The more you can focus on engineering business process automation for the things that make you unique as a company, the faster you can move.
What are the most important considerations for organisations planning for digital acceleration?
The first side of this is that you need strong supplier relationships. You need to outsource stuff that somebody else can do better than you, which of course we’ve seen time and time again. The other side is automation. The more you can focus on engineering business process automation for the things that make you unique as a company, the faster you can move. A computer doesn’t sleep or work nine to five. It’s a 24/7 model across multiple time zones and that means you don’t need such an extensive workforce.
Automate everything. That’s one of my guiding principles. You cannot run a business when people are manually doing things because people leave, and the information leaves the business with them.
We are trying to push clients down the direction of maintaining resilience through agility. To do that you have to ensure there is understanding of how the operating model works, so people can achieve that.
How are you helping client organisations become more agile, and resilient?
We are trying to push clients down the direction of maintaining resilience through agility. When something happens that changes an organisation, like Covid or a tsunami or the death of a senior team member, there needs to be a person that can jump in and play the part of the commando, who’s going to identify what needs to be done immediately, how we solve this crisis. To do that you have to ensure there is understanding of how the operating model works, so people can achieve that.
One of the things we try and do with customers is help them use modern media techniques such as creating videos to go into their learning management system to communicate the point. We use Videoscribe, which allows us to quickly create an engaging five-minute video on what the expectations are in various crisis situations. It really helps organisations to maintain a group of people who understand the requirements well.
If we look at Covid, you had people who were used to maintaining on-premise networks and suddenly those skills were completely useless, and they had to adapt to remote working. Instead, they needed skills like software defined VPNs to enable people to access solutions and continue operating from home.
Companies are going to need to restructure at the C-Level to get the full value from their CIO and CTO, or they’ll find that their competition is going to be innovating them out of existence over the next three years.
What's your view on how companies need to change structure to be more agile and adapt to change?
One of the issues that many large organisations face is that they treat the CIO and CTO as little more than a managed service provider and those people don’t have a seat at the table. That’s going to need to change over time because successful companies are those that see themselves as technology companies that happen to do something else. Like the Financial Times is a tech company that happens to sell a newspaper, and ASOS is a tech company that sells clothes. The CTO and CIO play a key part in strategy at those companies.
Companies are going to need to restructure at the C-Level to get the full value from their CIO and CTO, or they’ll find that their competition is going to be innovating them out of existence over the next three years.
With clients who are investigating the potential of AI we look at the business process first. What are people doing, what’s their job? Once you can establish the business problem and process, that’s when you can start to think about where AI and automation can help.
RICHARD SLATER
Head of Managed Services
Amido
What role do you see AI and machine learning playing in accelerating digital transformation?
In the short term, AI and ML are going to be core to decision support systems. They’re still in a position where you can’t entirely trust them, but they are helping humans be more efficient at what they do.
We delivered a chatbot for NHS 24 during the pandemic, which essentially reduced the length of time it took staff to find information about coronavirus from two to three minutes to just ten seconds, by typing in the question the customer was asking. We won a Digital Technology Leaders Award recognising the innovation and success of the service.
But of course, perhaps one time out of 20, the answer is wrong or the question is too complex, and the chatbot needs to triage that query and signal that human intervention is needed to provide the right information.
I think we’ll be in that place for a few years, whether it’s chatbots or self-driving cars, because when you’re dealing with issues of health and safety, we aren’t yet in a place where we can entirely remove the need for human intervention. But over the next decade we will see trust levels increase and I think we’ll start to see regulators bringing in regulations of this process, because it can’t turn into a Wild West.
With clients who are investigating the potential of AI we look at the business process first. What are people doing, what’s their job? We found one client had hired people to type up transcripts of voice from radio transmissions. We thought there has to be a way to capture that automatically using text engines. Once you can establish the business problem and process, that’s when you can start to think about where AI and automation can help.
Amido is the cloud-native consultancy for better business outcomes. They help their clients think and do, delivering strategy and engineering software that gives them the confidence to take on their toughest challenges and improve the lives of their people and customers.