Making the Value of Hyperautomation a Reality

For the last couple years, Gartner and other industry analysts have focused on hyperautomation as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends.

Hyperautomation is the automated handling of as many processes as possible to free worker time from routine processes and repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex problems.

This focus on hyperautomation — or AI-powered Automation — began before the pandemic, which has now greatly accelerated the impact of work-from-home, decentralized teams and new processes needed to continue business.

The challenge with today’s hyperautomation landscape is that it’s very fragmented, with approaches and automation technologies far from standardized. Consultancies focus on automation transformation services to provide tooling that can unify some of what’s needed to drive hyperautomation, but “build-your-own” approaches can’t drive full insights that create business value.

Modern AI-powered Automation vs. existing approaches

Consider what’s different about modern AI-powered Automation versus existing approaches. AI-powered Automation includes advanced technologies that expand what businesses can achieve:

• Applies to all processes — both business and IT
• Unifies across all process areas
• Handles dynamic and routine business process flows together
• Separates detections, actions and optimization to identify automation opportunities

Leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as a means to identify automation opportunities and determine their potential business impact

Provide more than robotic process automation (RPA) by automating different types of workflows and processes, including server scripting, container management, OCR, intelligent business process management (ibpms) and software release

As an example, consider a use case of a company’s mobile app. To deliver the best customer experience, the app needs to automatically detect issues, offer the customer something for their inconvenience while simultaneously opening internal tickets to fix the issue, proactively determine what the issue could be, annotate the ticket, notify the internal owner of the issue and stand up a container test environment automatically to troubleshoot. This mix of AIOps, helpdesk, software automation and intelligent process automation is not only complex but requires a holistic integrated approach to drive real automation optimization.

IBM Cloud Paks for Automation and the IBM Automation foundation

Companies are quickly advancing beyond basic analytics and AI insights, moving to a greater range of tools that allow them to achieve the full benefits of hyperautomation. A critical benefit of adopting AI-powered Automation into an enterprise is being able to identify gaps and opportunities and focus efforts on those value-add areas.

IBM has many years of experience in the automation space and technologies that culminate in today’s IBM Cloud Paks for Automation and the underpinning IBM Automation foundation. With a complete and modular set of AI-powered Automation capabilities to tackle common and complex operational challenges, the IBM Cloud Paks for Automation provide a common approach to detecting, acting and optimizing all your processes in the only unified AI-powered Automation business and IT platform on the market. IBM Cloud Paks for Automation add domain-specific capabilities in AIOps, Business Automation, Integration and Network Automation with AI-powered Automation. Partners also can use the IBM Automation foundation to power their own solutions.

Powering the automation of decision intelligence in the enterprise

Whitespace, an IBM partner, has released “eamli,” a product that powers data-driven decision making in the enterprise — both at the center and edge. The eamli product utilizes capabilities within the IBM Cloud Paks for Automation to quickly connect to required datasets, analyze objectives from potential decisions and provide an optimized set of decision simulations for consideration.

A Ministry of the UK government is currently utilizing eamli to provide decision intelligence as a means to better manage and optimize their portfolio of project and program delivery against an annual budget of over $6 Billion. As they continue to scale automation, more benefits are being realized:

• Collates data from around the enterprise into one holistic view using data connectors to quickly integrate existing databases and data management tools
• Draws only on the data that is needed to inform the required decision-making
• Informs complex decision-making quickly and efficiently
• Provides a single view to understand the interaction between data, decisions, objectives and efficiency
• Explainable AI and ML drives advanced analytics insights using natural language processing with understandable human language
• Supports decision-making for both the strategic direction at the center of the enterprise and the delivery of day-to-day decision-making at the edge of the enterprise

The Whitespace team continues to work with the IBM Automation foundation to create event-driven automation and plan to create a hyperautomated decision intelligence capability for the enterprise in both the public and private sector by 2022.

With eamli and other partner products powered by the IBM Cloud Paks for Automation, hyperautomation is now a reality, providing fast time to value with less investment.

Learn more

Learn more about IBM’s approach to AI-powered Automation at this year’s Think, with sessions now available on-demand. Session 1667, “Power intelligent automation across business and IT with IBM Cloud Paks for Automation” provides a deeper dive into the Cloud Paks for Automation, the IBM Automation foundation and eamli.

Register now to watch this and other Think sessions on demand.

If you are an IBM partner and interested in incorporating AI-powered automation by building on the IBM Automation Foundation, sign up to learn more about our early access program.

The original blog can be found HERE