3)       Andrea Moreland and Kristin Mettraux. Gartner, Inc. 2020. Scale RPA Value Through Shared Business and IT Ownership. Video. (28 July 2020). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.gartner.com/en/webinars/3985978/scale-rpa-value-through-shared-business-and-it-ownership

(4)       Human Capital Institute. 2017. Employee Experience: A New Social Contract. (May 2017). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.hci.org/blog/employee-experience-new-social-contract

(5)       Deborah d'Souza. Investopedia. Stakeholder Capitalism. Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.investopedia.com/stakeholder-capitalism-4774323

(6)       Sarah Firisen. 2020. Embarking on a Digital Upskilling Journey to Drive Change. (August 2020). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.uipath.com/blog/driving-change-embarking-on-digital-upskilling-journey

(7)       Blue Prism Limited. 2020. Competitor Analysis. (September 2020). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.blueprism.com/competitors/

(8)       Macmillan Education Limited. 2020. Crowdsource. Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/crowdsource

(9)       HBS RS Alumni. (2015). How Facebook used crowdsourced translation to spur international growth. (October 2015). Retrieved 21 September 2020 from https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-digit/submission/facebook-crowd-sourced-translation/

(10)    UiPath SRL. 2020. It’s Time to Automate. Video. (15 July 2020). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.uipath.com/events/uipath-live/its-time-to-automate/broadcast

(11)    Diego Lomanto. 2020. Accelerating Digital Transformation: Introducing the Automation Flywheel. (August, 2020). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://www.uipath.com/blog/introducing-automation-flywheel?hs_preview=dUpgiMIk-33348838336

(12)    Antonio Martini, Viktoria Stray, and Nils Brede Moe. 2019. Technical-, Social- and Process Debt in Large-Scale Agile: An Exploratory Case-Study. (August 2019). Retrieved September 21, 2020 from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-30126-2_14#:~:text=We%20define%20Process%20Debt%20as,is%20going%20on%20%5B15%5D.

? 2020 Miguel Angel Garcia Ramirez. All rights reserved.