JUST ADD IMAGINATION - Knowledge Capital Partners

Dr. John Hindle & Dr. Leslie WillcocksKnowledge Capital Partners

Since its introduction in 2012, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has rapidly become a strategic enterprise capability, with leading companies combining RPA and Intelligent Automation to accelerate value realization, master scale challenges, and conquer complexity in ways never before possible. This series of reports highlights how they’re using combinatory innovation to become more competitive and create new value.

MAY 2020

JUST ADD IMAGINATIONEMPOWERING CREATIVITY

“We can pilot and test any thoughts, information, and experiences creatively,

taking different pieces and molding them into

something new.”Chieng Moua

JUST ADD IMAGINATION

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PART FIVE

Using imagination and combinatory innovation, a specialist financial

services BPO provider developed an inexpensive, fast and attractive

“Rent-a-Robot” service based on a connected-RPA platform. The

service enables multi-skilled Digital Workers to be delivered in the

same way staffing agencies deliver temporary human work – with

no upfront cost, full maintenance and retraining. The provider built

an internal “robot factory,” using highly automated development

and maintenance tools and processes to build and deliver Digital

Workers to clients, enabling them to take on additional work and

cost-effectively meet demand peaks.


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PART FIVE

COPYRIGHT © HINDLE AND WILLCOCKS 2020

In this series, we have highlighted how leaders across regions and industries are

using imagination and applying combinatory innovation to address key enterprise

challenges. We’ve seen how they’re integrating an ever-growing suite of Intelligent

Automation capabilities via connected-RPA platforms to accelerate value, master

scale, and manage complexity in their organizations. These achievements are

both impressive and diverse. But where is all this innovation heading? And, who

is leading the way? Let’s explore some advanced examples that may offer clues.

Digital Workers arrive on their worksites pre-trained in key processes.

The service is enabling clients to take on additional work and cost-effectively meet demand peaks.

The Digital Workers arrive on their worksites pre-trained on a

wide variety of key financial processes, including fund transfers,

cost settlements, insurance handling, collection support, deposits

contracts, and even complex loan data calculations, application

verifications and closings – all on multiple platforms and applications,

including SAP, SalesForce.com, Temenos, Uniflow, and others.

Since the cost of the Digital Worker is a fraction of the cost of a human

employee and the Rent-a-Robot pricing model contains no up-front

cost, clients capture financial benefits within a month of deployment,

in addition to rapid availability of fully trained Digital Workers.

As the pace of technology-driven change accelerates, a global

education services provider is using imagination and combinatory

innovation in its quest to become the world’s learning company,

with significant investments in new artificial intelligence (AI)-guided

education tooling. Its operational goal is to create an intelligent Digital

Workforce, capable of self-learning and continuous improvement

across a range of internal and external services, supporting and

working alongside its human professionals.

The company has established a cloud-based connected-RPA

platform in order to exploit AI and cognitive capabilities.

It currently uses the platform to manage rights and royalties

acquisition from a complex network of suppliers for image,

audio, text and video content.

Integrating connected-RPA and intelligent optical character

recognition (OCR) is also simplifying and expediting qualification

and credential checks, and the company is using API calls with

RPA and Python coding for an applicant onboarding validation

process. Learning by doing, the company is moving rapidly into

its vision of becoming the global learning company.

JUST ADD IMAGINATION PART FIVE

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Investing in a strategy of AI guided tools to become “the world’s learning company”.

The goal is to create a Digital Workforce capable of self-learning and continuous improvement, supporting and working alongside human professionals.


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Combinatory innovation isn’t limited to for-profit environments,

either, as a major regional public health care provider has shown.

The provider is using cloud-based Digital Workers to automate

patient care along assigned clinical treatment pathways, with

fewer than 1% exceptions requiring manual intervention. Where the

manual process involved gathering and printing up to 15 pieces of

data for each patient, including scans, clinical tests, visit histories, etc.,

then scanning them into a single pdf file, Digital Workers now read

the content, extract the reason for the referral, and retrieve, merge

and upload all the required data using secure smartcard technology,

and alert consultants the file is ready for review. The Digital Workers

actively monitor a caseload that includes an average of 2,000

referrals per week on a 24/7 basis, reducing the time required for

processing from 25 to 5 minutes.

The provider is automating patient care along assigned clinical treatment pathways.

Based on this success, the provider has also automated maternity

patient self-referrals using connected-RPA and cognitive e-form

technology to receive and verify data, register the patient, assign

appointments, and confirm details to the patient. Letters from clinics

to patients, moreover, are automatically translated into their primary

language and published on the provider’s patient portal.

Finally, the provider is building a new combinatory automation for

clinical coding for ophthalmology and endoscopy patients that uses

connected-RPA and cognitive tools to analyze unstructured data,

identify common themes, categorize the data, and recommend

the likely coding output for treatment records.

2000 REFERRALS PER WEEK IN ONE FIFTH

OF THE TIME.


