#7 Hyperautomation Centre of Excellence (CoE): What you need to know for success - Part 1

Hi and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast with the Automation Guys. Are you thinking about setting up a Hyperautomation Center of Excellence? Are you wondering what skills and capacity you need to build? If you like to find out in detail what this means and how to take a cohesive and enterprise-wide approach, this episode is for you. Hello everyone, my name is Sascha Cutura and also here with me today is Arno van Rooijen and together we are the Automation Guys. We have planned another exciting episode for you today. It's all about Hyperautomation again. Yeah, and since we have actually started this podcast, we had a couple of Hyperautomation stories. And today we will talk about setting up a center of excellence for hyperautomation. Arno, do you like to give our listeners a high-level overview what we have planned for this episode?

Yes, of course. Thanks, Sascha, and thanks for the listeners that are joining. So there's a lot of talk about hyperautomation and the scalability it brings to your business, but I think today's topic is really how to scale automation or how to auto hyperautomation in your business by actually establishing a center of excellence. Now, instead of adopting hyperautomation technology— so this is low-code, RPA, AI— in silos, what we encourage our clients to do is really to take a cohesive enterprise-wide approach to automation. And the establishment of a hyperautomation center of excellence is the recommended way to embed automation very deeply with inside your organization and really to provide, you know, the operational guardrails and the guidelines for pilots, productionization of initiatives, the rollout of these initiatives and process automation projects. And then beyond that, the sort of the maintenance and support. You know, we always think about hyperautomation. A lot of people ask, you know, what the hell is hyperautomation? But I think it's really a belief that If anything can be automated with inside your business, you know, it should be automated. And I think if this philosophy resonates with you, a Hyper Automation Center of Excellence is really an ideal way to embed automation deeply and effectively, you know, with inside your business. And also a Hyper Automation Center of Excellence provides you with a springboard to identify and act on the most suitable sort of hyperautomation activities within your business and also a platform for sharing knowledge and resources for every stakeholder that benefits throughout the hyperautomation journey. And this is not just the people that use this or that get the advantage from hyperautomation, but it's also everybody in between, you know, the champions that pushes hyperautomation, the champions that establishes these initiatives, the champions from above, the stakeholders that invest within Cider. So I think it's really important for us today to talk about, you know, how do we establish and deploy a very effective hyperautomation center of excellence? And for those listeners out there that doesn't know what a center of excellence is, it is really just a blueprint or a sort of a digital factory for how we align resources with inside a business to establish very good outcomes, predictable outcomes for automation initiatives.

All right, yeah, thank you very much, Arno. That was a really good introduction. So I guess, yeah, as you touched on this earlier, so this, this episode is is really to understand how to establish and deploy that effective Hyperautomation Center of Excellence. And yeah, very often, like with other bigger initiatives, it requires really good governance. So the first really important step is to create a change management and governance framework to make Hyperautomation work at the center of excellence. Excellence for Hyperautomation work really well. So to maximize the gains and to really get all the benefits of Hyperautomation, yeah, you need to create that enterprise-level governance committee. So a group of people come together to evaluate all the different process areas across the business really, so all the different business units, and selecting sort of most promising processes in terms of return of investment and scalability.

Yes, exactly. And I think governance is important because this committee actually, you know, it is sort of a feasibility check on the projects that we should let into the Hyperautomation initiative sort of world, right? So I always see it as a funnel, right? So there's stuff coming in the left-hand side of the funnel. On the far right-hand side, that's the projects that actually were delivered and provides benefit. So I think this committee is really important to kind of manage that demand pipeline and sort of to set the guidelines for the assessment of these projects, the design of them, the development and deployment of these solutions. And I think ultimately there's an accountability as well, because if we have got executive sponsorship, there needs to be accountability to executive sponsorship. What are we putting out in terms of promises? What are we investing in terms of resources? And what are we getting out of this? How does it change the lives of people that actually is within the business? How to make it better? How do we improve people's lives? And it's all collaboration. I think we always talk about this collaboration between business and IT, but I think this committee's primary remit, or one of the primary remits, is just to make sure that the sort of cogs between IT and the business is well-oiled and people collaborate, right?

And this is, I guess, then a top-down kind of element, isn't it? So it comes from the top executives to to come up with that or to basically initiate that committee or ask people to set up a committee, or is this just coming out of several departments?

