The Rise of Hyperautomation in the Modern Digital Workplace

The workstyle of employees has evolved in the last two years with the introduction of remote and hybrid work. This change has elevated the importance of the employee experience in the digital workplace and brought it to the forefront of boardroom discussions. Having a modern digital workplace is now a strategic necessity for every industry and is no longer “optional” Hence, organizations are increasingly investing in intelligent technologies to design a human-centric digital workplace.

Over the past few years "hyperautomation” has gained a lot of traction, and many businesses have begun to identify how they can best leverage it in their digital workplace ecosystem. It involves identifying which tasks or processes to automate, choosing the appropriate automation tools, making them more agile with reuse of automated processes, and extending their capabilities using various technologies like artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, process mining, process automation and machine learning. A purpose-built hyperautomation roadmap can not only empower employees with choice but can also automate repetitive and complex tasks, to drive digital workplace operational efficiency. However, some organizations struggle in coming up with an appropriate technology architecture that can ultimately elevate employee experience and productivity to build a better modern workplace.

Jumpstart your Hyperautomation Journey

As the AI revolution promises to transform modern digital workplace operations, it changes the way endpoint data is sourced, managed, and leveraged to identify continuous improvement opportunities and promote new ways of working. Here are our key recommendations that organizations should consider to jumpstart their journey to hyperautomation:

• Align business and digital workplace strategy – For the digital workplace to deliver business outcomes, it must be consistent with overall business goals. Stakeholders from various functional areas such as HR, talent management, business lines, and employees should be consulted to shape the digital workplace transformation framework and set priorities. Interactions with stakeholders will provide insights into organizational and department goals, workstyle requirements, and gaps in the current solution.
• Identify processes – Organizations should identify business processes that take too much time and human effort. It can be as simple as mapping out time-consuming workflows and repetitive manual tasks or analyzing service desk tickets to identify frequent issues. Consider using process mining to understand existing process operations, identify the gaps and bottlenecks, and determine opportunities for digital process automation. Doing this will allow you to add automation where it can deliver the most effective results.
• Collect insights & define targets – Identify the structured or unstructured data that will be needed to fulfil the processes. Leverage digital experience management solutions that can help keeping track of known indicators. Define business and IT outcomes based on digital experience, efficiencies, and return on investment. It is also critical to measure the success of each automation process as you identify more tasks.
• Set boundaries between automation and manual tasks – Domains that involve interpersonal connection, affection, and human understanding are the areas where artificial intelligence can lag behind human intelligence. Humans possess strong judgement capabilities and an intuition-based improvisation and can detect nuances in more easily than artificial intelligence. This introduces the concept of augmented intelligence where humans and machines are focused to partner and deliver the real value of automation.

Hyperautomation Use-Cases in the Digital Workplace

Here are some of the high-impact hyperautomation use cases that organizations can look at in their digital workplace environment –

• Consumer grade storefront – Managing procurement always becomes a tedious task that consumes a lot of time for IT teams. By creating an intuitive portal, organizations can empower their employees to order exactly what they need to do their best in their day-to-day work in just a few clicks. With a built-in workflow and integration engine, it can also route requests to the right approvers and provide real time updates.
• Intelligent virtual assistants – Self-service options can boost efficiencies and create a better employee experience. Hence, organizations can look forward to utilizing conversational AI with easy-to-navigate interfaces to help employees quickly find answers to common work questions and resolve issues in real-time. This is one of the major advantages of it is the 24/7 availability.
• Analytics-driven command center – To elevate user experience, run frictionless operations, and drive service delivery excellence, IT leaders must have access to a modern analytics-driven command center. Using advanced analytics and visualization technologies can empower the digital workplace operations leaders to monitor digital workplace health, diagnose issues faster, and prevent IT disruption. When developed from the employees’ perspective, the digital workplace command center can also provide a single source of truth and assist in driving higher employee productivity and engagement.
• Self-healing with drift control – To ensure devices are always performant, compliant, and secure, IT teams should be able to manage endpoints from anywhere. An automated endpoint management solution can empower the IT teams to remediate issues in real-time and improve compliance and risk management with auto-remediation. The IT teams can prevent issues before they occur with self-healing and drift control capabilities and discover affected endpoints across the network in seconds through real-time diagnostics, whenever needed.
• Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality (AR/VR) – AR/VR solutions can transform field services by enabling hands-free, offline/online viewing of workflow instructions for training, maintenance, and inspection. These applications enable novice workers to connect with a remote expert who can guide them in performing the workflow better.

In Conclusion

As organizations continue to improve processes and as more instances of AL & ML enter the digital workplace, you’ll start seeing even more meaningful insights that will prove valuable to boosting an employee’s ability to perform their day-to-day job. While you may want to automate several processes in an effort to achieve too much in a short time, you should implement the hyperautomation strategy in phases and achieve results periodically. In the process, don’t neglect your organizational change management and talent management strategies as your employees upskill and adjust to the new technology and embrace automated processes in the organization.

Find out how NTT DATA’s Nucleus Intelligent Enterprise Platform can power your organization’s workplace hyperautomation journey.