Hyperautomation is here to stay, and businesses will need to learn how to leverage it fully to remain competitive in our increasingly digital world.
In recent months, the hype around the concept of hyperautomation has been on the rise due to its next-gen, end-to-end mode of automation. While still an abstract concept for some, the time has come for data leaders to begin thinking about how they can successfully leverage this next big tech capability in their organizations to be able to optimize and integrate processes at a larger scale, improve business performance, and maximize productivity. This will become increasingly critical as Gartner predicts global robotic process automation (RPA) software end-user spending – an essential part of hyperautomation – is projected to reach $2.9 billion in 2022, an increase of 19.5% from 2021.
But this is no easy task. Organizations are essentially looking at a mass rollout of new, automated systems across the majority, if not all, of their business. Let’s take a closer look at current hyperautomation benefits and some steps IT leaders can take to achieve successful hyperautomation within their companies.
Benefits of hyperautomation
Before we dive into some of its advantages, it’s important to define what hyperautomation is beyond an industry buzzword. According to Gartner, it can be defined as “a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible.” This can involve the use of multiple technologies, tools, or platforms, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), RPA, and more.
While this is a large task, it can have many benefits if executed effectively, including:
- Reducing manual labor. This likely comes as no surprise to those who are already familiar with the concept of business automation, but having the ability to eliminate disconnected, repetitive, and labor-intensive processes with automated technologies at a large scale enables organizations to dramatically boost productivity by redistributing employees to focus on more valuable and engaging work. This ultimately streamlines operations.
- Digital twins. Hyperautomation also helps companies advance their use of digital twins, which is the virtual representation of systems and assets that can be used to test and optimize performance, increase productivity, and reduce risk. By automating these virtual end-to-end workflows, businesses can more effectively eliminate bottlenecks, establish best practices and improve efficiencies in their real-life operations through these digital models.
- Talent recruitment and retention. Today’s data scientists are eager to work on innovative and impactful data analytics projects. However, in reality, many get stuck doing important but tedious data work around loading, governance, ingesting, and quality. Hyperautomation can be leveraged at a large scale to identify and fix inaccurate data in place of these data scientists, freeing them up to focus on more desirable work.
See also: 10 Hyperautomation Use Cases: Delivering Enhanced Business Productivity
8 tips for achieving effective hyperautomation
Discussing the benefits of hyperautomation is one thing; turning words into action is another. We’ve established that achieving hyperautomation is not easy, so effective preparation is key. Here are some tactical steps businesses can take to begin laying the foundation for an effective hyperautomation strategy:
Strategize. Creating a concrete strategy for your hyperautomation efforts that includes goals and what the rollout will look like for your organization is critical. You need to start somewhere, and in order to bring your colleagues on board and adequately allocate resources, you will need a well-thought-out plan.
Reinforce your team with the right skills. When it comes time to build your team, bring on individuals that have influence across the company and the right skill sets. For example, you’ll need input from both data experts and business analysts for both their technical and strategic knowledge.
Document everything. In order to measure progress and improve along the way, ensure that all business processes, decisions, and milestones are well documented from the start. You never know when you’ll need to go back and reference something over the course of the history of your hyperautomation projects.
Audit. It’s important to have an understanding of the current level of digitization at your company so you can determine which processes still need automating and focus your efforts accordingly. Once you’ve identified which systems are still manual and in need of automation, add those to your plan.
Establish the right tech stack for your needs. Ensure you have the right technology tools in place that enable you to integrate various forms of data in real time. Look for solutions that are flexible and scalable and grant you access to different data sources, like data warehouses.
Begin executing your hyperautomation strategies. It’s time to start collecting data streams and establishing data quality standards along with a coherent data warehouse. As you begin to apply your strategy, establish automated notifications across different parts of your organization so that stakeholders can be alerted of any issues or bottlenecks in the new systems that need to be addressed. At this point, you can also begin applying AI and ML models to train and enhance your hyperautomation operations.
Continuing education. Now that your hyperautomation infrastructure is established continue to train teams in data literacy and analysis so they can fully benefit from the newly automated processes.
Embrace transparency and communication. Encourage information sharing, transparency, and collaboration between departments for continuous hyperautomation success. This will allow teams to be better aligned in order to make more effective decisions and boost business performance.
While the exact future of hyperautomation remains to be seen across many organizations, one thing is certain: it is here to stay, and businesses will need to learn how to leverage it fully to remain competitive in our increasingly digital world. The hyperautomation journey is an intensive one, but by following these few steps, IT teams can help increase their chances of success.
