Time marches on and experience grows

As a person with responsibility for intelligent automation, you can imagine how pleased I am to see the recent Everest Group’s positioning of Capgemini as a leader in their PEAK Matrix^TM for Intelligent Automation in Business Processes Solution Providers 2020. As automation technology matures and companies rightly expect business operations solutions to be built on automation, the marketplace is becoming considerably more competitive. For that reason, it is rewarding to see that the hard work, expertise, technical partnerships, and client successes crafted by our teams have earned recognition. The report acknowledges our “vision to create value for [our] clients, by reimagining business operations using an augmented workforce” and notes the role that the Capgemini Intelligent Automation Platform plays in the provision of “end-to-end automation deployment.”

But, unabashed back-patting aside, one of the standout points raised by the Everest report was the importance of the platform to the strength of an intelligently automated business operations solution (or IT infrastructure or applications solution for that matter).

Research confirms that many businesses struggle to make that leap from successful automation piloting to widespread, cost-effective deployment at scale. It is the platform that enables this leap. Using an intelligent automation platform, in effect, means that the groundwork is done.

The platform underpins the IT, applications, or business process solution with a rich hub of configurable, pre-built, intelligent automation solutions, accelerators, use cases, and business insightful solutions – combining ITPA, RPA, and AI with deep corporate knowledge and continuous learning – to deliver powerful economies of scale in every deployment. Without it, even the most ambitious and potentially productive of automation projects is destined to under-deliver on value if it cannot replicate success across the relevant parts of the business.

Firstly, for me, a key consideration in achieving successful automation is “intelligent orchestration.”

As “automation solutions” become merely “solutions,” the differentiation between the good and the great will be the inclusion of strong and automated governance, analytics, monitoring, predictability, and interpretation. Centralized and automated orchestration and real-time transparency will eliminate risk and optimize the total cost of ownership across the platform’s toolsets. Intelligent orchestration can execute end-to-end scenarios, driven by data and data-driven learning, ensuring touchless optimal flow. Consequently, this will enable businesses to get to the return-on-investment milestone early and accelerate their digital transformation with confidence.

Secondly, fundamental to successful orchestration is the “constant and automated analysis of data.”

When done well, this will expose the real “intelligence” of the “intelligent automation” of infrastructure, applications, and business operations that embody a complete IT system. As my colleague Marek Sowa notes in his blog, A short guide to demystifying intelligent automation (and I paraphrase here), intelligent automation “is both a reality and a necessity.”

As time marches on and experience grows, good orchestration presents a comprehensive view of the IT estate from server to invoice, data-center to warehouse and the list of quick wins enabled by orchestrated automation grows faster than ever before, revealing what to automate today that may not have been automatable before.

Finally – and very possibly contrary to many of the things that I have said – there is a need to respond rapidly and not necessarily strategically to the current extraordinary global crisis; businesses can’t always afford to wait for the comprehensive benefits of large-scale and long-term automation.

Once more, I will paraphrase another colleague, Lee Beardmore who, in his blog Digital transformation – long-term strategy vs. short-term need notes that while “most businesses may want a big-picture business model that embraces every aspect of their operations, they don’t always have the luxury of time in which to see that model realized.” And in the COVID-19 world, this is one such time when smaller, incremental, and rapid changes may be required.

IT leaders and CIOs know that intelligent automation offers a route to the agility required to respond to sharp, tactical business requirements but they may be unsure of how to take advantage of AI-based approaches such as machine learning, deep learning, and swarm intelligence. They may also be rightly concerned by long and costly development cycles.

An intelligent automation platform is rapidly deployable and offers the potential to meet urgent demands.

Not only that, but the right platform could also underpin future, more measured, and strategic projects when (and I have my fingers crossed here) something approaching normality returns.

To download your own copy of the Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix^TM for Intelligent Automation in Business Processes Solution Providers 2020, click here. Find out more about the Capgemini Intelligent Automation Platform here.