Intelligent Automation for NEWS & Information Services : A Point of View

The Global Content & Information market segment is estimated to be approximately $ 13 Billion and there exists a huge gap in reimagining and streamlining the workflows especially in sectors catering services to Legal, Tax, Compliance, News & Media customers, given the Covid19 and remote work from anywhere scenarios.

In this blog, we will briefly look at the Intelligent & Cognitive Automation journey a Global Enterprise serving its customers with powerful content should traverse through. The blend of business acumen, foundational skills and domain expertise powered with emerging AI technologies coupled with ML, NLP, Information Search, Intelligent Publishing to maximize the impact and deliver business results with a new pair of lenses in this post Covid19 world.

We will briefly touch upon in this blog the importance and role of various “Elements of Success” organizations to set up, program manage and/or transition global centers capable of driving product ownership and innovation, strategic vendor partnerships and transfer pricing, while doing so create a strong horizontal of horizontals to meet and exceed the needs operating in a Shared Services mode helping and supporting the HQ.

Gartner describes effective CoEs as “Concentrating Existing Expertise and Resources in a Discipline or Capability to Attain and Sustain World-Class Performance and Value.” In doing so, the captain of the COE has a vital role to play in defining clear design principles, creating a strong team, building a playbook powered with frameworks and reusable components, dials and leavers for 360 degree transparency, strong governance with a focus on business continuity Change management, implementation, support, and disaster recovery followed with continuous innovation, business agility and scalability.

The journey begins by defining Business Case, ROA (Return on Assets), ROCE (Return on Capital Employed), ROI (Return on Investments) and clearly defining the benefits of in-house Global Center of Excellence and Citizen Led Automation from a cost stand point viz-a-viz engaging the third party service providers. Not to forget the End to End ownership an inhouse COE bring in with substantial value addition.

 The Captain who leads the Automation COE should initiate the journey with a focus on strategy and governance that aims to optimize the way of working by defining the guidelines, rules and framework for the business and technology functions. Charting out a Center of Excellence should carry the pillars of Governance, Development, Operations, and Support followed with multiple chapters owned by respective functional and technical leaders viz… Program Chapter, Innovation Chapter, Technology Chapter, Delivery Excellence Chapter and very importantly chapter for Change Management.

STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT

After getting the house in order and having a strong cadence ensuring the COE is operating as a well-oiled engine the captain now should focus on raising the bar and eye at scalability. Doing so its critical and important to manage your stakeholders well, while there are promoters and friends you encounter in your journey there will be some opponents and antagonists too, its very human and the art is in managing them. In my personal experience managing difficult stakeholders should not be to fight them but to win them over and gather support in the larger interest of the organization. Here below are some principles that come handy…

 1.     Accept their authority, don’t fight them. Use principles of building consensus with them using Data, build credibility with actions. Ensure you map your stakeholders and use both art and science to influence and eye a Win-Win scenario.

 2.     It’s understandable that you may not have reverence towards them, but don’t demonstrate negative emotions. Strict No-No for grapevine discussions.

3.      Understand the root cause of their negativity and try overcoming with a dialogue. There are reasons for such undercurrents, can be personal biases or simply because they don’t seem to understand the importance of the initiative or their direct involvement.

4.      The best option is to setup a one to one and solicit feedback, question them how we can work together. More open questions over a coffee will surely help. You may not get an honest answer upfront, don’t get defensive and listen to their intents. Build bridges and break the walls.

5.      Be honest and polite, set expectations on what is expected from them in the project. More importantly ensure you make them important. Use authority and external intervention if required as a last step for them to fall in line for the larger benefit and interest of the organization and initiative.

In personal experience, if you can establish Credibility, Trust and show them Results, you have won half the battle, rest you need to invest time to nurture and build relationship. Influence them to say “YES”, it takes time … but its “POSSIBLE”. Use the principle of scarcity and if your other promoters who have seen benefits start sharing their stories you will see more commitment, no one wishes to miss the bus ??

OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION, BUSINESS CASE PRIORATIZATION and TRANSFORMATION

According to McKinsey’s Global Institute, it is possible to partially or fully automate 56% of tax planning and financial evaluation processes, as well as 20% of risk management workflow.

According to a survey commissioned by Baker McKenzie, and published in the article Asia Pacific Mega-Trends and Legal Solutions, 66% of the law executives in the region acknowledge the need for technological innovation, while 84% expect the legal industry to be faced with major technological disruption over the next two years.

The Art of selection of a use case should be scientific and driven by strong business case / data. As a rule of thumb seven parameters need to be kept in mind in selecting the process as in the figure below.

Intelligent Automation helps dissect some common problems in legal sector, it reduces business risk, and improves legal productivity. Few popular ones being employed effectively today are in the process areas like Billing, Patent, Operations, Workflow Management, Conflict of Interest, E Discovery, Client Risk Management, Fee Overrun Reductions, Automated Drafting using NLP, Vetting of Contracts, Identifying Tortious Liability, Chatbots to name a few.

