>> From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas,
it's the cube covering UI path Forward IV
brought to you by UI path.
>> Welcome back from the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
The cube is live at UI path Forward IV.
I am Lisa Martin here with Dave Volante.
We're going to be talking about roadblocks to automation
and how to navigate around them.
Joining us next is Purna Dodda Paneni,
expert associate partner at Bain and company.
Perna, welcome to the program.
>> Purna: Thanks Lisa. Happy to be here.
>> Lisa: Talk to us about some of the use cases
that Bain is working on with UI path.
And then we'll dig into some of those roadblocks
that you guys have uncovered.
>> Yes, this started a few months ago
where we were working with Brandon,
who's the product lead on the UI bot side.
We wanted to understand
what's the state of citizen development
and what are the blockers
and how we should both from the product side,
but also on the automation journey side,
we need to dig deeper and understand
where each of the clients and the employees
are going through the journey together.
>> And if you look at it
from the citizen developer perspective,
what are some of those roadblocks?
>> There are a few. So when, like, if you,
before we go to the roadblocks,
there are three main concerns,
or I would say critical groups
that are involved in being successful with automation-
the organization, or BU leaders,
the IT and employees.
So each of the groups have different perceptions
on like misconceptions or perceptions
on benefits of automation and how to go about it.
The blockers that we have seen
were like three sets of blockers.
The first is cognitive,
where employees are unaware of automation
or the benefits of automation.
And the second one is more organizational
where organizational leaders
and how they feel about automation
or how they think about employees
when we introduce automation to them.
One part of that is there's a misconception
with ordination leaders
that employees are fearful of job loss
when you introduce automation.
What we have seen in our research is
it's completely the opposite.
Employees are eager to adopt automation if
given an opportunity.
They are willing to upscale themselves,
and they are willing to save the time
so that they can spend that on
critical value added activities
for their customers in the process.
And a third blocker that we have seen
is more on the product side,
where some of the employees that we talk to
as much as progress has been made by RPA vendors
and low-code no-code vendors,
it's still these tools are not intuitive,
user-friendly for business users.
They still feel that they need to go through some training
programs and have better user-friendly interfaces.
>> Dave: What's the entry point to an organization?
I mean, first time I ever heard of RPA
years and years and years ago,
it was at a CFO conference.
Okay. So that's cool.
It seems like at Forward IV,
there's a lot more CIO presence here,
and that, is that relatively new
or did I just miss it before?
>> Purna: It is relatively new.
So like, when we looked at,
like in the past few years,
the entry point has been someone in finance
or IT has heard about RPA, the benefits of it.
They went and bought a handful of licenses
and then they went and implemented it.
But it's one of just a handful of processes.
It's not organizational wide.
It has been mostly on a smaller subscale of processes
and projects.
Now that like organizations are realizing
employees are asking
and we are slowly growing up with automation COEs.
Now it's intersecting with the CXL level of,
if it has to intersect with your,
or if you want to reinvent your business through automation,
it has to come from the CXL level.
And that's where we are seeing more and more CIOs
are being involved in decisions on automation, journeys,
the technologies that have to buy and adopt
for the business processes.
>> Dave: So, IT can be an enabler of course,
but also sometimes IT can be a blocker.
>> Perna: Yeah.
>> Dave: And, you know, certainly from security standpoint,
governance, et cetera.
And so one of the things that we heard today in the keynotes
was you don't want to automate -
The CIO - he or she owns this application portfolio,
and everybody wants to do new projects
because that's the fun stuff we heard from one CFO.
Yeah , you add up all the NPV from the new projects.
It's a bigger than the valuation of the company. Right?
But the CIO is stuck having to manage the infrastructure
and all the processes around
the existing application portfolio.
One of the things I heard today was
don't automate an application or a process
that you're trying to retire
because we never get rid of stuff in IT.
So I wonder,
should automation, like an enterprise wide automation,
should there be kind of an
application rationalization exercise
or a business process rationalization coincident
with that initiative?
>> Well, absolutely.
I think that was one of the blockers that we have seen,
like some of the misconceptions and some of the blockers,
when IT looks at it for them,
they consider like you're bringing all these tools.
You're asking business users to like who haven't had-
Haven't been trained in technology or programming.
You're asking them to build these automations.
