by Sachin Rane, on Apr 30, 2020 4:12:12 PM
Estimated reading time: 3 mins
Integration of different business applications using APIs towards seamless business operations is one way of automation. However, it offers a linear solution. As businesses look forward to do more with existing resources, Intelligent Automation (IA) is offering a definite way ahead. It is a key lever of digital transformation to achieve exponential results event amidst practical lockdowns.
So how does IA help you scale-up?
IA is a congregation of different automation solutions, each helping you leverage your existing investments further.
- Intelligent Data Capture (IDC): It enables you to digitize or convert paper-based work into digital assets. It helps you manage the digitized content and categorize it in an intelligent manner by using fuzzy logic and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): It enables you to transform manual, repetitive, and rule-based processes into automated ones. It helps you move data between systems at high speed with the use of digital assistants or bots.
- Decision Management technologies: These technologies include data science and advanced analytics technologies, automation workflows, and AI algorithms. They sit atop your existing systems and help you identify patterns from high volumes of data to provide highly interactive visualizations.
Together, these technologies offer a digitally secure and integrated platform that helps you extract and manage content, orchestrate work, and manage decisions. These three levers allow you to take your mind off mundane tasks such as filling up forms, maintaining spreadsheets, and other swivel chair operations and help you focus on your business key process indicators. They take care of 90% of information generation and intelligence amassing while seamlessly automating your processes.
Is scaling up possible beyond IA?
Yes. It is. When you think of the data received from multiple channels, the information explosion in the last few years as well as the huge amount of information you require to process for deriving meaningful and actionable insights, you have to think of automation at scale. This is the right time when you take your automation to the cloud.
Containerization of your existing IT investments or software applications helps you run them seamlessly on the cloud, where the hardware infrastructure is separate from the software. It gives you tremendous control of the architectures, which are otherwise not easy to fine tune. You can host these containerized applications on-premise, public, or hybrid cloud.
Talking of taking the IA levers to the cloud, you can leverage each of these levers individually or in a bundled form over the cloud. The cloud format not only allows you to improve the speed and the compute power but also the scale of operations over geographically distant locations.
This digital scale is ideally adopted in a platform as a service (PaaS) mode to have better control over the operations. Though software as a service (SaaS) is also offered by the large cloud service providers, who offer the IA solutions on the cloud to you in a pay-per-use mode.
The business impact of IA over the cloud
Automation over the cloud has tremendous business potential:
- Investment leverage: Extends the reach of your automation packs such as RPA, IA, and other tools over other geographic locations.
- Cost reduction: Frees up the office infrastructure used for storing paper files as well as information technology servers.
- Information structure: Enables you to achieve a disciplined information architecture – anything to do with intelligence, AI, and IA and the amount of response you get from it is a direct function of the information architecture.
- Speed: Improves the efficiency in the resulting paperless office by exponentially reducing the time required to access enterprise content.
- A la cart functions: Extends the automation and allows you to call up other services, such as decision making and visualization, as required in a pay-as-you-go mode.
- Scalable architecture: Drives scalability and nimbleness across the enterprise by extending the functions of IA along with the benefits offered by APIs and system integration.
- Empowered workforce: Helps you achieve a hybrid integration platform atop an agile architecture to empower people and processes.
- Legacy leverage: Enables you to tune huge monolithic architectures in their containerized avtaars over the cloud.
In summary
IA bots running over the cloud enable you to manage content, orchestrate work, and manage decisions over remote, geographically dispersed locations. The systematic information architecture and the scalable nature of the effort are instrumental in the making of a future-ready enterprise.
