#53 Democratizing Automation....Success Factors....Employee-driven automation

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. My name is Sascha Kottura, and with me here as always is Arno van Rooyen, and together we are the Automation Guys. And today we thought we were talking about democratizing automation. And yeah, and with that, we would like to look at sort of 6 really important success factors. There's generally no, no arguing that the nature of work has changed as a result of the pandemic. So when we look back sort of the last 24 months, yeah, everything has changed dramatically. And yeah, many employees during that time have taken the opportunity to, to to sort of listen a bit more to their employees and provide them with meaningful opportunities to grow and to learn new things and to add sort of maybe other things to the business, other value to the business. And yeah, there's a shift towards engaging employees with more meaningful work, with activities where employees can be more creative, more innovative, and more problem-solving. So all of those kind of things sort of are given the employees more and more these days. And routine and manual tasks, we know, we know are not very exciting for employees. And those employees in the business have previously spent time on them. And yeah, it's not really meaningful work. So, and now, So they are looking into the space of automating them really more rapidly. And so with all this new thinking, new creativity, new tools and skills there, we see businesses rapidly accelerate with automation initiatives and digital transformation efforts. And yeah, Arno, what do you think about that?

Yeah, very good, very good sort of intro there, Sascha. You know, you talk a bit about employees doing meaningful work to express creativity and using their problem-solving skills. And I think, you know, the true benefits of automation and process automation, business process automation in a business are unleashed when automation development skills are very easily accessible for everybody in the business to enhance any of the mundane aspects of their job, anything that's manual. So I think accessibility is key for that. It is very difficult to imagine and really to find real-life examples of a truly centralized department that's responsible for catering to the needs of all the business units while also scaling automation efforts across an organization. That doesn't happen. So hence we're seeing this sort of employee-driven automation is really key to transformation within side of business. And it's not just for the organization itself, but also for the employees. And it's really critical to go out and select automation technologies or platforms that people find very user-friendly to use, and it's got really rich features and capabilities, you know, to automate their work. So, you know, what we want to really look at today is the non-sort of technology factors that are critical to the success of any business out there that's embarking on an employee-driven automation program. And, you know, hence why we want to look at the 6 critical success factors for democratizing automation. And, you know, that term just means make it accessible to people, almost liberating automation in a sense that people can actually—

That word itself, it's not that easy.

Yes, exactly. So democratization, liberation, whatever you want to call it, The first step is we need an executive champion. And we look at automation historically, it has kind of been embedded in silos and various units across a business. So as we've seen technologies like robotic process automation, or RPA, AI, and machine learning emerge, things like center of excellences, that we brought into to ensure governance, standardization, and quality control. All of these things sort of didn't mean a lot sort of 5 years ago, but all of these kind of terms are things we sort of associate with automation. And to truly scale and democratize automation across a business is a transformative effort that needs to be driven by a very strong executive champion and somebody that's got vision or somebody that's a visionary. So absolutely number one is we need very strong executive support to ensure that there's a cross-functional commitment and that this person or this committee needs to really clear any roadblocks along the way that causes the automation program to slow down. So that's in essence the sort of first important one.

That's very, very interesting. So the second one we want to look at is sort of around automation champions within the organization. And as we know, with any change and transformation efforts, it is very, very important to assemble and start with early adopters within the business. It's not as important for early automation adopters to have those maybe technical skills. It is, it's really more their willingness to learn new skills, being proactive and going out in the departments, in different units to find and identify areas for automation opportunities, for automation and Yeah, there are lots of different ways to find those willing people in the organization, that group of people in your business. One of the ways is to run an automation initiative or workshops where employees are introduced to basic automation training. So with that kind of toolset, yeah, I haven't seen anyone who didn't get really hooked on that cool stuff these days. Yeah, and then they are immediately asked to identify, to take these new skills and to automate one or two aspects of their daily job that they consider manual and routine. So sort of all the stuff they ideally do not want to do themselves anymore. So this is how we look at it very often, isn't it? We'll try to find lots of things they don't, they're not really keen on doing it themselves. The task they really hate. And if a bot can do it, that's great. Or if automation can do it, that's great. So then, yeah, and then we ask employees which tasks should be automated. And there are lots of you who should actually be part of the automation team later on. And there are lots of very enthusiastic people who are coming forward and they're really pushing that story and become a champion for further automation initiatives in the business, sort of they are sort of part of your team then, isn't it? Yeah.

