Why Intelligent Process Automation May Be the Key to Balancing Efficiency and Organizational Agility
When I was in middle school, I was on a fantastic soccer team. We were undefeated and went on to win our youth soccer region.
I led our defensive squad, which powered (if I do say so myself) our team to its dominance. It was one of the greatest experiences of my young life — and taught me a life lesson that may now be essential for enterprise leaders to learn as well.
While I would love to take credit for our prowess, the real credit belonged to the team’s assistant coach, responsible for coaching our defense.
“You need to conserve your energy and play smart, Charlie,” he used to tell me. “But always be ready to strike when you see an opening.”
While it was common in professional, college, and even high school teams, it was very unusual for defensive players to ever do anything but hang back and defend in middle school. But our coach taught us that we were the ones who could see the whole field — and the opportunities when they developed.
So, he’d tell us, we had to be defenders, but be agile enough to go on offense when the time was right.
Little did I know that he was teaching much more than how to be a good soccer defenseman. He was teaching me a life skill — and something that is now an essential lesson for enterprise leaders everywhere: if you want to win, you need to strike a balance between playing defense and going on offense when an opportunity presents itself.
In the context of the modern enterprise, the way to do that may be to embrace a new approach called Intelligent Process Automation.
All the chatter around digital transformation belies the real challenge you face.
To thrive in this rapidly shifting market, you need to strike an almost impossible balance: continually improve efficiency and optimization, whilecreating organizational agility.
These two critical objectives intersect at the automation of enterprise processes — and can almost seem to be at counterpoints. Many of the business process technologies and approaches, such as business process management (BPM), enterprise content management (ECM), robotic process automation (RPA), digital process automation (DPA), and low-code platforms tend to excel at one or the other, but not both.
By themselves, they rarely enable organizations to find this elusive balance between efficiency and agility. More to the point, they introduce their own levels of rigidity. Every step that increases efficiency often decreases agility, and vice versa.
“The ability to adapt and respond according to both new events and consistent with existing rules and policies is critical to organizational agility,” explained Nathaniel Palmer writing in Forbes. “Yet this goal is often at odds with automation focused on scalability and repeatability.”
The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies promised to help bridge this gap — and it has, to some degree — but the underlying problem remains. As long as organizations remain focused on the technology, rather than the business problems they must solve, they will come up short for the simple reason that no one technology is sufficient to deliver what they really need.
A new method, which has been bubbling just below the surface for a few years, may offer a way to strike this tricky balance by integrating a combination of approaches and technologies and mixing in AI.
McKinsey calls this approach Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) and believes that it can help enterprises shift their focus to the customer. “While IPA takes over rote tasks, human workers can focus on delighting customers and thinking about how new troves of data outside the organization…can help achieve business goals.”
Doing so may be the key to enterprises striking the balance between defense and offense, and between efficiency and agility.
Like every buzzword before it, IPA is an imperfect term — and one that technology providers are already abusing.
