The Increasing Importance of IA & Automation

2020: A year that revolutionized and impacted the way we work and live, placing organizations' future into question.  A year where restructuring, transformation, and reinventing the "normal" took center stage, emphasizing the importance of staying ahead of the game through investing in AI and Automation.  

Although the crisis is still in effect, we have learned how to cope and adjust to its repercussions. Organizations are discovering areas of great opportunity and are ready to take on new strategies and leverage the power of Automation and AI, which has become inevitable in today's world. With changes comes transformation, and the need to adapt to the "newer" generations' digital habits has been the driving force behind digitalization, process automation, skills enhancement, hybrid workforces, and more.    

Over the past 12 months, employees have demonstrated that working from home can be done efficiently and that workspaces are not crucial. The impact of the pandemic on service operations showed us that employees are now more effective than ever: 50% of staff are operating at a higher level of productivity than they were a year ago. However, the technical aspect of working from home involving: hardware issues being easily resolved, challenges around engagement, transparency, and isolation, and maintaining a good work/life balance, is an aspect of WFH that is still in progress.   

Within shared services and global business services around the world, automation had already been driving effectiveness and efficiencies. This trend will not only continue to give an abundance of solutions, for example, process discovery, but it will also make it easier than ever to recognize process automation.  

But what are organizations' actual preferences as far as accessing IA capabilities? As seen below, enterprises recognize a platform-based approach: a combination of best-class technologies. Accessing digitalized data throughout the process flow has a massive advantage that all the blockages that previously prevented a seamless service order are now removed and tasks are combined within a flawless and automated application that straddles the whole process.  

Even before automation solutions became more and more used, the problem of a lack of digitalized or structured data has always been an issue. The improvement and solutions to, for example, convert not only text or images but even audio and video into a structured format that can be used to feed automated processing is ever increasing. As seen, "data extraction" is one of the priorities organizations have in terms of where they place importance for their investments.  

Intelligent automation, with an emphasis on "intelligent" rather than "automation" is a game changer for modern organizations. The benefits of IA, such as ensuring skills are maintained according to organizations' needs, driving high quality hiring, providing improved talent management, and improving processing for end-to-end activities (order-to-cash, record-to-report, procure-to-pay), will all be accessible at a touch of a button. Where processes are not cohesive and take up more time than actually needed, produce error, and too expensive to sustain, intelligent automation will be the drive behind ensuring you're are not left behind.  

Aside the operational benefits, automation drives improved experience and engagement for customers, which is the driving force behind a trusted and strong brand. Seeing how the past 12 months alone have tested organizations ability to stay afloat and functioning, modern intelligent automation solutions will make it easier to stay ahead of the game, something that is crucial in today's fast-paced environment.  

Global Market Review: Intelligent Automation in Shared Services