And really I've seen this firsthand in the last sort of week where we had a customer, you know, this person was an executive sponsor of robotic process automation in an organization. She emailed me, she said that she's had previous with robotic process automation before. How can we get started? And there was a sense of intent in an email I received. So I basically was really excited about that because A, we already got the executive champion tick box ticked, and B, she already identified automation champions inside the business and got them involved as well to start the sort of automation journey and booking of ideation workshops kind of going around the business. And that's already shows very, very good intent bringing those people in so early on in the process to get things started. So if it's that way, you've kind of got the momentum of the executive sort of sponsorship. You've got this sort of buy-in from the automation champions. Like you say, these are the people that sort of go around the business and participate in automation workshops. So, you know, very, very, very key to the success again for, you know, democratizing automation within the business. But of course, you know, once we land automation program with inside a business, or once we sort of seek to land it with inside a business to start scaling it, we've talked a lot about this, Sasha, on previous podcasts. It's all about the change management aspect as well. And, you know, We need to create a very kind of, you know, it needs to be very clear communication, you know, support and commitment and buy-in from employees. You know, when we bring automation with inside the business, people are still a bit anxious when we talk about robotic process automation, the fact that perhaps the robots will take their jobs. But we've seen that hasn't been the case. So I think we need to think about change management. And I think that what many of these, I guess, employee-driven automation efforts misses is the need for a kind of like a carefully created and constructed change management strategy that minimize this resistance to change. To automation initiatives.

Yeah, people don't generally— they do not like change. They like to keep things as they are.

Yes.

So this is why as well with the automation champions we had earlier, as long as when you get everyone else, so yourself thinking about what is painful or doing your daily job, so that I guess it's so much easier to get that change in. Yeah. So of course, with all the excitement getting solutions developed by those automation enthusiasts. And we don't want them to run off and everyone doing their own thing, a bit uncoordinated. Yeah, this is why a very important point is the governance around those initiatives. We don't want to sort of hinder innovation, that kind of stuff. Of course, we're very keen when we work with business to really get this going, but But the governance is essential for putting the right boundaries around sort of security compliance. And of course, we have to assess the risk when we develop automations and get basic— get those developed by sort of employees. So they should be aware of those things. Security, very often I know it from myself, that was a topic which was never so much fun, but then it was a big problem later on before going live. So yeah, some aspects of those governance of governance can be already provided by, by just choosing the right automation platform. So lots of that stuff comes already with it. So yeah, that allows sort of for tighter controls in general. So say if you have a strong platform looking after those kind of things, there won't be sort of too many sort of weird consequences further down the line. And of course, with the governance, who is doing that in general? Yeah, you have a center of excellence very often in place, and that center of excellence plays a very critical role in making sure automations are compliant and they are not risky. And also these center of excellences, of course, they, they evaluate on, on sort of effectiveness of automations and ideas. But yeah, so governance is a very strong part of those center of excellences. Yeah, there, of course, as I mentioned earlier, we don't want to hinder too much of that innovation excitement. So there has to be that balance. In terms of enabling the business and the business users to design citizen-led automations, so automations within their own departments, but still, yeah, but still have that risk and compliance in mind. I think that's— this is what sort of, I guess, the most difficult part might be. But when this is sort of nicely worked out and nicely rolling within the company, there's a huge, huge opportunity there.

