Re:Boost your business with Intelligent Automation Chapter 1: The intelligent automation balloon!

Automation is not a simple journey. It requires a change in mindset, and like any change there will be opposition and friction. In this series of three blogs, Jerome Thomas and Jaap Van Arragon present a step-by-step guide that provides you with examples and a proven approach to ensure your journey to effective and scalable automation is a successful one. Both Jerome and Jaap are seasoned automation experts and, in the course of these three blogs, will give you the key to intelligent automation, enabling you to create the maximum possible value.

If you haven’t seen it, the 2016 movie Hidden Figures has, as its backdrop, the USA’s space race with the Soviets to send the first man to the moon. During the movie, one woman’s team of analysts from NASA decides to adopt the newly launched IBM 32XX computer to augment their crucial calculation capabilities to find the right parameters needed to make the mission a success.

Now, translate this into what the latest intelligent automation capabilities brings to our day-to-day business – and we see that automation brings the same kind of disruption.?

Adopting intelligent automation is a huge opportunity to augment your delivery, to remove low value and tedious manual tasks, and to improve the level of services delivered to your customers while improving the financial parameters. But, in business, automation could be technology focused, process orientated, or value driven. As a result, a non-specialist is exposed to too many definitions to digest – making them believe automation projects are complex and hard to initiate. ?That can lead to uncertainty around where they should concentrate their deployment efforts. In this blog, we will an IT operations perspective as the field of many automation opportunities, but you should note that the principles and approach presented here can just as easily be applied to automate business operations.

To simplify, let’s consider the image of a hot-air balloon!

We’ll call it the intelligent automation balloon: a perfect image to elevate your business to the next level. The balloon gives you a clearer, simpler picture of what it can do for you – reducing the potential complexity around this topic and enabling a shared understanding of intelligent automation’s value within your organization.

For us, it is only if you can extract a value greater than effort deployed across your delivery brackets (applications management and/or development, infrastructure management) that your automation initiatives can generate value in terms of savings, quality, compliance, and growth, and truly take off!?

If you are aiming for maximum value through these efforts, you need a strong automation operating model

Now we have seen that automation applies to all your delivery brackets, let’s look at how value can be created through the Automation Operating Model (AOM). Looking at intelligent automation as a balloon, the AOM is the cabin and engine of the balloon:?

Engine: Intelligent automation technologies and platform bring in solutions to automate the variety of activities that exist across delivery towers. each activity relies on key technology enablers that are combined to deliver maximum value. From a technology standpoint, intelligent automation is defined as a combination of rule-based, artificial intelligence, and flexibility-driven technologies.?

• Rule-based technologies automate high volume, repeatable tasks and mimic human actions including both IT Process Automation (ITPA) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
• Artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses a range of technologies that learn over time as they are exposed to more data. The AI technologies are speech recognition, natural language generation (NLG), context-aware computing, biometrics, image and video analysis, machine and deep learning, swarm intelligence, and chatbots or voice bots.
• Flexibility driven technologies increases the predictability and agility in an already complex architectural landscape. It does this by leveraging cloud services, API-, and microservice-based development, and leveraging newly available big data to predict and prevent disruptions in your services.

Cabin: Analysis capabilities enable opportunities to be identified through various proven workshops and assessments. This analysis will enhance existing processes and activities, in addition to augmenting team members to their respective delivery activities. Analyzing existing processes will help identify new automation opportunities, leading to augmented delivery and augmented team members. Analytical capabilities rely on enablers helping to identify the most valuable automation opportunities such as automation SMEs and workshop techniques to unleash the potential of automation across three key areas: ticketing, housekeeping, and development.

Ticketing

• Ticketing workshops enable you to identify all the possible automations you could implement either by applying pre-existing bots or developing new ones.
• It follows a structured and proven approach, starting from service management dump analysis to identifying any relevant opportunities for automation. ?
• It leverages automation assets such from companies like UiPath, Automation Anywhere or, indeed, our own Capgemini Intelligent Automation Platform (CIAP).?

Housekeeping

• Any activity performed by people that comprises of repetitive, tedious, time-consuming, and low-value activities.
• There is a lot of untapped automation within these activities, which will bring a combination of monetary, quality, compliancy, and team benefits.
• Identifying opportunities for intelligent automation is straightforward when leveraging a proven user journey workshop approach. ?
• You could identify many intelligent automation opportunities in a 2 hour workshop and plan to develop them in addition to derive almost immediate benefits.

Development

• The different areas where an (Agile) development team is active can be rapidly assessed with a DevOps Technology Assessment. Whether it is about continuously integrating your codebase or continuously testing your applications, this assessment gives you an overview of the areas where you are succeeding and where you are lagging. It immediately shows you the focus areas and the potential benefits of optimizing your delivery.?

And the bottom line?

All these capabilities lead to real-life intelligent automation implementations, augmenting your business operations. Demonstrable examples include:

• Augmented delivery to enhance process (i.e. SAP end-to-end ticket automation)
• Augmented team members to drive added value (i.e. Automated phone call or message alerting system frees people to innovate)
• Augmented delivery and augmented team members enhance process and empowers people (i.e. Development team can continuously deploy source code to production / Automation optimization through process standardization)

To read part two of this three-part blog, click here