Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Automation Trends on the Horizon
By Shiva
Ramani, CEO at iOPEX Technologies
The
age of automation has unquestionably arrived. Fast tracked by the pandemic,
automation took center stage in 2020, enabling organizations to streamline
tedious and repetitive tasks and processes as well as improve the overall work
from home experience. Now, new developments in artificial intelligence and
machine learning are driving IT automation trends and influencing change
management strategies across a wide range of industries.
But
what does the year ahead have in store for this rising tech tool? Here are a
few ways we think the industry will grow to meet the needs of the marketplace:
1. Organizations
will lean on Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI). Even before 2020,
digital transformation was on the rise. People were already conversing
through social media platforms, such as Facebook, as well as home
assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa. These applications use speech-based
assistants and chatbots, also known as Conversational AI, that have
recently been fast tracked by the pandemic. Now, recognizing the benefits
of voice optimized responses and contextual awareness, organizations have
begun leveraging Conversational AI to automate communication through
text-to-speech based virtual assistants that improve customers'
satisfaction.
Looking forward, companies will adopt Conversational
AI to achieve efficient operations. By
leveraging Conversational AI, organizations can provide personalized and
differentiated experiences for their customers that ultimately build unique
relationships over time. Each interaction can feel like a 1:1 conversation that
is context-aware and informed by past interactions.By utilizing Conversational
AI, businesses will be able to reduce costs and increase efficiency, drive
sales, improve customer satisfaction and enhance the employee experience.
2. Organizations
will use robotic process automation (RPA) as a stepping stone. Automation as a concept
has been a bit subsumed under the broader category of RPA. While RPA
brings immediate benefits on successful implementation, it does not set
organizations up for true automation success if they do not treat RPA as
just a stepping stone for native digital experiences.
RPA is quite tactical. It helps organizations automate
processes and repetitive tasks which are important for the business to succeed.
As the first stepping stone towards an AI driven workplace, organizations
should stop thinking about the short-term benefits of RPA, and look forward to
what RPA within the organization can lead to a decade from now. The right RPA
implementation will mean an organization will eventually be ready to bring in
solutions like AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, cognitive services
and more. In 2021, RPA will be used as a starting point, but organizations will
continue to build on their RPA wins and tie these wins back to the
organization's broader objectives, such as end-to-end processing and data
orchestration, in order to improve operations.
3. Cloud
networking will continue to grow. Moving forward, traditional
enterprise networking will be disrupted by cloud networking as it will
become mainstream. Businesses today turn to the cloud to drive agility,
accelerate time-to-market and increase scale.
To remain competitive, automate tasks and enable work
from home from anywhere in the world, organizations are adopting a multi-data
center strategy and leveraging the cloud to improve operations. Through cloud
networking and automation, IT admins and cloud admins are able to automate
manual processes and speed up the delivery of infrastructure resources on a
self-service basis. Taking these benefits one step further, cloud automation
can also be used in the software development lifecycle, improving aspects such
as network diagnostics and data security.
4. Organizations
will be forced to prove the value of automation. When thinking about automation
within an enterprise, the primary pain points are costs and developing a
business case for an automation project. Businesses usually have trouble
quantifying the value that will be delivered on account of
automation.
The best place to start when it comes to the
automation journey is to think about unit tasks that make up a process and unit
processes that make up a function. The ability to discover the tasks from the
data flow will give an organization a unique edge in both executing automation
projects and most importantly gaining buy-in for it's adoption.
Automation
is ultimately enjoying sustained growth for many reasons and shows no signs of
slowing down. Therefore, organizations looking to improve their testing
processes should look at these automation trends closely and start adopting
them to stay current and relevant in the fast-changing times.
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About the Author
Shiva
Ramani is an entrepreneur who has been instrumental in setting up several IT
start ups, with the most recent being iOPEX Technologies. Prior to starting
iOPEX, under Ramani's leadership, CSS emerged as a Global 500 Technology player
with a comprehensive offering of Technology Operations Management for
Enterprise, Support Management Services for Consumer Technology Companies and
Lifecycle support services for ISVs. Shiva co-founded CSS with the goal to
create an organization that helps drive technology adoption.