The Automation Advantage: Embrace The Future of Productivity and Improve Speed, Quality, and Customer Experience Through AI Bhaskar Ghosh Instant Download
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture
Preface: Sharing What Works
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1 The Intelligence Imperative
CHAPTER 2 Beware the Barriers
CHAPTER 3 Start with Strategic Intent
CHAPTER 4 Choose Your Spots and Map Your Journey
CHAPTER 5 Plan the Plan
CHAPTER 6 Architect for the Future
CHAPTER 7 Inspire the Transformation
CHAPTER 8 Sustain the Gains
CHAPTER 9 Relevance, Resilience, and Responsibility
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
by Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture
The Covid-19 pandemic made it very clear that technology is a lifeline
for economies, governments, organizations, and people. It not only
helped us solve immediate challenges and stay connected with one
another—it also changed the way we see and understand the world.
Automation, the focus of this insightful and extremely practical book,
is no small part of this change. Like many other technologies, automation
advanced greatly over the past decade with the rise of intelligent systems
—encompassing capabilities like applied artificial intelligence (AI),
industrial and process robotics, and service robots. Now, due to the
impact of the pandemic, the pace of automation innovation is moving
much faster than we anticipated.
There is no better guide to automation than Bhaskar Ghosh,
Accenture’s chief strategy officer and former group chief executive of
Accenture Technology Services. I have worked with him for many years,
and his invaluable vision and counsel have helped countless companies
through their digital transformations. In The Automation Advantage,
Bhaskar and his coauthors, Rajendra Prasad and Gayathri Pallail, draw on
their veteran expertise to explain how automation works—and how it
works best. They cut through myths and misunderstandings to blaze a
clear trail for any business leader looking to develop an automation
strategy, create new value, and realize growth—all with a human-centric
approach.
Because like all technologies, automation should never be considered
in isolation—it’s always in the context of solving human problems. I often
tell other CEOs that if someone comes to them and says, “I have an
automation project” or “I have a blockchain initiative,” they should say,
“No.” They shouldn’t even ask what it is, because no initiative should ever
start with technology. Ultimately, technology enables; it’s about
empowering people.
Currently, we estimate that we are at only 15 to 20 percent of what
could be automated. We’re going to see that percentage rapidly increase,
as automation continues to spread from manual processes, such as
building cars in a factory, to enhancing mental processes, such as giving a
consumer a consistently better customer experience. Automation is
helping companies actively grow their businesses through speed, safety,
quality, cost-efficiency, and resilience.
Seizing this opportunity, companies are investing in this technology
and creating jobs. But are people ready and able to fill them? Are young
people leaving high school with basic technology skills and digital literacy?
The answer in many cases is no. Before the pandemic, we were not ready
to address the growing global reskilling need that automation is bringing.
Unfortunately, we still are not prepared. As companies, we have a huge
responsibility to reskill, and it is imperative that we bring together
government, educational institutions, and not-for-profits with equal speed
to partner on addressing this need.
As we enter the postpandemic era, we are seeing a world awakened
to an incredible opportunity to reimagine and rebuild responsibly and
sustainably. Instead of seeing automation as a technology that competes
with people for jobs, it can and should be considered a way to contribute
to our shared success. By eliminating mundane and repetitive tasks,
automation allows us to focus human attention where it’s most needed—
on creativity, empathy, and critical thinking. The Automation Advantage
helps us understand not only how automation can create value for a
business but also how its unique combination of technology and human
ingenuity can play a part in transforming the global economy into one that
works for the benefit of all.
PREFACE
Sharing What Works
The year is 2019, and the place is a beautifully furnished meeting
room in a modern office tower—the headquarters of a global company.
We’ve come to town to meet with a management team considering a
complex operational business issue, which we think presents a great
opportunity for intelligent automation. We’re confident we can make a
case for this with the information we’ve assembled, which anticipates the
questions these executives will probably have.
First, they’ll likely ask: “What is intelligent automation?”
Answer: It’s the new era of automation in which machines are used
to perform tasks formerly reserved for humans—tasks that involve
analyzing data, making decisions, and learning from what follows once
decisions are implemented.
Second, they’ll ask: “Why should we invest in automation like this—
will it really make us a better company?”
Answer: Your competitive edge will still depend, more than ever, on
your people’s talents, but you’ll be able to leverage and augment those
talents to an unprecedented level.
