Hyperautomation is a need or just a buzz word?

Hyperautomation was called out by Gartner in 2019, as one of the upcoming trends on hyper cycle. Since then many has tried to jump on this train but failed to achieve the desire outcome.

Many thoughts it’s just an extension or advancement of robotic process automation, but its not.

So, what is Hyperautomation? Well! It is a framework which is a combination of automation technologies, Artificial intelligence and machine learning which boosts the human’s capabilities to execute task or activities more efficiently and faster with minimal or no errors.

Why do we need Hyperautomation?

Due to rapid change in technology and being into digital era, the business needs faster innovations and development to improve the time to market value.

As per Gartner survey 54% of respondent said that, in order to shorten the business initiative timelines there was 4 to 10 concurrent automation initiatives in past 12 months. And this number and spending on such initiatives will keep on increasing further but the question is, are these initiatives successful?

Mostly these initiatives are funded and managed by various LOB within an organization, and works in silos, so due to lack of end-to-end visibility it leads to longer time to complete interconnected processes.

Most of the organization looked automation either from IT Operation or max business process point of view, but it needs more collaborative efforts to come up with long-term strategic goals from overall organization point of view, so that even if there are any changes then those can easily be incorporated with minimal updates in the framework.

Due to lack of awareness about automation, there is a fear within employees that they might lose their jobs. To tackle this, organization needs to have structured approach to educate their employees about how these initiatives will save their time which can be used towards building better functionalities or work on more complex process.

Robotic Process Automation works wonders if it has structured data as an Input, but it fails where there is an unstructured data (such as physical form or documents or natural language etc). So just by implementing RPA, the process still needs manual intervention and does not meet purpose of reducing time to execute. That’s why its an utmost important to invest into right set of tools and technologies to achieve desired outcome. ?

So to Summarize, at high-level the challenges due to which organizations are not able to achieve maximum benefits out of various automation initiatives are:

1.??????Lack of long-term strategic planning for these automation initiatives

2.??????Siloed approach and no end-to-end visibility across all automations

3.??????Making wrong choices of the technology or the tool

4.??????Missing AI-enabled intelligence to business process.

5.??????Lower adoption by the workers due to fear of losing jobs.

To address these challenges organization should have a well-defined Hyperautomation framework which will bring and provide complete visibility across siloed working automation technologies within an organization.

Following steps can be incorporated to move ahead on this journey.

1.??????Strategic planning for automation goals

• a.??????Defined Business Use Case
• b.??????Prioritize it based on Criticality or Urgency

2.??????Get structured data out of unstructured data

3.??????Wisely choose RPA and other automation’s tools

4.??????Understands the unknowns within business processes

5.??????Orchestrate or consolidate the automation tools into single platform.

And the step by step journey towards Hyperautomation should look like this,

But one must understand this cannot be achieve within 2-3 months, it’s a long-term process and involves various stakeholder including business personals.

• Reference: Gartner The Gartner 2022 Predictions: Hyperautomation
• Reference: www.sciencedirect.com journal and books