Good Practices in Establishing an Enterprise Automation Centre of Excellence
Automation technologies have now become an essential part of any enterprise and the potential to transform today’s workplace significantly. According to a recent global survey, by 2025, enterprises will lower operational costs by 30% by combining hyper-automation technologies with redesigned processes.
However, many enterprises today are jumping into their automation journey by conducting individual pilots and without any plans for scaling or putting in place a system that can help them to do so. This leads to sluggish implementations that do not help organizations achieve expected ROI. Eventually, organizations may lose confidence in automation technologies entirely resulting in missed opportunities to create a competitive advantage through automation.
After automating the first few processes enterprises generally get an idea of how to automate processes. However, to scale up, enterprises need to consistently deliver high-quality, new automation projects while maintaining ongoing projects. This is where an automation Centre of Excellence comes into play and provides the necessary research, quality assurance, and leadership on how to automate business processes and tasks.
An automation Centre of Excellence (CoE) can help focus the attention, technology, and processes required for successfully scaling automation initiatives. Any organization that seeks to achieve business transformation should adopt and implement a CoE. Yet, not all organizations have a CoE, while others ignore creating one.
Some of the impediments to a good CoE design or implementing a CoE include:
- Reluctance to Change: Many organizations are reluctant to change or improve anything that looks to be working just fine on the surface. Not all organizations concur to the idea of continuous improvement, and as a result, often lag especially when disruptions such as COVID-19 and other major changes occur.
- Complexity: Some organizations believe that a Centre of Excellence is complex to build and requires a lot of expertise and time to monitor and maintain. No one would want to waste organizational resources to reinvent the wheel. A good COE will centralize functions/capabilities that can be done once and re-used across the enterprise.
- Risks: Enterprise rightly believes that they have a lot at stake and more often than not look to wait before they can mitigate their risks. The problem with this is that they lose several steps towards their journey of excellence. There are a number of risks inherent in building a COE and organizations should be aware of them and should have a plan to mitigate them.
Role of an Automation COE
Vision
An automation COE should be presenting the organization-wide vision and strategy for digital transformation and intelligence. Having a strong automation vision is the starting point in building a successful COE. A lack of vision and strategy is the main reason why enterprises fail to scale their automation programs. According to a recent report, enterprises frequently face challenges in deploying more than just a few bots, with up to 50% of RPA deployments initially failing.
Governance
An automation COE must provide effective governance of the overall automation initiatives in the organization, including defining structures, roles, and responsibilities, ensuring sponsorship, aligning process pipeline management, and managing business continuity. Organizations should look to adopt a centralized, decentralized, or hybrid COE model based on which model fits its needs.
Operate
Another critical role for a centre of excellence is automation delivery, which requires identifying automation use cases within the organization. Once the organization’s digital transformation is mature enough that there is no dearth of new automation opportunities, the role of COE shifts from generating ideas to prioritizing them. COE should deliver secure, highly governed automation to the entire organization.
To maximize value from digital transformation, organizations need to proactively plan how they will manage the changes that result from automation. Many companies cite a lack of effective change management as another significant reason for failing in automation implementation.
Good Practices in Building an Automation COE
Let us look at some of the proven good practices to successfully establish and run automation CEOs.
- Standardization: The primary purpose of a COE is to define and create standards and best practices for the organization. This includes developing documentation, blueprints, and methodologies for tasks such as quality assurance, technical architecture and maintenance, performance monitoring, project, and resource planning among other tasks. These documents will change continuously and, in some cases, might become obsolete based on the evolving needs of the industry.
- Key Stakeholders Buy-In & Funding: Automation projects must find support from key stakeholders within the organization who should see automation as a strategic business initiative and provide the requisite financial and human resources. There would be a lot of myths associated with the goals of automation and therefore it is imperative for everyone within the organization to understand how automation can really enhance operations. The business would then take note of the transformative capabilities of the technology and gradually understand that automation will genuinely help employees utilize their time in more value-added tasks and not replace them.
COE like any other business entity needs funding. Enterprises can choose the funding approach among enterprise funded and BU funded that best fits its needs. Establishing a well-run, well-funded CoE is a proven way to help an enterprise embrace the transformative potential of automation.
- Identify & Use Organization Assets: The Centre of Excellence team should have a keen eye to identify all of the usable assets that exist within the enterprise and the CoE itself.
- Human Resources: A COE should involve a wide range of resources from throughout the enterprise. Some of the key roles and their responsibilities include:
- Champion: Resource responsible for propagating automation adoption across the enterprise
- Change Manager: Personnel responsible for creating the change and communication plan aligned to project deliverables.
- Business Analyst – Resource who understands the as-is process and creates the to-be process roadmap for automation.
- Solution Architect – Personnel responsible for defining the automation architecture and taking care of the end-to-end development.
- Developer – Resource who designs, develops, and tests automation workflows and support the automation implementation.
- Code & Documentation: This includes program code, module, algorithms, tools etc developed by the organization. These will establish consistent and repeatable practices throughout the enterprise. There should also be documentation around policies, organizational and industry best practices, etc, for everyone to refer to within the COE.
- Human Resources: A COE should involve a wide range of resources from throughout the enterprise. Some of the key roles and their responsibilities include:
- Performance Measurement: CoE must put in place the mechanism to track, measure, and report on the team’s performance across automation initiatives. This is paramount to the evolution and eventual success of the COE as it will also help in garnering the support of the key stakeholders. Measuring performance also allows the CoE to focus on weak performing areas through training from subject matter experts thus leading to an increase in the overall quality of the CoE.
While starting the automation journey is quite easy, the majority of enterprises struggle in scaling their automation initiatives as there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for different operating models. Aligning your automation vision with business and IT goals, choosing correct processes for automation, and building the right culture for automation adoption will require a dedicated COE team.
