The Covid 19 pandemic has placed a heightened emphasis on hyper-automation: Rajendra Prasad, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Technology
Imagine if you could automate critical tasks by infusing AI into applications and infrastructure management, such as auto-triaging tickets or using robotic-process automation with cognitive capabilities for chatbots for user issue resolution or, predicting business issues to avoid them. Rajendra Prasad, Senior Managing Director, Global Automation Lead, Accenture Technology, shares his perspective on the power of new technologies such as automation, DevOps and continuous delivery in improving revenue growth and operating margin
Some edited excerpts:
Why do enterprises currently need enhanced automation capabilities, and what role does it play in business growth?
The pandemic has placed a heightened emphasis on hyper-automation. These are automations that can rapidly be implemented to reduce high volume, manual tasks and drive operational and cost efficiencies to minimize disruption and make systems more resilient. Imagine if you could automate critical tasks by infusing AI into applications and infrastructure management, such as auto-triaging tickets or using robotic-process automation with cognitive capabilities for chatbots for user issue resolution or, predicting business issues to avoid them. That’s what we are able to do for organizations at speed.
We have found that most leading organizations that adopt new technologies such as automation, DevOps and continuous delivery are outperforming their peers in revenue growth and operating margin.
Besides resilience, when AI-powered automation is scaled across the enterprise, it drives growth and creates business value. It not only enables organizations to better utilize their human talent, increase customer satisfaction, make IT predictive and promote building new technology skills, but it is key along with data and cloud to maximizing the value of technology. Furthermore, it is a powerful force for innovation when applied holistically across people, processes and business functions.
What are the biggest challenges that companies face with respect to automation?
One of the biggest challenges that organizations face currently when implementing automation is establishing a strategic, holistic automation vision that is aligned to business strategies. If an organization implements automation in silos, it can have unintended consequences from adhoc deployments that do not connect, leading to a series of isolated projects.
To make an automation project successful, it is important to first understand the business challenges that need to be solved, and then build an enterprise-wide holistic approach to drive significant change. Further, it is important to choose automation platforms that are adaptable, interoperable and scalable to deliver desired outcomes and business benefits in the long-term.
How are organizations overcoming operational disruptions with the help of hyper automation?
In the “never normal” world we find ourselves, there is a crucial need for speed and adaptability when it comes to technology. Hyper automation accelerates an organization’s existing automation investments to make systems more resilient. Through the elimination of application and infrastructure bottlenecks, hyper automation, for example, frees up human resources to focus on higher priority issues and ensures the availability of critical systems.
As businesses prepare for the future, it is essential for organizations to move faster than ever before to remain competitive and deliver business innovations. We are helping organizations accelerate their pace of change and reap the benefits of the transformative power of automation, AI, data and cloud.
What are the functions of the new generation of Accenture myWizard, and how does it impact cost and operations for companies?
The new generation of our intelligent automation platform, Accenture myWizard, brings together the best of AI-infused technology assets that organizations need to reimagine and transform their IT systems for exponential efficiency gains and operational performance. It has helped companies improve user experiences by more than 50 percent, reduce IT operational costs by up to 60 percent and get new products and services to market up to eight times more quickly. The new generation of myWizard offers expanded capabilities for modern engineering, including software quality engineering, modern operations and enterprise automation journey management with automation for DevOps in the cloud. Other new features include an automation roadmap with benchmarks to identify automation opportunities and provide insights for faster return on investment and value realization.
What do you mean by intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation involves taking a machine taught to do simple,repetitive tasks and teaching it to adapt or correct its performance based on a lot of changing conditions, all at incredible speed and scale. In other words, it’s meshing automation with cutting edge AI and machine learning technologies to provide organizations with speed, agility and predictability.AI-powered automation delivers the opportunity to augment the human workforce and strengthen the human+machine collaboration.
