Unlocking gains of complete automation

As organisations embrace automation, amid economic uncertainty and a skills shortage, they must ensure their strategy doesn’t result in islands of automation scattered across the business.

The aftershocks of the pandemic and ongoing global skills shortage are set to drive automation investment, according to Forrester. The robotic software and related services market is set to grow by almost 60 per cent in the coming years, leaping from $US13.9 billion in 2021 to $US22.5 billion in 2025.

Automation is a force multiplier that empowers organisations of all sizes to do more with less. It frees people from performing time-consuming repetitive tasks, so they can focus their efforts on higher value tasks that require a human touch. This can help start-ups scale to compete against larger incumbents, while also allowing the big players to remain nimble in the face of growing competition.

One challenge is that a piecemeal approach to embracing automation can create as many problems as it solves. With the boom in automation adoption needs to come a unification of automation services, according to Forrester’s Automation is the New Fabric for Digital Business report.

Tactical, cost-focused automation can hinder an organisation’s broader digital transformation efforts. Islands of disconnected automation lead to a myopic view of what is possible, while overreliance on a single automation technology leads to suboptimal outcomes.

To combat this, a collection of diverse automation technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), low-code tools, native integration platforms (iPaaS), process intelligence, chatbots and machine learning are increasingly being woven into an ‘‘automation fabric’’.

This system for whole-of-business automation integrates multiple adjacent and complementary automation technologies, process architectures, organisational behaviours and partner coinnovation models.

One potential downside of business agility is that it introduces the ability to quickly create silos that divide an organisation. To unlock the true business benefits of automation, it is critical to take a holistic approach and ensure that different automation technologies throughout the business work in unison, says Matthew Calkins – co-founder and CEO of software development service Appian.

‘‘Automation allows software to bear some of the burden when organisations are looking to do more with less,’’ Calkins says, ‘‘but too often they attempt to use a single technology – such as RPA or AI – to do everything.

‘‘By strategically combining different automation technologies, they can cover the entire life cycle of a process, from discovery and process mining to creation in workflow and execution.’’

The Appian Low-Code Platform combines the key capabilities needed to get work done faster – process mining, workflow and automation – into a unified low-code platform, which accelerates the ability to discover, design and automate important processes.

Australian customers include non-bank lender Pepper Money, with the Appian Low-Code Platform increasing productivity by allowing each member of the credit and settlements team to process 53 per cent more applications.

Appian’s platform also supports Pepper Money’s asset finance loan origination solution, SOLANA, which has allowed the company to grow its business volumes by 70 per cent while improving efficiencies.

The future of automation is convergence, Calkins says, illustrated by $US2.5 billion in acquisitions across the sector and the creation of 18 strategic partnerships within the past 12 months.

‘‘That it’s all in the name of convergence,’’ he says. ‘‘The day is coming where you can’t be just an RPA vendor, process mining vendor or workflow vendor, you’ve got to be all of the above.

‘‘In my opinion, the price of admission to this industry, one year from now, is that you have to own all of the components that constitute automation.’’

Along with the need for convergence to avoid the creation of disjointed automation silos, organisations must also avoid dependence on data silos by embracing ‘‘data fabric’’.

‘‘Just like unifying your automation, the idea behind data fabric is to bring together data from across your enterprise, so you can read, write, query and interact with this dispersed data as if it is all part of a local database,’’ Calkins says.

‘‘Data fabric becomes the automatic integration layer which everyone in the business can use without the need for specialist skills, skills which can be so hard to find right now.’’

One of the key mistakes that businesses make when approaching automation is viewing it simply as a way to keep working the same way more efficiently, rather than recognising the opportunity to embrace digital transformation.

‘‘It’s one of the disadvantages of using the word ‘automation’, it can create a mental picture of something which is repetitive and unchanging,’’ Calkins says.

‘‘The point of modern automation is not to merely speed things up, so you can churn out the same thing over and over, but it’s actually to create an assembly line of custom experiences, which becomes part of your competitive advantage.’’