Overcoming the 3 Main Challenges of Intelligent Automation

Delivering on the promises of Intelligent Automation can be overwhelming, especially if the hype is oversold and you’re not made aware of the potential blockers and challenges that could derail your ability to scale.

Mastek has worked with Together, International Personal Finance and UK Government Departments to create Intelligent Automation solutions that reduce the administrative burden, drive cost savings and unify IT and business goals.

A core part of our client’s success is to overcome silos, involve all stakeholders throughout and ensure cultural change to bring together multiple functions to kick-start automation and align outcomes to business KPIs. This allows them to yield the greatest benefit of intelligent automation whilst introducing sustainable and well-paced change.

Generally, automation challenges arise in the need to replace redundant processes and support business revenue. These include:

• i) The realisation that employees can worry about the impact of intelligent automation on their existing roles and responsibilities;
• ii) A need to prevent silos by taking a whole enterprise approach with all stakeholders involved; and
• iii) The introduction of in-house expertise using high-velocity agile delivery.

Let us help you navigate these above-mentioned challenges and achieve successful automation implementation. 

Intelligent Automation: Overcoming Challenges in the Organisation

Challenge 1: Make your workforce feel valued

Any bot, by its nature, interacts with its environment, affecting those involved, altering perceptions and modifying existing roles.  To integrate new technology harmoniously with the workforce, all employees must be fully engaged and brought on board as early as possible.

Intelligent Automation is known to increase employee engagement by allowing human workers to focus on higher-value creative tasks that, in turn, drive business growth—but it needs to be well implemented and carefully explained.

Challenge 2: Manage expectations for scaling

It’s essential to involve all stakeholders from the outset to prevent a lack of focus and unclear goals. Define and agree on use cases and user stories with all stakeholders.  

With Intelligent Automation, implementation at velocity is key to ROI—Agile delivers solutions in days, making time for backlogs to be cleared and bringing forward high-priority use cases.

Challenge 3: Creating in-house expertise

Teams unfamiliar with intelligent automation services and solutions need to be able to build their knowledge incrementally so that the implementation journey maps onto their learning curve—start with simple use cases and ultimately move to high complexity and rigorous execution.  Processes need to be identified and optimised.  Grappling with complex use cases early in adoption can cause frustration, increase costs and limit rollout.

In my experience, Intelligent automation does not take away our ability to create or influence—instead, when coupled with careful planning and strategy, it helps to make business goals a reality and transforms roles to keep employees happy and engaged.