Intelligent Automation promises efficiency and cost benefits in the both Direct and Indirect Tax compliance and reporting. Some use cases are in this area are Data extraction/gathering, running reports, calculating adjustments, Workflow management, Populating work papers and uploading into software, Transaction taxes, Transfer Pricing/International, Income tax compliance, Tax accounting, Data management to name a few.

Intelligent Automation in the News and Media sector is catching up especially in areas like Device Activation, Content Creation, Content Discovery, Meta Data Updates, Service Requests, Customer Management, Content Grouping and Distribution, Automated Content Creation, Intelligent Editing, Real time story creation and publication, Content verification and Proof reading, Competitor tracking, Content Sorting, Social media monitoring and boasting content that can go viral, TRP management etc…

While there is no dearth of use cases, you may in consensus with your stakeholders and sponsor define the parameters and draw the Priority Percentage, such Priority percentage varies from sponsor to sponsor and the priority of the function. What is important for the captain who owns the COE is to establish a right balance on prioritizing the business case, while doing so ensure the equation is not disturbed with any key stakeholder, managing a reluctant stakeholder is more easy as compared to those stakeholders who wish to participate in the program, if they are not handled right, nothing stops them to engage a third party and kick off the automation initiative on their own, this will introduce internal competition and jeopardize the program. The Captain needs to be critical and focus on a collective bargain strategy to ensure the problem of plenty is addressed right. The creation of the Change Control Board and Global program office needs to keep a tab on such offshoots.

The Role of the Captain does not end after going live of the process unlike the third-party vendor or service provider, it’s a continuous one. This needs the right temperament and long-term vision, furthermore there should be a focus to build a strong second line leadership and ensure program scalability without hampering the velocity of implementation. More so, its essential to define a right Support and Change Management function. The Level-0 Support includes Self Help, Wiki, FAQ, which can be owned by the BOT Owner while the L1 Service Desk carries a role towards Infra, Network, VDIs, Application, Security and other critical incidents with clearly called out SLAs that quantify the Queue Management. L3 should eye at Problem Management and Enhancement while the L4 should be an escalation to the Product vendor or trigger a Change Request. Service assurance playbook should be well documented with procedures and such SOPs focus on Change Management, Service Transition, Configuration and Release Management.

CENTER OF EXCELLENCE JOURNEY …. FROM PILOT PHASE to TRANSFORMATION

When it comes to COEs, there does not appear to be a standard model, and although in my personal preference, the reality is that different models can be effective. Such structures can be Centralized, Distributed, Federated, Hub and Spoke model etc… Nonetheless, the journey from Pilot Phase to a Transformational phase is depicted in the figure below considering various players including the model, workforce, delivery, governance and KM followed with best practices and case studies.

What makes you successful as a captain is the ability to deliver, the execution excellence and commitment to deadlines, business knowhow, ability to talk the business language with technology expertise in the backdrop a two in a box skill (Business + Technology) will help you outperform.

In my personal experience, Delivering results is accomplished by focusing on six key areas viz... Planning, Organization, Problem-Solving, Communication, Ownership, and Innovation.

After a few successful sprints 12 to 15 months of the COE backed with few case studies and success stories, in several global business units, by now few automation champions throughout the organization are advocates and evangelists with your C-Sat and NPS score trending green. You have defined standard and steady pipeline and a refined framework to churn out automated solutions powered with AI elements and home-grown tools, accelerators and connectors to strengthen the features of the standard products at a consistent quality and speed. You also have a complete toolkit with controls, reporting tools and carry an A+ score from the enterprise audit results, all recommended corrective and preventive actions are in place. Its time to fly high… its time to take the next step and accelerate the scalability and grow into a federated structure with stronger centralized governance and setup several decentralized satellite mini COEs for end to end Opportunity Identification - Delivery Lifecycle.

A strong Knowledge Management function, thought leaders who can visualize the big picture and a team of evangelists, a well-defined self-paced training program can make Automation the DNA of the organization for operational efficiency at scale resulting not only in cost optimization but also overcoming risk and improved customer experience. Such success stories promoted in the right forums set the stage to received Global Analyst recognitions and accolades and stand strong as a case study for the peer group companies to follow.

In Spirit and Letter, the vision is to lead and transform the creation and scaling up the operation of an Intelligent automation COE delivering insight that powers decision making and strategic planning, from opportunity identification across all of the enterprise functions through the implementation/support of Intelligent automation solutions via various automation techniques not limited to RPA but leverage emerging technologies like NLP, ML, AI etc… meet and exceed the expectations, ensuring business continuity co-owning overall business case with various global functions.

While this blog post focuses and revolves around the formation and successfully running the Center of Excellence, the next set of episodes in this series will focus on each segment and how Automation powered with AI technologies can assist Information rich business units like LEGAL, TAX, COMPLIANCE, NEWS & MEDIA etc… watch out for this space and feel free to connect with me at [email protected]