By 2030, automation will drive 75 to 375 million people to reskill and even
change occupation – do you agree it’s time to upskill your workforce?
”Empowered teams transform businesses”
If you’re a business leader, the COO or transformation director keen to bring intelligent automation into your business this is exciting news – but it’s important to note that “resistance to change” and “choosing poor use cases”, being the two most common reasons for why 50% of RPA and AI projects fail. This all boils down to a lack of education amongst analyst and consultant teams new to automation as well as technology knowledge gaps throughout the stakeholders who are impacts by it
There are tonnes of training programmes for how to build an automation software robot, and how to develop chatbots and programme AI solutions – but there is a lack of strategy, analysis and project delivery training in this automation and AI space
This type of training is one of the 3 things that we’re focused on providing our clients – we want to show you that -even if you’re late to the automation party, you can still get ahead of the game
“Automation is an anyone thing”
Robotic Process Automation aka RPA was specifically designed to elevate the pressures from the IT department from the demands of the tech-hungry companies. This demand was driven by customers wanting faster, more accurate, and more accessible, 24/7 omni-channel services. RPA gave business operations teams the power to control their destinies so to speak and build solutions to solve technical roadblocks caused by legacy systems, in a matter of weeks, instead of waiting for months or years for software upgrades.
By being a business led technology, in many instances it is the COO and operations directors who determine how it is used. Besides, they know the processes better than any technician or analyst and know how to get the most value out of their resources. There is a great need for the senior leadership team to have awareness and solid understanding of new technologies, benefits and use cases to navigate teams through the new digital world – upskilling needs to start from the top
Automation and AI requires investment in both training and technology so that the whole workforce is empowered, however many companies only train a handful of people in the core automation team
The empowered workforce approach
RPA market grew over 63% last year: an article in Tech Crunch a leading technology publication in mid 2019 saw an explosion on interest in robotic process automation. In fact by 2025, 97% of all businesses would have invested somewhat in RPA – we can safely say this technology will great impact all industries and business models over the next 5 years – as well as change the competitive dynamics in each market sector
70% biz believe RPA allows employees more human interaction: this recent study by business wire showed that “keeping employees engages and happy” led to successful digital transformation of businesses (take a look back at our “can’t get started, no momentum” webinar to get an overview of the RPA benefits
Even UiPath one of the world’s largest RPA vendors expressing the need to “keep employees at the core of RPA efforts”
McKinsey Global Institute report estimated that by 2030, automation will drive 75 to 375 million people to reskill and even change occupation. So on that final point, do we agree it’s time to upskill you staff? – and build a tech-savvy workforce?
If you’ve looked for training how to use cutting-edge technologies, most likely you’ve struggled to find the right training plans for your team – well let me explain why this is:
About 90% of all RPA trainers provide development and architecture training, the other 10% also do some basic analyst training to provide information for the developer, but you’ll probably be hard pressed to final a provider of training focus around the application and strategic delivery
This is also echo’d in other technologies, such as cloud and AI training – like Azure, Google cloud platform (GCP) and Amazon’s AWS – where all training focuses mainly on development and technical architect
We totally appreciate the importance of developer training however we would suggest that this lack of non-technology training for teams cause be 1 of the root causes for why 50% projects fail, and 98% can’t scale
“ 50% projects fail, and 98% can’t scale”
Teams are able to build the technology but teams struggle to manage projects and execute strategic plans for enterprise wide roll out – and by teaching 5000 students to help teams worldwide, helping firms and consultancies to set up and manage teams to both build and support automated solutions I’ve had the unique opportunity to peer behind the curtain and identify the roots to these grave statistics
Furthermore, by coaching and managing newly formed teams of analysts in RPA, I can see how an imminent flood of new analysts, consultants, programme and project managers in the market, with minimal tech experience will further reduce the success rate of RPA and AI projects.
Here are our 4 recommended steps for you, if you see the value that investing in teams to be more tech-savvy will bring to transforming your company:
STEP 1: AWARENESS – have a communications plan with a consistent message
- Awareness training for your senior leadership team
- Awareness training for Stakeholder teams (namely HR and IT)
- Awareness training for staff
Core stakeholder teams such as IT and HR should be the first to know about these new changes so your business is physically, technically and emotionally prepared for the new changes
STEP 2: GET INVOLVED – provide Digital Transformation training for teams to get involved
- Training the core team on the technology and how to implement it
- Training staff on how they can contribute so they and their teams can benefit from the technology (this is augmentation not replacement)
- Run regular workshops and lunch ‘n’ learns for staff to learn more, develop themselves and prepare for the new digital age
STEP 3: TOOLKITS – provide training on how to use tools and templates to implement automation
- Training for tools for each role in the implementation process (portfolio manager, analyst, automation champion, other stakeholders etc)
STEP 4: AUTOMATION & AI ECOSYSTEM – train on a suite of new technologies
- Training on various automation and AI technologies,
- Learn the most common technologies such as:
- Process Mining and Process Discovery
- NLP (natural language processing) and chatbots
- Machine Learning and Deep Learning
- Computer Vision and ICR (intelligent character recognition)
- Discover and learn new technologies that match the use cases in your business such as swarm intelligence, sentiment analysis, Datalakes etc.
So in summary, in order for a smooth and wide-spreading automation roll-out we encourage Centre of Excellence teams bring the whole company along on their digital transformation journey by; Building Awareness, Starting from the top down, training both the core team and stakeholders.
