Ed Macosky, Chief Innovation Officer, Boomi, shares how the next generation of automation is here and how hyperautomation can help tech leaders increase productivity and innovation.
Automation is a game changer that has streamlined business processes and created enormous efficiencies amongst repetitive, routine tasks. It accelerates the delivery of IT infrastructure and applications, improves productivity, and speeds time to market. However, automation has its limits; it requires certain customizations in the existing IT infrastructure and can sometimes even impede a business’ progress by creating tedious and manual work for IT teams. As a result, forward-thinking IT executives are now exploring the practice of hyperautomation and how it can be used to create more intelligent, agile automation for non-routine tasks.Â
The components of hyperautomation go beyond traditional workflow automation to include artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), structured process orchestration, automation through business rules, event-driven automation, the core components of integration platform as a service (iPaaS), robotic process automation (RPA), and more.
See More: How to Level Up Your IT Service Desk With Automation
In 2021, Gartner found that more than 50%Opens a new window of CEOs and 69% of boards of directors are demanding accelerated growth and operational excellence. Hyperautomation provides a critical path toward achieving both. The same survey found that 80% of organizations consistently self-report increased or continued investment in hyperautomation initiatives.Â
Traditional Automation vs. Hyperautomation
Traditional automation uses “If/Then†triggers to launch an event – If this happens, then execute this command. Sure, If/Then triggers can streamline tasks, but as static commands, they can also break when software is updated. Any IT professional who has had to oversee change management knows what I’m talking about. They must update everything from API calls to tagging – often painstakingly by hand. These triggers create technical debt that IT teams must constantly address, essentially turning automated processes into manual tasks. These manual tasks can result in unexpected downtime that costs the organization time and money.Â
Static, brittle automations cannot intelligently orchestrate complex workflows that bridge business systems, teams, and companies. They can’t evolve to address dynamic processes or maintain connectivity when APIs managed by third parties are updated. Moreover, traditional automation cannot mimic human actions, as it executes predefined instructions. Often, users must have programming skills to automate workflows and processes through traditional means. The overall process of introducing automation to the workplace can take months to design, test, and implement. The process can seem never-ending.Â
In contrast, hyperautomation enables an agile business model where people, software, and the underlying infrastructure are constantly changing to meet dynamic customer, market, and competitor demands. By combining automation efforts and connecting solutions, businesses can achieve straight-through end-to-end processing that delivers benefits for them, their stakeholders, and their customers.Â
A Deeper Look at Hyperautomation
Traditional automation definitely has its place in business, but it can’t achieve what hyperautomation does. The practice of hyperautomation identifies patterns to create automations that can evolve and adapt on the fly, enabling organizations to achieve maximum ROI with minimal human effort and helping them break down silos that exist between systems and functions.
This ramped-up version of intelligent automation allows companies to quickly develop and push dynamic code that leads to real business outcomes – increased revenue, lower costs, and risk mitigation – faster and mimics human actions to complete tasks. Businesses that have the means to do so are moving away from traditional automation and implementing hyperautomation practices. To further solidify this point, Gartner estimates that more than 56%Opens a new window of organizations have an average of four or more concurrent hyperautomation initiatives underway, and leading companies have over 10.
Real-world Success
Consider the example of one large brewery which transitioned its automation processes to hyperautomation. Ordering a shipment of lager over a mobile fulfillment app requires careful orchestration across production, shipping, fulfillment, inventory payments, and other business units. Steps in this complex business process can sometimes break. When that happens, each event triggers an event log that gets sent to the IT team to diagnose and fix. Help desk resolution is typically a manual process, requiring administrators to handle each event individually. But recently, this large brewery used hyperautomation technologies to analyze historical event logs, identify trends, recognize the associated UI bottlenecks and automatically push a resolution. Now, events are automatically resolved without human interaction, speeding up time to resolution while creating a better customer experience. It’s a win-win for the brewery and its customers. In short, hyperautomation led the way for intelligent connectivity and better-integrated experiences across the board.
See More: How Automation Is Driving the Evolution of Work
The Next Step for Static Automation
As organizations continue to advance their digital transformation initiatives to keep changing customer demands and business environments, it is imperative to advance beyond static, trigger-based automations. Business leaders in many industries are using hyperautomation to help them accomplish their organizational objectives and meet metrics.Â
The practice of hyperautomation and the evolution beyond traditional automation is more than just the latest buzzword. Hyperautomation results in agile, end-to-end workflows that span teams, systems, architectures, and partners. These highly intelligent, fully autonomous business processes use AI/ML to identify patterns and create smarter automations that can evolve and adapt to change at the speed and scale of today’s businesses. Maybe it’s time to look at your organization’s current automations and see where hyperautomation might fit in.Â
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