• Organizations often have many business processes that rely on manual, routine, and repetitive data collection and processing work. These processes need to be automated to meet strategic priorities.
• Your stakeholders may have decided to invest in process automation solutions. They may be ready to begin the planning and delivery of their first automated processes.
• However, if your processes are costly, slow, defective, and do not generate the value end users want, automation will only magnify these inefficiencies.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• Put the user front and center. Aim to better understand the end user and their operational environment. Use cases, data models, and quality factors allow you to visualize the human-computer interactions from an end-user perspective and initiate a discussion on how technology and process improvements can be better positioned to help your end users.
• Build for the future. Automation sets the technology foundations and process governance and management building blocks in your organization. Expect that more automation will be done using earlier investments.
• Manage automations as part of your application portfolio. Automations are add-ons to your application portfolio. Unmanaged automations, like applications, will sprawl and reduce in value over time. A collaborative rationalization practice pinpoints where automation is required and identifies which business inefficiencies should be automated next.

Impact and Result

• Clarify the problem being solved. Gain a grounded understanding of your stakeholders’ drivers for business process automation. Discuss current business operations and systems to identify automation candidates.
• Optimate your processes. Apply good practices to first optimize (opti-) and then automate (-mate) key business processes. Take a user-centric perspective to understand how users interact with technology to complete their tasks.
• Deliver minimum viable automations (MVAs). Maximize the learning of automation solutions and business operational changes through small, strategic automation use cases. This sets the foundations for a broader automation practice.