Strategic advice to leverage new technologies
Technology is at the heart of nearly every enterprise, enabling new business models and strategies, and serving as the catalyst to industry convergence. Leveraging the right technology can improve business outcomes, providing intelligence and insights that help you make more informed and accurate decisions. From finding patterns in data through data science, to curating relevant insights with data analytics, to the predictive abilities and innumerable applications of AI, to solving challenging business problems with ML, NLP, and knowledge graphs, technology has brought decision-making to a more intelligent level. Keep pace with the technology trends, opportunities, applications, and real-world use cases that will move your organization closer to its transformation and business goals.
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This month's issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal (CBTJ) examines the new face of automation and explores novel ways to address the various issues and challenges encountered.
In my coaching, it is incredible how much pushback I receive on the idea of demoing your architecture. It seems Agile teams are comfortable demoing end-user functionality, but incredibly uncomfortable when you ask them to demo architectural elements.
Daniel J. Power, Ciara Heavin, and Shashidhar Kaparthi argue that a better governance mechanism is necessary to minimize the dangers of rushing to adopt AI and automation without due consideration of the risks. They present a governance framework for intelligent automation that includes all key stakeholders and offer policy prescriptions and guidelines for successful intelligent automation.
Tad Gonsalves and Bhuvan Unhelkar argue that while machine intelligence facilitates smart automation and autonomous operations, yielding benefits, it cannot handle decisions that need to account for subjective factors, such as satisfaction, perceived quality, or joy, which cannot be parameterized in an ML algorithm. The authors recommend judicious superimposition of human natural intelligence (NI) on machine intelligence as a better way to facilitate business decisions that factor in customer value. In their discussion of how to achieve this goal, they also present a few use cases that embrace this hybrid intelligence.
In most enterprises, business processes are automated in isolation, creating “automation silos” — a major barrier to realizing the fuller potential of enterprise-wide integrated automation. In their article, Aravind Ajad Yarra and Danesh Zaki address this issue. They differentiate between first- and second-generation smart automation and identify key imperatives to ensure desired integration across an entire business process. Furthermore, they present a detailed architecture for, and a pathway toward, smart automation 2.0, which enterprises can adopt to enable their automation bots to cooperate across the value chain
Namratha Rao and Jagdish Bhandarkar outline the concept of intelligent automation using AI, ML, and RPA. A case study from the financial sector highlights the benefits gained through RPA. The authors explain how an intelligent bot can be trained and deployed over a period of a few months, and they emphasize establishing a roadmap, applying the right security measures, and setting up robust governance as three key tenets for scaling automation.
Joseph Byrum describes an intelligent enterprise as one that embraces AI to guide all its functions and decisions, small or large. However, this business is not run by the all-knowing, utopian artificial general intelligence (AGI) that science fiction writers and some commentators envision, which is a distant dream. Rather, it is an enterprise run by augmented intelligence — humans using AI and decision support tools that are enriched to the extent that is currently realistic and feasible. Byrum discusses the advantages of enterprises embracing augmented intelligence but cautions that making the entire enterprise “intelligent” requires concerted effort.
We present in this issue of CBTJ a set of five articles that provide actionable insights on topics of current interest to professionals and executives. We hope the articles inspire and encourage you to harness advanced automation in your domain of interest.