Zetta Ampersand team members Andreas Calabrese and Nick Morris recently provided their thoughts on the Forbes article How Development Automation Can Support Digital Transformation. Below are their thoughts on how organizational leaders can properly prepare to implement automation.
From Nick Morris:
Although a high percentage of large to middle market companies have been implementing digital automation for several years, the pandemic has pushed many to accelerate their adoption of digital technologies significantly. In order to fully take advantage of the utility offered by digital automation, companies should consider looking outward for consultation as to what technology stack would best meet their needs and goals. When properly implemented and through thorough consideration of process design, automated processes improve technical agility and work synergistically with one another and the people who must interact with them at key points.
Even a highly technical IT team can benefit greatly from the utilization of automated solutions. President of Exadel Solutions, Lev Shur, highlights such use cases as automating the testing and project setup processes; allowing IT teams to minimize mistakes and focus on strategic and value-driving tasks. Personally, I see a large opportunity to improve communications amongst teams through the use of automation.
In regards to IT teams, automated Slack messages could be sent out to the team upon conducting a failed or successful test. Automated messages could also be used to alert the team when a technology or processes fails to run properly, enabling them to address problems immediately, rather than waiting till an employee or customer discovers and reports the issue. The success rate and execution time of these crucial processes could also be monitored through a live dashboard, providing the team with a real-time, easy-to-view hub to observe the health and efficiency of an organization's tech stack. The observation of key performance indicators within the IT department and beyond can also allow company administrators to make data-driven decisions and build an understanding of efficiency among different technologies, departments, and processes.
From Andreas Calabrese:
As identified in the article, a large number of middle market organizations were forced to increase the speed of their digital transformation as a result of the global health pandemic. As distributed workforces and the tools to manage them are implemented, many companies were left with processes that no longer aligned with the ideal value chain flow within an organization. Without a refocus on process design and how intelligent automation is implemented, organizational leaders risk allowing their companies to fall behind compared to their competitors.
As identified in the article, adopting a progressive stance as a company on digital transformation is essential to remaining competitive. Unfortunately, the speed at which a company is required to implement new technologies is not up to its leadership. In reality, the availability of new technologies such as intelligent automation set the precedent for how quickly the competitive landscape evolves technologically. And while the article does acknowledge the existence of new tools allowing for a larger base of employees to participate in digital automation, it fails to identify the most challenging aspect; designing and managing new processes.
A major challenge many companies face in implementing automation is the lack of resources available in regards to talent. In the vast majority of cases, there is not enough of an organizational demand for automation to directly create chief automation officer roles within the company. Yet, a lack of investment in process design and intelligent automation directly exposes a company to the risk of losing its competitive advantage. Even tools that allow for no code/low code applications still need to be integrated into centrally planned workflows.
At Zetta Ampersand, we partner directly with medium and enterprise organizations to design and deploy intelligent automation into their workflows. Through providing a direct analysis of the quantifiable impact of automation, we help our partner organizations recapture thousands of human capital hours per year. Having worked with leading companies in industries ranging from financial services to recruiting, we continue to provide our partners with the advantages afforded by digital automation. We at Zetta Ampersand would be happy to provide a cost-free analysis to any middle market organization as to how impactful automation would be to their workflows.
Automation Associate Nicholas Morris can be contacted at Nicholas.M@ZettaAmpersand.com