Why automation is giving rise to hyperautomation

A 2020 McKinsey Global Survey found 31% of organizations have fully automated at least one business process, and another 35% of organizations were piloting automation of at least one process. Although automation has streamlined workflows to some degree, it doesn’t provide visibility into processes to aid optimization efforts.

What’s needed is a hyper transformation platform that incorporates not just automation, but also intelligence, digitization, low-code application development, and process mining. Robotic process automation (RPA) is great for remedial tasks, but it doesn’t provide a central core nervous system. As a result, we’re seeing an evolution to hyperautomation.

What is hyperautomation?

Hyperautomation is more than just pure automation. It encompasses intelligence, integration, automation, digitization, transformation, and optimization.

Just as you wouldn’t apply a saw to a nail, you shouldn’t apply automation to every task. To apply automation, you really need to understand workflows across people, processes, and systems. If you map those elements to that same workflow in that same journey and pick the right tool for the job, you can hammer the nail instead of cutting it off.

To truly achieve proactive business agility, organizations must rethink the nature of business processes themselves. In every workflow, it’s not a workflow without integration and automation.

Any workflow requires applying intelligence to identify processes. You can’t do that without being able to see connections between systems. Integrations are key to that.

Keeping people first

There’s no good replacement for critical thinking within the enterprise, and that critical thinking is done by humans. Automation on its own helps remove the remedial, trivial tasks, freeing knowledge workers for critical thinking.

Hyperautomation allows humans to really use their creativity, to be innovators by creating amazing new workflows and experiences. It also enables critical thinking around analyzing process optimizations in bottlenecks within businesses. Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to documents and content helps streamline experiences for customers, partners, and employees. All of that takes critical thinking.

You’re not just saying, “Hey, let me do the remedial automation and then bring in the knowledge worker to finish.” You’re actually saying whether it’s an automation of tasks, a digitization of processes, or an analysis of the business. All of that brings the critical thinking of humans with the capabilities of the intelligence.

Getting started with hyperautomation

If you’re just getting started with hyperautomation, it’s important to understand it’s more than just automation and, as such, it involves multiple tools. You truly need a hyperautomation platform, such as the Now Platform, that provides a central nervous system. It’s a central hub to everything that’s happening across the business.

What’s truly core to hyperautomation is the ability to workflow people, systems, and processes across the enterprise. Our workflow and process automation engine allows you to workflow processes across the enterprise. Our intelligence layer enables you to optimize across the enterprise and create standardized experiences.

App Engine, our low-code offering, enables employees to automate workflows across the enterprise, whether or not they have coding skills. And IntegrationHub delivers immediate value by connecting critical business systems across the enterprise.

Learn more about succeeding with automation and hyperautomation in our whitepaper.

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