So one, they have to manage with the all the applications
and the tools fraud that happens.
And to manage these automations after the business users
have either left the company or moved on.
So it is essential for them to think through
and provide a streamline tool set on two aspects.
One, IT needs to be as you started off,
IT needs to be an enabler to provide them the specific tools
that they can. They have already blessed.
They've curated it,
which are ready for business consumption.
The second part IT can also do is
providing collaboration platforms
so that business users can learn from each other
and from IT so that they can,
one are developing the right processes,
with the right methodology that is governed by IT
and no security or data governance issues come through.
>> One of the things that you mentioned in terms of
the three roadblocks that you uncovered was that
you were surprised that the results of the research
showed that in fact,
employees are really wanting to adopt automation.
In fact, I think the stat is
86% of employees want automation,
but only 30% of leaders are giving them the opportunity
to use that. That's a big gap.
Why do you think that is?
>> So a few things, right?
I mean, as we talked about the three concerns that you have,
right? One is organization leaders.
If you consider from them,
their view is that employees are not capable of adopting
or building on the automations using these tools
and they need technical skills, but
all the automation vendors have made progress.
And if you look at the tools today,
they're much more user-friendly
and business users are willing to adopt.
The second part is we talked about is like
the fear of job loss from the employee standpoint.
Whereas employees are looking at it as
an opportunity for them to upscale,
but also eliminate the pain points that they have today
in the day-to-day activities, using the automation tools.
And for them,
it is like this is helping them
spend the time with the customers where it matters
on critical value added activities,
versus going through reputative process of the journey.
And the third part we talked about earlier with IT,
IT has this notion that they need to
build and develop anything technical business users
will not be able to build or manage.
And they're also worried about the governance,
the security, and the third part,
which you brought up earlier is that tools fraud is like,
we need to manage like these volume of tools
that are coming in,
which is only adding to their plate of
already busy, busy workforce.
>> I have one of those, it depends questions.
And as a good consultant,
I'm sure you say, well, it depends,
but are there patterns like best practice
or even more than best practices?
Are there sort of playbooks, if you will,
and patterns,
I'm sure it's situational,
but are you seeing patterns emerge where you can say,
Okay, this sort of category should approach it this way.
Here's another one in a different,
maybe it's a department bottoms up, top down.
Can you help us sort of squint through that?
>> Yeah. So in terms of approaches like at least up till now,
the prevalent thing that is happening is like
COEs went and buy some licenses.
They talk about like opportunities that they have.
So it's more of a top-down driven,
like COE driven agenda.
What we are seeing now,
especially with citizen automation
or democratization of automation,
is there's a new approach of including employees
into the journey and bringing the bottoms up approach.
So there's a happy part
where you marry up the top down approach with bottoms up.
And one, you will find opportunities
which are organizational wide with the BU leaders.
And there are ones which are on
the long tail of opportunities,
which employees feel the pain,
but IT or COE doesn't have the time to come
and implement or automate these activities.
Considering like one part we have seen,
which is like increasingly helpful for people
who have done this properly, is including employees.
And one thing we talked yesterday is invest in employees.
They considered automation as investment in employee side,
than something they're doing to employees.
So it's kind of collaborating with employees
to make progress,
which seems to be helping evangelize
and also benefit with automation.
>> How have the events of the last 18 months
impacted this as well?
We've seen so much acceleration
and the mandate for automation.
What are some of the things that you've seen?
>> Sure. So for us, like, even before the pandemic,
we've seen in our research,
so like more than close to 50% of the organizations
that they started the automation journey,
but unable to achieve the savings or targets that they set
themselves for whatever the success factors are,
which had a few reasons.
One, they didn't have the organizational support,
nor they were taking the end-to-end journey
or the customer journey to figure out like,
what are these big opportunities that they can go through?
And they haven't included employees
and to figure out what are the main major pain points
to go through the journey?
One thing that was clear was with COVID,
no one expected this kind of disruption in a pandemic.
There are a lot of offshore centers
or like pretty much different geographies
got disconnected from the work that's being done.
You still need to support your customers.
There is still a higher demand.
What do you do?
It's not like you can scale up your employees in a pandemic.
That's where like we have seen increasing push
towards automation and technology
to see that can help and support and scale
in a pandemic environment
and also help your customers in the journey.