Well, I think the committee itself should have sort of sovereign rights with inside the business. I mean, I always look at a, you know, this committee as, and you know, don't think about a committee and there's 30 or 50 people in it. I think this is just a select group of people that can have the conversations with executive management as to what direction are we taking, what sort of outcomes are we achieving, what sort of new initiatives are we pushing the CEO or COE, you know, what is the sort of things that strategically that we can adopt, and ultimately, you know, what is the direction of travel here, you know, are we tackling meaningful initiatives meaningful? Are we solving meaningful problems here? Because of course, if I'm an investor with inside a business in automation, I need to have a go-to person that I can go talk to, you know, where are we with things, you know, how are we doing with our automation initiatives? And I think this is you know, one of the sole kind of purposes of, of this particular committee. And, you know, they need to understand how do we drive continual development within, say, the center of excellence, doing impact assessment on the type of processes we want to automate. And again, like I said earlier, managing the demand pipeline. So if you establish the center of excellence you might have a pipeline of activity that comes through that you need to prioritize. And I think it's their job to say, well, these are the things that we want to push through because that's in line with our strategy. And these are the things that we can deprioritize, but maybe, you know, in a couple of months or the next quarter of next year, we will look at this.

Okay, so, so what we hear as well very often is the center of excellence is sort of, sort of destroying a bit of the fun, or not necessarily the fun, but sort of slowing down again on this, this urge of innovation. So that departments, the departments are full of ideas and they want to get going, they want to take Power Automate and want to get going. So then if they hear about the center of excellence in these departments, they sometimes come back to us and say, oh, are you slowing down us already? And by putting this in place, and what do you think? If you would like to start your career in process and automation, then the Convedo DX IT Graduate Program is for you. Within 4 months, we will give you all the training you need to become a 360-degree full-stack automation developer. After the training, you will be joining exciting client projects to put your new skills into practice. You will learn all about low-code, RPA, process mining, and AI, all based on market-leading technologies from Appian, Blue Prism, Celonis, and many more. If you like the sound of this, head over to cdx.rocks and apply for one of our upcoming cohorts. What should we say to them?

I would say that if your idea is good enough to be adopted within SAS Center of Excellence, it would be. And I think that the role of this sort of committee is to— and again, this could be day one, one person, or day you know, 365 for people, but it's their job to choose the initiatives that stand out, that's going to provide, you know, those initiatives that would be beneficial to a business. Now, you know, I think what we don't want to do is choke good ideas and, you know, airbrush them out. But at the same time, if we have individuals with inside a business, with inside a department, which is really excited about automation, and we provide a good framework to submit those ideas, if we do it in a very structured way, and that's templified, and what I mean by that is we provide them with the right sort of way to document their thoughts as to, you know, how to submit these automation requests. And, you know, I think that the best ones will prevail, you know, the best ones will be chosen. If somebody goes in half-hearted and say, yeah, I think I've got an idea here, I think it might work, then, you know, if the legwork is not put in as to, you know, what the benefits are what the scope of the project might be, then maybe those ones will lose out. So I think it is all about generating good competition with inside a business. And the initiatives that is put forward, that's chosen by this committee, are the ones that people actually thought about. They thought about what's the sort of impact this will provide to a business, what's the cost savings it will provide, and why it should be first on the list, right? And everybody should always strive to have theirs first on the list.

Yeah, and I guess I think the framework as well established rules like security, isn't it? So I think this is very important as well. So although you might have lots of great ideas, I think security very often might be a thing which is not necessarily looked at because it doesn't sound very innovative and sexy, but it's one very, very crucial part of getting a really good application out there.

Yeah, I agree. And I think there are unfortunately some boring governance things that we need to adhere to. You know, I think everybody would like to live in a world where there's no governance, but we all know where that leads, right? So, you know, I think eventually as your automation initiatives mature, you need to have the governance frameworks around it. And, you know, there needs to be this sort of, this group of individuals that ensures that we execute correctly and efficiently and the outcomes that we want to achieve is achieved. We want to make sure that this governance council is prioritizing the projects across the departments and all the functions. So it's implemented in the right priority. You touched on security. I think that's really important because of course in everybody's world, security is taken care of by somebody else, you know, in the ether. But I think it's important for somebody to govern that, right? And, you know, we've got a lot of governance in our day-to-day life. And I think for this, it doesn't have to be overbearing, but at the same time, it needs to be responsible so that if a robot does log onto a system and have access to sensitive data, we need to ensure that that data is only accessible or presented to people that, you know, haven't got access or should have access to, you know, to that data. So I think it's all about establishing this council that we can have the standards, the working principles, the guidelines, and all of the best practices in one place. So everybody understands the rule of engagement. And I know you talked about sort of the sideline of people innovating and doing things on their own. I think that's good, but I think my message would be, you know, take all of that stuff. When you have a Centre of Excellence, present it in such a way that it's easily digested, the benefits are seen pretty easily, and it's submitted forward. So hopefully when it comes to project selection, it will actually be selected as a project and be put forward for implementation, right?

