Pointless versus Purposeful Automation

By Desi Silva

Have you ever felt as though your company was automating for automation’s sake, and automation’s sake alone? 

There’s a monumental difference between pointless and purposeful automation that goes back to the goal behind the transformation, and what’s to be gained through the process. 

But it’s easier said than done. I worked for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, a bank with an enormous budget for digital transformation, and it still happened. 

We were supposed to be improving our process and our bottom line, but we were just adding to the complexity. Rather than transforming our business, we were merely translating the way we did business, breaking it up into a series of tasks that bots could understand and replicate. There was no innovation, no improvement to our process, and certainly no transformation, at least in the true sense of the word. It’s a common problem afflicting companies in nearly every industry as they look to automate their business process. 

Faced with mounting pressures, shrinking timelines, and an array of strategic initiatives  that promise the world and fail to deliver even a piece of it, it’s no wonder leadership looks to the giants in the marketplace to solve their problems.

Unfortunately, these giants are gigantic failures when it comes to understanding the high-risk and highly regulated operations of financial institutions. Often, existing solutions in the market are little more than a series of siloed tools that address individual tasks. This requires the user to hop through multiple systems to execute a single process. And, because these disparate tools don’t communicate with each other, they are unable to capture detailed execution information to assist with planning.

This kind of automation focuses on reducing headcount, rather than increasing business intelligence. These so-called transformation tools fail to consider the business process as a whole. Instead, they target isolated task executions and prescribe different tools for each task. By the time the “transformation” is complete, the business process resembles automation Frankenstein, with various solutions stitched together here and there. This creates a brittle process that constantly breaks and struggles to scale in complex and highly regulated environments.

All of this amounts to pointless automation.

Purposeful automation, however, takes a holistic approach by addressing and adding value to all three areas of operations:

Purposeful automation supports execution by enabling subject matter experts to focus on what matters most, clearing up the noise and bringing forward only the exceptions that need attention. It transforms the business by understanding and improving processes through an intuitive and use case-specific approach to automation. And finally, it supports strategy by giving users a detailed look into what’s really going on, recognizing patterns, and forecasting future scenarios to aid in planning.

DeepSee does all of this. Built for business users rather than technologists, we not only keep the “human in the loop,” we empower them to execute more effectively and efficiently. DeepSee supports very complex use cases in highly regulated markets with a suite of templates that business users can choose from and customize further. Finally, as the pioneer of Knowledge Process Automation, DeepSee infuses decision intelligence through the entire process, allowing teams to improve their operations using a machine learning model that empowers them to simulate real scenarios with small or large amounts of data.

In a sea of automation solutions, DeepSee is doing digital transformation differently. Don’t believe me? Reach out for a demo and let me show you how DeepSee’s automation solution provides banking and financial services industry a huge opportunity to monetize the data their operations process daily.