Employee Centric Democratized Automation

Introduction

A majority of organizations globally have adopted automation as a key capability to move products, services, and customer experience to the next level. For organizations today, it is critical that every employee is thinking and working towards automation as a way of life. Automation and AI are no longer complex pieces of technology that only a few can understand and apply in their workspace; they are becoming more part of our day-to-day life. We start our day with various automation and AI-based products around us, be it our phones, television, or other smart devices. This reinforces that automation and AI can be applied anywhere and by anyone; they add value and help take things to the next level. Organizations have gone a big way already, making automation an essential enterprise technology. Now is the time to make it part of every employee’s daily work so that individual productivity gains can be added to realize the organization’s overall productivity goals.

Half of business technologists produce capabilities for users beyond their own department and/or enterprise, according to a new survey from Gartner, Inc. They are primarily responsible for building analytics capabilities (36%), but are also involved in building digital commerce platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation, among others.¹

Why Democratize

As organizations are looking to be more agile and responsive to the changing markets and technology, they want to make each employee a partner in this journey. When employees embrace automation as their day-to-day tool, they begin thinking about deriving benefits in ways that were not thought of earlier. Automation is not just an organization’s goal anymore but every individual’s goal, thus helping employees move towards more fulfilling roles that can add value. Democratizing automation helps align the organization towards the objective of “Automation as a way to work,” which allows each employee to think and find ways to reduce effort and improve quality in his\her daily activities through automation. When you have a Bot for each employee, they think of automation as a means to help them move to the next level at work by focusing more on activities that require human qualities and add value. Enterprise automation in a few scenarios is more prone to failures. In such scenarios, employee-driven automation can help make automation more robust.

How to Democratize

Automation technologies like RPA (Robotic Process Automation) from an early stage have been citizen developer friendly. These technologies allow users to create automation using their studios, providing tools to drag and drop activities and build a process. With the emergence of Low-Code/No-Code platforms, Business SMEs have tools to not only design automation themselves but also to create and connect them to a user interface or Apps. Low-code/No-code platforms provide a simple GUI-based interface with various pre-built elements and adaptors to help citizen developers design automation in a very intuitive way on their own without any developer know-how. Organizations can adopt the following steps to democratize automation:

Future of Automation Programs in an Enterprise

Enterprise-wide RPA programs will continue to be the primary driver of automation-based efficiency programs for an organization, but they are also looking to bring in individual productivity measures. Since not all manual, repetitive processes can be automated through unattended RPA, specific processes need manual intervention, due to several reasons like:

While organizations will make automation a more decentralized function through democratization, it is still a cultural change, not merely technological. They need to bring an automation mindset where it’s also an individual goal, not just a department or business unit. In this regard, citizen developer friendly automation studio and Low-Code/No-Code tools will play a significant role in the adoption and spread of these technologies.

AssistEdge provides a holistic automation platform that comes with an in-built Low Code Application (LCAP) Designer with drag & drop, point & click ability to build feature-rich responsive web apps accessibility over desktop, laptop, tablets, and mobile powered by iOS, Android, or Windows OS. LCAP designer also supports pre-built Integration with Attended and Unattended Automation, thus mitigating the need for Application APIs for integration with legacy applications.

AssistEdge Enterprise Personal Assistant is another offering that empowers employees to automate everyday tasks with contextual assistance that can typically enable up to a 20% reduction in manual efforts with a 3X improvement in employee satisfaction. All these capabilities are business users friendly, thus bringing automation closer to end-users.

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021-09-21-gartner-survey-reveals-half-of-business-technologists-produce-technology-capabilities-for-users-beyond-their-own-department