Automating @ Scale

Most companies that deploy automation technology recoup their investment in the first two years. The benefits of automation are clear and quantifiable: increased accuracy, boosted productivity and hours back to the business. But scaling automation across a department or an enterprise can be challenging. In fact, ISG Research shows that fewer than 10 percent of enterprises successfully adopt automation or introduce cognitive capabilities across multiple functions. Though automation is a key part of digital transformation, many companies stall out in their automation initiatives after they have automated just 20 processes. They start strong and then hit “the RPA wall.”

More than anything, we’ve found that hitting the RPA wall is due to organizational resistance to change and a lack of process and technology standards. It has less to do with the technology itself and more to do with a lack of strategy and governance.

To break through the wall, organizations need a way to manage and prioritize demand, build hardened bots that won’t fail, measure and communicate business value, make sure the people who are impacted by automation know what to do, and govern the change that is fundamentally redefining the way work gets done.

Until now, enterprises have lacked a full-service program to help them systematically create automation competency, deliver consistently, and scale reliably. They’ve needed an easy-to-use system to educate, enable and mobilize citizen developers, reinforce best practices and simplify and standardize the code review process. Building all these capabilities one by one is daunting.

To help our clients break through – and to avoid hitting the RPA wall altogether – ISG Automation has acquired Neuralify, a unique subscription-based digital enablement platform that facilitates faster RPA adoption across the enterprise. With Neuralify, ISG will offer the industry’s only applied, continuous learning platform designed for remote learning—especially important in the current work-from-home environment. By adding continuous training for building and scaling bot workforces and a proprietary Code Quality Analyzer to our full suite of automation services, ISG will significantly accelerate our clients’ automation journeys.

The combination of Neuralify and ISG Automation will bring new levels of automation capabilities to our combined clients and enterprises worldwide. Together, we are able to offer an end-to-end suite of services, including automation assessments and strategy, implementation and integration of software bots, establishment of center of excellence to scale automation, organizational change management and production support services. 

ISG Automation clients will have access to a cloud-based digital enablement platform that provides:

• Learning Platform: the gold-standard in hands-on continuous learning and mentoring
• Code Quality Analyzer: automation for tedious and error-prone code review process
• Games Arena: competition environment to foster internal awareness and engagement
• Virtual Sandbox: zero-install access to our RPA environment and enterprise applications

These capabilities compress the learning curve and increase developer productivity. The digital enablement platform has shown to help clients achieve, on average, a 270 percent increase in output, as measured by quality and pace of automation development, and a 43 percent reduction in build costs, with higher quality and less rework.

Realizing the true promise of automation requires a wholistic and disciplined approach that empowers teams to embrace automation and even become automation evangelists. ISG can help you evaluate, educate, automate and operate on a scale that will make the most of your automation investments.

About the author

Chip Wagner serves as Chief Executive Officer of ISG Automation, the fast-growing robotic process automation (RPA) division of ISG. ISG Automation helps clients navigate the myriad challenges, risks and opportunities of automation – from selecting the right automation software partner to building a bot workforce to leveraging the technology to transform and improve business outcomes. Chip joined ISG in 2016 through the acquisition of Alsbridge, where he was CEO. Most recently, he was president of ISG Americas Industries. Chip has more than 30 years of technology experience and is a recognized industry expert in the nascent field of RPA and a regular speaker on the impact of innovative and disruptive technologies.  In addition, Chip has deep knowledge in business transformation, contract negotiations and telecommunications and has been directly involved in more than $15 billion in sourcing transactions.