Absolutely, yeah. And I think very often it's not that easy actually to choose, to get started, isn't it? Because very often these software, these technologies we have are very expensive. So I think someone, some committee, someone needs to sort of approve it anyway. And yeah, it starts already at selecting Selecting the right software product and can we afford that specific software product? Can— what else can that software product bring us? I think if one department would just think, for example, UiPath or Appian is the right tool, yes, maybe for this one specific use case, but do we want to spend that amount of money for, for just this one use case, or do we want to maybe use it for, for more in the business? And I think This is where then the council or the committee comes in, isn't it, to, to look at the wider opportunities and the wider potential by using these specific products, because there are lots of things to consider. So Hyperautomation is looking at the different technologies out there like AI, RPA, low-code case management, process mining, integration and analytics. So if you have to consider solutions in all these areas to bring all these technologies together, I think it's really worth having a good view into the market because you don't want to end up with potentially individual products for each of that. So yeah, it definitely starts there very early on so that IT and a group of people need to make the right selection.

Yeah, as well.

Yeah, and, and negotiate the best prices on, on these components.

Yeah, I mean, my view is that the IT team should be exclusively involved in the software selection and the purchasing and all of the negotiations for all of the constituent components. But, you know, the operations departments that's going to use these technologies should be consultant or well, consulted during this process. And from a functionality perspective, they should be aware of what these capabilities bring to the table, right? We talk about all of these multiple complementary technology stack within hyperautomation, which is, you touch on it, AI, RPA, low-code, and case management, process mining. But I think, looking at, at all of these, these technologies, um, collectively, there should be good decisions on the ones we choose. I think from a Hyperautomation Center of Excellence perspective, we should choose the right tools in our armament, you know, to tackle this problem. Now, day one, it might be that you only adopt RPA. That's fine. But I think as long as you understand that for Hyperautomation, we probably likely to include AI and low-code automation, process mining, that's something that's going to come into the future. So you need to have that awareness when you start procuring the software and, you know, bringing those technologies inside your business.

Absolutely. So when we look at The software is built, not built, is purchased. So then the real work actually starts for these departments. They actually need to get started on building these applications out and need to understand in depth how to build these applications. Lots of our companies we talked today, they actually struggling to understand what skills are needed. What is, yeah, so what kind of people do they need if they really want to scale automation within their business? So what do you see, Arno, there as the sort of as the main or the main functions we need to look at putting a Hyperautomation Center of Excellence in place?

Yeah, I think that's an excellent question. And, you know, we always talk about, you know, the lack of technical skills when you start automation initiatives. And, you know, one of the, the remits, you know, of, of the governance committee, you know, so we spoke about this government commit committee that sort of looks at it strategically. We talk about kind of procuring the software, but now if we, if we look at at, you know, build skills and capacity. So this is actually to be able to execute, you know, to put hands on keyboard to build out these initiatives. You know, this governance committee should also, you know, appoint a hyperautomation operating team. So the operating team is really sort of the mechanics around rolling out automation initiatives. Now, there's a couple of roles that has got accountability, you know, for implementing and managing hyperautomation efficiently, well, efficiently with inside the business. And I'll run through a few of those. Now, again, in a real world, from day one, you're not gonna have all of these. You might have some role sharing. But if you just look from a role perspective, the kind of the hats people wear, the first one is obviously the sponsor who is sponsoring the hyperautomation initiative from a, from a business side. And that's really important. So this is a person that from a sort of enterprise and strategic level looks after executive sponsorship. You know, somebody has to pay for all of this, and that person needs to be aware of what's the return of investment. The second type of role, what we call is this hyperautomation champions. And what they do is they evangelize and drive forward hyperautomation adoption throughout the business. And they ensure there's a healthy pipeline of initiatives. If you're not gonna promote this, your pipeline's gonna dry up.

Which— This was the first part of this episode. Please also listen to part 2 to get the full overview on what is needed to set up a HyperAutomation Center of Excellence. 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 episode. We hope you will tune in next time, and until then, let's automate it!