Third: “Are other companies in our industry already moving in this
direction—and is it paying off?”
Answer: Yes. (We’ve done our research.)
Finally, they’ll ask, “Given our other priorities, why is now the right
time to invest?”
But as the meeting begins, the surprise is on us. These aren’t the
questions the executives ask.
As we share our thoughts on known pain points in their type of
business and how automation could help, the executives are already
nodding and pushing us along. This is a group already convinced that the
opportunities are exceptional. It turns out there have been pockets of
experimentation going on in their organization, and these limited, one-off
solutions have been yielding seriously good results. So this top team
wants to take things to the next level.
They’re past the why questions and well into the how. As they aim to
approach the automation opportunity at scale, they want to know where
to start. How to identify top business cases and how to determine the
priority order in which to address them. How to assess their legacy
systems and data issues that might delay them. They also wonder how
they can be sure their people—both the technology staff and the business
users of the new tools—will value the change and want to be part of it.
It turned out to be the best boardroom conversation we’d had all
year, as we found ourselves talking excitedly about the very issues
consuming us personally at that moment. We’d been working with a
variety of leading companies that had reached the same “scaling” point in
their intelligent automation journeys, and we had been able to identify
important patterns, the common pitfalls, and the clever solutions that cut
across their companies.
As a technology consulting team with a practice area to lead, we had
been pulling together these lessons and trying to distill them into practical
guidance on designing and implementing successful automation projects.
Now, the observations were jelling into insights that we knew could
genuinely accelerate an organization’s progress.
And guess what: the following month, we had a very similar
conversation with another company’s management team, also jumping
ahead to the “how” questions—and then a great workshop with yet
another right after that. We found ourselves repeating key messages and
refining them, figuring out how best to organize and articulate the
principles we were developing in practice. Eventually, we felt like we had
covered all the major bases and developed a point of view on each of
them, whether in a white paper, blog post, speech, methodology module,
or presentation deck—however, we felt we should really pull them
together into one coherent package. One of us named the challenge at
that point: “That would require a whole book.” And here we are.
The book you hold in your hand is designed to answer that smart set
of burning questions we continue to be asked by managers and leaders
who want to proceed quickly and confidently in automation initiatives. But
if we’re setting the whole context for how this book came about, we also
have to mention that other big source of pressure that hit organizations
all around the world in 2020—much as we might all want to forget it. We
were well into the process of writing the book when Covid-19 hit, and we,
our company, and all our clients found ourselves struggling to protect our
people, help our customers, and remain productive amid a devastating
pandemic.
We know and work with many academics, management gurus, and
analysts focused on the realm of intelligent automation, and sometimes
we envy their situations. For some of them, a lockdown on global travel
and orders to work from home made this a year when they suddenly had
more capacity to reflect and write. For us, it was a crazy time of demand
for client solutions, as automation became more important than ever. This
was an urgent realization by many firms.
As early as April 2020, Information Age reported that HFS Research
surveyed 631 major enterprises about how they anticipated the pandemic
would affect their strategies and operations. One of its questions asked:
“How do you expect Covid-19 to impact your spending” in 10 major areas
of technology investment. Fully 55 percent of respondents knew already
that their spending on automation would increase, making this the second
most reported increase after cybersecurity—both obvious concerns as so
much mission-critical work moved abruptly to online platforms.1
For us, the challenges came simultaneously on many fronts—in our
client projects, every one of which is unique, and also within our own
company. Accenture itself moved instantly to new modes of staying
productive—away from the consulting industry norm by which
professionals spend the bulk of their time on-site at client locations and
generate much of their value through in-person working sessions. The
companies we had already been helping with automation seemed most
eager to double down on that work. For companies seeking
hyperautomation before (where discrete automated tasks roll up into
seamlessly automated processes, and automated analysis identifies for
itself new opportunities to take automation into new realms), the
pandemic crisis pushed those ambitions further.
Having a book to complete in the midst of all this was not what we
had anticipated when we signed the contract with our publisher. Yet there
was a silver lining, too. We think the fact that we were so deeply in the
mode of capturing and explaining principles from real-world engagements
made it easier for us to make sense of this new, very dynamic, and
frankly unnerving situation.
In many ways, this book represents the synthesis of long experience.