Yeah. And I guess it's a sort of once-off framework that once you establish it, you just have to constantly kind of tweak and review it and, you know, keep that governance safeguarded. So it's an initial, I guess, initial piece of work you do. And from there on, it's just kind of like an element of management to keep it in place and make sure it's up to date. The next one is training and enablement. And we know that technologies and all of the tools available today certainly enable business users without any technology background to quickly learn and to be able to sort of build these automations that simplify a lot of the manual work they do within these business processes that they participate in. But the key here is that organizations also need to carefully craft training and enablement plans that ensures employees are aware of what's the art of the possible with inside automation and can utilize the automation platform that's been adopted by the organization. So I think that's quite an important thing just to ensure that that enablement and upskilling and that sort of training programs exists for your staff that want to build out their automations. And again, you talked about the center of excellence here when you talk about the governance piece, but I think The Center of Excellence again can provide a helping hand here and guide employees while they get up to speed with their own automation expertise. And obviously, Center of Excellence will provide those kind of frameworks to help employees get started with the automation initiatives and how to build out these automations that make their day-to-day life easy. So again, I think Incorporating and encouraging automation-related training and skills within site, the learning process can also help organization retain and obviously attract new talent as well.

Actually, when we talk about innovation, ideas, creativity, and now letting those ideas come from within the business from different departments, departments, it requires sort of incentives and awards. So very, very much, I think with the normal idea management within companies, that's very much sort of the case. Not every company is doing those kind of things, but yeah, definitely automation ideas, initiatives, push, put a few automation concepts or projects in place. So I think those things need to be rewarded, and a well-designed award and incentive strategy can, can really motivate and encourage the right behaviors within, within the company. Those, those enthusiasts, I guess, they, they go with it anyway because they, they think just working with these new technologies and making their life easier is already incentive enough, but but I think is a good driver there. It's important to listen very, very closely what the team really wants and values. And then of course foster that through encouragement and further initiatives within the business. It could be lots of businesses using bonuses and maybe travel, those kind of things, employee of the month, that kind of stuff. So yeah, for really good automation ideas and for the achievements later on. So not every necessarily every project idea is sort of excellent. So maybe it sort of fails. But, but yeah, there's some really good successes and everyone should be, should be aware of those. And then it's very important early on in the company, incentives and awards are very important. And when you, when you start off sort of a developer, citizen developer program, So when it's really needing more early adopters to push those things and automation ideas further, so your initial citizen developers have really proved the value and the benefits of doing more automation and to learn those skills needed and to actually take part in the training. And yeah, so that's one element. To get everyone excited. I guess it just requires a little push, and sometimes that's enough.

Brilliant. So that, that was really good. Thank you. So I guess just, just to summarize, you know, if, if you are spinning up a citizen development program, you know, the kind of key success factors is, again, when you talked about nominating or getting executive sort of buy-in, bringing the automation champions. These are the people that's really passionate about automation and that can really spread it throughout the business. Talked a bit about change management, just control that, make sure that automation is a positive thing, manage the way that your business, you know, change and operational change, you know, Have a good strategy in place, bring in the governance so that if we do enable people to be creative and do stuff in automation, that IT is still involved, we still have the guardrails, you know, enable and train people to unlock and unleash their creativity and then reward them for that. So I think it's kind of a very simple, um, 6-step formula, but It really works. And I think the more you kind of look at this structure, the more you will enable people to really, like I said earlier, unleash that creativity and use these really, really good technology platforms, low-code platforms, to build out these automations and really take advantage of all of that time-saving and cost-saving it can provide to people.

Yeah, thank you very much. And as always, Arno and I are very happy to help. And if you have any questions on those topics, feel free to just reach out via social or visit our website, theautomationguys.net. And yeah, that's it for this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. And yeah, we will be back very soon with another episode. And until then, let's automate it. Unfortunately, that's it again with this episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. If you like this episode, please give us a 5-star rating and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episodes. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!