Mark Twain was purported to have once said “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” As I get older, and allegedly wiser, this maxim continues to become more and more true. In business, like life, patterns that resemble prior experiences continually emerge from seemingly random occurrences.
Last month I had the privilege of attending UiPath’s Forward 5 conference in Las Vegas, the world’s largest automation conference with over 3,000 attendees who met to discuss the current and future state of workplace automation, as well as the evolution of human and machine partnerships to accelerate human achievement.
In addition to the usual technology conference attendees (customers, technology buyers, vendors, press, analysts, etc.) I found it remarkable how many senior-level business executives were in attendance representing their firms and organizations. I had the opportunity to meet with several CFOs, senior executives of transformation, Chief Lending Officers, and Chief Information Officers to name a few. The number of senior business leaders in attendance was markedly higher than in years past so I became curious and of course, inquired as to why they decided to attend in person rather than send a delegate. The response was nearly universal: they were there because they needed to form an Enterprise Automation Strategy.
Just a year ago, the answer was different. The intelligent automation space was emerging as the hot topic du jour. Everyone was talking about software robots driving cost savings and boosting productivity. People were intrigued and primarily attended to become educated on the technology and to explore various use cases. People were inquisitive and excited. Today, however, it looks decidedly different.
Here’s where the rhyming comes in.
As an executive who has spent my entire 30+ year career in technology, I’ve seen some fairly amazing products, solutions, and trends emerge during that time; the rise of the internet, client server computing, open networking, and virtualization just to name a few. But in all that time, the advent and mainstreaming of cloud computing jumps out as the biggest enabler.
The term cloud had been used for years but in August of 2006, Amazon Web Services launched their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), enabling people to rent virtual computers and use their own programs and applications online. Other vendors quickly followed, and early on, the technology or Infrastructure as a Service was seen as intriguing; promising for a certain set of use cases, but certainly not a threat to the way that IT had always been deployed and consumed. And then it happened.
With the great recession of 2008-2009, the international monetary system nearly grinded to a halt. Unemployment spiked, bankruptcies and foreclosures hit record levels, and for about 9 months the daily news cycle was bad news followed by worse news, weather then sports. (For those under 35 who want to get a pretty good indication of what that time was like, I highly recommend HBO’s film based on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s best-selling book, “Too Big to Fail”).
Very quickly two things happened. First, emerging companies who could take advantage of the agility and reduced economics of cloud computing seemingly popped up overnight providing disruptive offerings at unprecedented scale at massively advantageous cost models. Airbnb (2008) and Uber (2009) were just a few examples of these “Born in the Cloud” organizations. Meanwhile, established companies were quickly forced into a defensive posture to ward off these “New Economy” upstarts but found it difficult to react with the speed and innovation necessary to compete against their faster competitors.
Second, cloud computing quickly became more than a technology, it became a board imperative. Directors began having difficult conversations with c-level executives. “Why are we spending so much on infrastructure? Why does it take us months or years to release new software and new products? What’s our enterprise cloud strategy?” Those organizations that could not respond were at best, disadvantaged competitively and at worst, became irrelevant.
You see, the cloud wasn’t a place after all. As it is now commonly understood, cloud is an operating model. A way of doing business. A fresh look at an age-old problem that drives, agility, massive economic advantages, and accelerates innovation by automating much of what people had to do just keeping the lights on in their data centers.
Sound familiar? In just two years since our pandemic-initiated calamity first manifested itself, organizations of all sizes are under similar, albeit different pressures. Regardless of which side of the debate you reside upon, the nature of how work gets done has permanently changed. Employee expectations about how, where, and why they work have been altered. As a result, the competition for skilled and unskilled labor is at an all-time high, resulting in severe staffing shortages across all industries, large and small alike, and rapidly escalating costs. Workers are voting with their feet in record numbers thus putting pressure on teams to do more with less which ultimately perpetuates the problem. The downstream effect? Transformational business initiatives are oftentimes being delayed, postponed, or cancelled because all of an organization’s time is being spent maintaining the current state.
As a result, board level discussions are now challenging C-level leaders with new but similar questions. “Why are our people leaving? How can we hit our growth objectives without scaling costs? Why can’t we innovate faster to exploit market opportunities?” And ultimately, “What’s our Enterprise Automation Strategy?”
You see, these board members are asking the right questions. Intelligent automation technology, much like cloud, changes the way work is performed. However, this time, those changes are pervasive across an entire organization. From finance and accounting, to supply chain, to sales, customer service, HR and more, automation, when deployed properly and at scale (hence an Enterprise strategy), unleashes an organization’s potential while fundamentally transforming the cost envelope under which they operate. By leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning models, Robotic Process Automation and advanced language processing capabilities in concert, the addressable numbers of process that can be automated are growing by the day. And that’s a good thing. Because automating a handful of processes, saving a few hours and declaring victory is insufficient and is fool’s gold. The true value comes through forging a new compact across your entire organization that enables not only cost savings, but by providing a digital workforce, allows for capabilities to solve problems unconstrained by the limits of humans and conventional wisdom. And that must be done at scale to be achieved. The customers I spoke to get it. It’s clear that UiPath gets it.
Organizations that fail to answer the clarion call to automation run the risk of being at best, disadvantaged competitively, and at worst, rendered irrelevant.
The time to think about an enterprise automation strategy is now. Before history rhymes.