Make automation fabric part of your business DNA

Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst, Forrester, talked about making automation fabric part of your business DNA at the recently-held Forrester Technology and Innovation Summit.

Automation is the new fabric for digital business. Future-fit firms are adaptive, creative, and resilient. Future-fit firms grow almost three times faster than their peers.

The automation rationale is shifting. First, cost and FTE productivity. Tasks required are tactical, individual scope, and task-focused. Next, we have capacity-as-leverage predictability. It is focused on a basket of intra-departmental processes. Third, we have business agility and actioned intelligence. The decisioning is inter-departmental scope, crossing front, middle, and back office. Last, peak innovation and business transformation. Enrichment is focused on ecosystems and personas.

Companies that win at automation will obliterate the competition! What got us here will not get us there. It is necessary to activate your automation fabric. We need to focus on five critical priorities. These are:

Strategy: Your CEO and your board must be directly invested in automation outcomes.
Sustainable scale: Shift from building collections of automations to building connected enterprise-wide platforms and automation fabrics.
Value orientation: Capture holistic value, align business and financial outcomes, and report to the board.
Cultural transformation: Invest in your employees like never before.
Stewardship: Build new structures for governance and leadership. Hire your first chief automation officer.

Your new chief automation officer should be a product owner, a process leader, a technophile, a transformation dynamo, and a canny storyteller.

Behavior 1: Design your business for autopilot. Define a CEO-driven roadmap toward the automation-fueled transformation. Envision every aspect of your business model as part of an autonomous enterprise. Consolidate stewardship and federate execution. Hire your first chief automation officer.

Behavior 2: Operationalize your automation fabric. Build automation on a bedrock of process excellence. Focus on the 'process of automation' as much as on the 'automation of process'. Track value holistically and report consistently.

Behavior 3: Invest on your people (like never before). Make automation literacy and people empowerment a cornerstone of your employee experience initiative. Design careers and skill-building pathways for your employees in the age of automation. Invest in improving your organization’s robotics quotient.

Automation is definitely the new fabric for digital business!