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The above three cases are just illustrative, as the possibilities are

in fact limitless. We have seen a major insurance company use

machine learning and visual processing with connected-RPA

to reduce the time required to assess an accident claim from

56 minutes to five seconds.

The early pilot alone was saving five million dollars a year

and freeing up 39,000 hours of work time. Another insurance

company combined cognitive automation with connected-RPA to

automate product and sales intelligence, optimize management

intelligence, and carry out rapid claims analytics, transforming

the customer experience.

A major US city government is experimenting with using license

plates as the entry point for analyzing traffic delays and flows.

In this case, connected-RPA is combined with Google Vision and

Microsoft cognitive tools to arrive at dynamic pattern recognition

and traffic solutions. Sam Stone, senior process analyst & developer

at Blue Prism’s Center of Excellence summarized it in this way:


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The scope is becoming almost infinite. I keep thinking there are things we can’t do then realize a bit later that we can.


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Blue Prism’s Vice President of Innovation Chieng Moua sees a

revolutionary future, one in which we’ll enjoy the capability to

download knowledge-as-a-service to any Digital Worker for

any requirement. In Moua’s vision, Blue Prism’s goal is to extend

its customers’ ability to apply imagination and combinatory

innovation, built around connected-RPA.

“Maybe customers don’t know what these new enhancements

should be,” he says, “because they’ve been running a bunch of old

processes. But, in the future, as companies like Blue Prism and

others have gone out there and scoured the planet and identified

the best business practices in retail, for example, customers

who want to be a part of that can just pay an incremental fee to

download that knowledge-as-a-service. And, as the Digital Workers

continuously learn, they’ll actually enhance the knowledge base.”

“What I’m quickly discovering,” Moua says, “is that companies are

still applying mundane work processes to support highly intensive,

highly focused critical decision-making events, because they

don’t want to make a bad decision. You can give a CEO the best

PowerPoint dashboard with all the data correlated with it and it

tells a great story, but this CEO still makes a gut decision.

PART FIVE


Companies are still applying mundane work processes to support highly intensive, highly focused critical decision-making events.

We’ll enjoy the capability to download knowledge as a service to any digital worker for any requirement.

WHERE ARE ALL THESE INNOVATIONS TAKING US?


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PART FIVE

Why is that? Why can’t we say, ‘Mr. CEO, you may not be making

the best decision. Here’s three or four or five scenarios. We can

run it through our predictive analysis tools. We can use our digital

talents to do a ‘what if’ scenario to see if it’s actually applicable

to reaching our goals — financial goals, quality of service goals,

whatever the relevant metrics are.’”

“That analysis capability in itself will be the new PowerPoint,” Moua

explains. “I call it ‘creative intelligence.’ We can pilot and test any

thoughts, information, and experiences creatively, taking all these

different pieces and molding them into something new. I call it

creative intelligence because it does take a bit of a creative mindset,

a natural curiosity, to say ‘what happens if I mix this with that?’

Moua’s “knowledge-as-a-service” vision is a practical solution to the

formidable challenges presented by our exponentially increasing

store of knowledge, continually rendering much of it outdated. As

Bell Labs guru Bob Lucky observes, “purging obsolete knowledge

is probably insufficient in itself to make room for the new stuff….The

complexity of our work is always increasing, similar to the increase in

entropy decreed by the second law of thermodynamics…..You don’t

have to know everything yourself, only how to ask the questions.”


Technology undergoes its own evolution, similar to biological life forms.

We can pilot and test any thoughts, information, and experiences creatively.


Entrepreneurs will “combine technology built for efficiency, speed and cost reduction with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and blockchain to enhance empathy and connection.”

Award-winning economist Brian Arthur argues that technology

undergoes its own evolution, similar to biological life forms. His

insight anticipates the connected-RPA vision – a future in which

entrepreneurs will, in his words, “combine technology built for

efficiency, speed and cost reduction with emerging technologies

like artificial intelligence and blockchain to enhance empathy

and connection.” Increasingly, Arthur believes, these technologies

will become more context-aware, more conscious and more

human-centric, ultimately giving rise to what he calls “Conscious

Combinatorial Technology.”

It is said that what gets measured gets managed. As we’ve seen

in these papers, with connected-RPA, what can be imagined

gets enabled. The examples we’ve featured suggest we’re in the

early stages of what will be an increasingly dynamic and powerful

process, and we can expect to see an abundance of exciting new

technology “life forms” in the coming years.

COPYRIGHT © HINDLE AND WILLCOCKS 2020 09

Authors’ note: Our general research into IT systems at Knowledge Capital Partners dates back over thirty years, while our focus on new technologies — Cloud, RPA, AI, Cognitive, etc. – dates roughly to the emergence of cloud computing around 2010, through the introduction of Robotic Process Automation in 2012, and continuing developments in cognitive technologies. We research, understand and interpret them, in other words, in the longer-term context of IT-based innovation and practice.

Combining technologiesFINALLY

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JUST ADD IMAGINATION - Knowledge Capital Partners

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