A Culture of Automation

“Embed automation into the culture of your organisation. Give people the confidence that they are going to be rewarded for doing this”

This past week executive leaders from O2, BT, Fujitsu, Accenture, Shell, Capgemini, Ericsson, Capita, TESM and Computacenter joined the Resolve System’s team at Percy & Founders in London for an evening of networking and a discussion around best-practices in accelerating incident resolution.

Steve Urwin, Technical Architect at Accenture, shared his experiences in automation from writing code as a C++ developer for the National Insurance System, to enhancing automation scripts while on student placement. Steve referenced David Autor’s TEDx Speech, which he shared an example of how cash machines take away job from banks, but they also allowed them to open more branches, therefore creating more jobs.

Steve further explained that, “Automating for the sole purpose of removing a person’s job is near impossible: you can only automate someone’s job if they help you automate it. If you tell them it will give them the opportunity to take on more interesting work, you’ll obviously have more engagement from them.”

Urwin’s Key Takeaways:

• With regards to automation: Pick something you know the details for; start small.
• Address the fears which will inevitably surface. “Embed automation into the culture of your organisation… give people the confidence that they are going to be rewarded for doing this.”
• When addressing the future of automation, Steve confirmed he believes the future of automation lies within systems like Resolve, “It is not just about the automation engine, it’s about the whole framework that goes around it, the ability to build the components that build up your automation capabilities, the associated framework to manage that, a library that people can search and something that you can quality control.”
• Automation in combination with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and now. AI has taken human processing out of the equation in some use cases. There is an improvement in service desks from sentiment analysis, to natural language processing.
• Automation is about bringing new opportunities to your people, it’s not about telling them to go away. “It’s safe to say we’ll probably do 20% reduction in overall effort, in thinking about the bigger picture, where can these people really add business value, analyzing the reports that have been created rather than building the reports in the first place.”

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