The real veteran among us is Bhaskar Ghosh, who has spent a career as
an automation advocate and been responsible for many groundbreaking
solutions. He and “RP,” as all of Rajendra Prasad’s friends and colleagues
call him, have worked together on many of these, ranging from small
projects to large transformations. Since then, often with Gayathri Pallail
leading the charge, we have helped many clients apply intelligent
automation to remove pain points in risk management, sales strategy,
customer service, and more.
As Accenture’s work in this area increased, we also found ways to
make our own company’s internal processes more effective using
automation solutions like workflow systems. The human factor is also
critical. We’ve approached our internal automation opportunities with
creativity, empathy, and innovation in the spirit of keeping the human
advantage front and center for organizations we work with. In any
situation where people must solve a complex problem, we’re convinced
they can do it better if augmented by robust automation.
Along the way, we’ve seen our colleagues make many technical and
managerial breakthroughs. In fact, as we began work on this book, the
news came that Accenture had just been granted its 60th patent related
to intelligent automation. To us, this is a real point of pride. We noted
already that we stay close to the discoveries being made by leading
researchers in universities, startups, and research and development labs.
The work they do is invaluable to us. But meanwhile, our great privilege is
that we are able to innovate in the setting of a global professional
services company where we work with the world’s largest and most
sophisticated companies. Their managers and leaders are inspirational.
They are eager to get real innovation done. The problems they need to
solve matter to their success and to the world.
Working where we do also means that we benefit from a culture that
prizes discovery—and the documentation and dissemination of it to the
world. This is evident from the constant stream of forward-looking
research that Accenture publishes in every form imaginable—from
podcasts to survey reports to high-level strategy books. In a company
that invests heavily in staying at the cutting edge, it is a cultural value
that we should have research-backed perspectives to offer our clients and
other stakeholders.
But while we earn our patents for inventions that are specialized and
technology focused, it’s critical that our client-serving teams can connect
those with the problems of clients, even when the client involved is
dealing with a highly strategic issue and talking in very big-picture terms.
To our people, it may be clear that the patented tool or technique directly
contributes to the client solution, but it isn’t always obvious to others. A
book like this can equip more people in the business world with the story
line that explains why this fast-evolving intelligent automation technology
is so important to achieve business objectives, and what it takes to put it
in place, at scale.
To be clear, this is not a strategy book—it’s an execution book. Our
self-assigned mission was to produce a truly practical guide. So yes, we
devote an opening chapter to offering some historical context on
automation and making the case for why it is now the time to invest in
cognitive technologies—but we then move quickly into content relevant to
organizations who already sense there is a big opportunity and want to
translate that enthusiasm into action.
We identify the most common barriers to acting on that sense in
Chapter 2, as a way of setting up the value of what follows; all of it is
geared toward overcoming these obstacles. In Chapter 3, we emphasize
the need to be clear on strategic intent because a shared commitment to
the business priorities is the necessary North Star to guide every aspect of
planning and implementation. This strategic imperative segues directly
into Chapter 4, which focuses on how to choose wisely from the
seemingly endless opportunities most organizations face to automate
some activity or another. Hint: it has as much to do with overall capability
building and intelligent automation maturity as with the potential bottom-
line impact of individual solutions.
Throughout, we place emphasis on what it takes to derive the
highest value from investments, and we address very ground-level
problems and considerations. In Chapter 5, we explain how to map out an
implementation plan, put governance in place, and keep track of progress.
In Chapter 6, we get into technology discussions on how to architect a
future-proof automation—at a level that is understandable to not just the
technology team, but also other functional executives and general
managers. In Chapter 7, we discuss the “soft stuff” that all experienced
leaders know is really the hard stuff: change management, reskilling,
organizational culture, and other elements of people management. At a
high level, we underscore the takeaway advice at the end of each chapter,
but we urge you to delve deep into the stories that bring the advice to life
and the research findings that back up its validity. Our objective in the
text has been to write to that all-important midlevel that helps the most
strategic thinkers in organizations understand the art of the possible and
helps the most focused tool builders and technologists make the
connections between their work and the overall strength and agility of the
enterprise.
As you’ll see, the metaphor and concept of a road map turns out to
be very important to that overall success. It gets introduced early and
reiterated often. Chapter 8 emphasizes that this is not a journey that has
an end; there is always effort required to sustain and build on the gains—
and without that effort, there’s a real risk of backsliding. Finally, Chapter 9
gives a glimpse of where the journey may take organizations in the
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