Hyperautomation is a topic that I get the occasional question about as I talk to people. The question really break down into two types:
First: "Hyperautomation, that's that RPA stuff, right?"
Second: "I don't see how business process automation and hyperautomation apply to the I&O space."
What is (and isn't) Hyperautomation?
If you're going to ask me who the leading vendors of hyperautomation solutions are, I'm afraid you're going to have to put up with me explaining this:
Hyperautomation is an approach, a framework, not a product. It represents the maturation of the contribution that automation can make to your business by increasing the scope and the business impact of automation. While individual tasks can be automated, processes, cross-domain orchestration, and ultimately, business model invention (and re-invention) are what hyperautomation delivers.
What hyperautomation isn't is a tool or even a set of tools. Tools are enablers, but the overarching message is that your hyperautomation isn't about tools, it's about value.
Ok, I think I get that, but aren't there products that deliver this?
Sure, there are lots of vendors that contribute to the delivery of hyperautomation value. RPA, Process Mining, Intelligent Document Processing, Service Orchestration, and the analytics and decision support tools. But because it's a framework, and one that is very responsive to the needs of your organization, there are very few vendors offering a product to do this holistically. The key is in the organizational needs: What is important today and can be delivered by the technology stack you have implemented may not be suitable for tomorrow. That's where the vendor offerings are likely to fall short — they can't deliver the business change necessary to take full advantage of the investments.
What about the I&O Leader?
There's two things that I&O leaders and their organizations should be thinking about when it comes to hyperautomation.
- How do we contribute to the overall success of the initiative?
- How do we take advantage of the capabilities for the I&O tasks that we are responsible for?
The first of these is being willing to collaborate on exposing more services and workflows that have been traditionally the realm of the I&O organization to tools and processes outside of I&O. As an example: being able to expose workload automation or service orchestration workflows to broader business processes. As an example, can I use an RPA bot to interact with a legacy system that is at the core of a business activity? Does this remove the need for either integration or human ticket handling?
The second is very much the opportunity I&O leaders have in front of them to take the success that the organization is demonstrating and turn that into I&O service improvement. That same RPA bot that is used to interact with one system can be expanded to support multiple, once there is enough success and trust built. Can we take the same idea and apply it to the service desk? For both internal and external users? If that comes to fruition, what do I do with the resources that I free up? Does my service quality go up? Does the cost of delivering services go down? Am I seen as a partner and collaborator, rather than a service delivery organization?
Wrapping up
Hyperautomation is the next opportunity for I&O to both make big changes in how they participate in the broader business activities of their organization, and to make changes in the way the I&O organization works.
This article originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.
