Process on the Fly
Strategy tends to be eaten for breakfast, by culture – but also by a lack of operational execution.
Organizational aspirations are simply “blah blah blah” without any ability to turn insight into action, quickly respond to events, overcome business silos, or go with whatever flow the corporate purpose supposes. And all that goodness must be delivered against a scarcity of both human resources and natural resources, plus the drastic need to reduce travel and energy consumption. This is where Process on the Fly comes to the fore and shines ever brighter. Breakthroughs within intelligent automation and a taste of touchless execution have firmly placed this container center stage. Quit talking and start doing.
In many ways, a process is just another ‘thing’. When equipped with ‘sensors’, this thing provides a continuous flow of data points about its status and whereabouts, not unlike the concept of a Digital Twin in the Intelligent Industry domain.
With the emergence of “Internet of Twins”, a full spectrum of possibilities opens up to not only better understand processes, but also to experiment risk-free with alternative scenarios and options, and predict – or even prescribe – how processes will run and be managed in the future.
Then, software robots come to the aid as dependable, digital companions, automating the interaction between humans and their technology-enabled processes. This Robotic Process Automation gives us the time and freedom to think, plan and focus – while the more mundane, repeatable activities are done for us, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. Without compromise. Automation also helps to relieve the pressure on organizations that always need to deliver more, but with fewer human resources and fixed assets, and a lighter carbon footprint.
Similar technologies act as a certified Silo Buster, bridging the gaps between corporate – or intercorporate – processes and systems, without intruding upon them. It’s one of the most straightforward, resource-saving ways to bring innovation to organizations: through up-cycling what is already there, rather than buying or building solutions from scratch. Add next-generation application microservices to the mix and any process is just an API call away. And while we are on the topic of ‘minimization’: redesigning legacy processes into micro-processes – each of them well described with input data, transaction data and output data – brings simplicity, and thus less complexity, less rules, and less mistakes.
Finally, the powerful cognitive capabilities of AI increasingly enter the arena of process automation and management. These capabilities challenge what we used to consider as a given, replacing inflexible, human-dependent processes with powerful reasoning and decisioning systems. These systems adjust to whatever situation occurs, anticipating the next best actions and resources required in real time. And while learning from what works, they increasingly become hands-, care- and asset-free, bringing organizations – and their people – on the road towards a no-touch, net-zero, frictionless enterprise.
Pretty fly, no?
Manuel Sevilla
Expert in Residence