>> In your opinion,
has automation become a mandate as a result of the pandemic?
>> I would say, yeah,
I would consider it more of like now become a,
I would say one,
a competitive differentiator to say like one,
I needed to keep my lights on and resiliency,
but also the companies have done really well,
they saw the advantage
and they weathered the pandemic better with their customers.
Now they use that as a platform
to create a competitive differentiation against their peers
and push things forward.
>> One of the things we heard today in the keynotes is
you got to think about my words, the lifecycle.
>> Perna: Yeah.
You don't just put it in the bot
and then let it just leave it alone.
>> Perna: Yeah.
>> You really have to think through that.
And that seems to me to be where you would help customers
think through how to get the most return out of their
investment UI path product company, they get great.
And so you talk about the value layer that you guys bring.
>> So for us, it's like when we talk to
mostly, we bring in from the business side of the house
to understand what are the key drivers
that you need to work on.
I mean, even before we talk about technology,
we talk about let's understand from the customer standpoint,
what is your customer journey end-to-end
and look through that journey lens,
and let's take the process end-to-end.
Let's look at redesigning process
and making it more optimal and streamlined
and where technology fits in.
That's when we talk about like,
if it is an RPA
or if it's a UI path platform that can support,
let's go through that journey
versus taking the tool itself as the solution
and trying to find every nail that you can hit,
which usually is not sustainable to your point.
Like we need to think through the whole life cycle,
make sure this is going to last, or if you are retiring,
like in the CIO panel,
that was a discussion where
whether we need to think through
when we are going to retire
and make sure like we are in that journey
versus building all these automations
or bringing all these tools
and leaving them alone for IT to manage long-term.
>> Again, last 18 months, again, question about the,
the reactions catalyze facilitated,
thinking about those three roadblocks,
the cognitive roadblocks, the organizational roadblocks,
and particularly what I'm interested in this question
and product,
what are some of the conversations that you've seen
or trends that you've seen
to help those organizations better understand
how to collaborate with each other so that
what they're not doing is putting in RPA point tools,
but really starting to build the right part of,
of a nomination end-to-end journey
into their digital transformation plans.
>> Yeah. I mean, in a way too, I, again,
I'll go back to the three concerns
that we talked earlier, right?
It's IT can only go so far and automate so much
because they haven't seen the business lens
of like how the processes are,
what they have to do end-to-end,
which is where you need to involve the business leaders
who can give you that view from the business side
and employees who are seeing the work day-to-day
and where they can eliminate the pain points.
So the organizations that are successful,
they are creating a collaborative environment
between the three groups to push things forward.
>> Yeah. You have to have that collaboration.
That's- that's critical.
Otherwise that's probably one of the road blockers as well.
>> Yeah. Absolutely.
>> Where does automation fit? '
I mean, you're obviously heavily into automation,
but thinking about the vein portfolio,
the boardroom discussions, where does automation fit?
I mean, there's security,
there's how do we embed AI into our business?
How do we Salsify our business?
How do we do, you know, transform digitally?
Where does automation fit in that whole discourse?
>> So I, I think automation is like
at the heart of digital transformation.
The part which we have seen where the gap is,
is not taking the business angle
and actually thinking through the process end-to-end
versus picking up a tool
and trying to go solve a problem
or find a problem to solve.
And that's where we, we think in,
in our discussions at boardrooms,
it's more of let's think through how you want to be,
imagine your company or how you want to be more competitive
looking into the future,
and like he walked back from that standpoint
and then target apart from,
I mean, the way we call it is a future back,
like where you are today and now like let's go forward
and do what your end state is
and where technology broadly or digital tools
and where automation fits in the process.
>> How do you see what UI path is talking about at this
conference? The announcements from yesterday,
there's a lot of people here, which is fantastic.
How do you see what they're announcing?
The vision that they set out a couple of years ago
that they're now delivering on?
How was other facilitator of organizations
removing those roadblocks?
Because as you said,
automation is a huge competitive differentiator these days.
And if we've learned nothing in the last 19 months,
it's, you got to,
you got to be careful because there's always a competitor
in the rear view mirror who might be smaller, faster,
more agile, ready to take your place.
>> Yeah.
So like a few things that we've seen in the product roadmap
that UI pat talked about is
they are providing the collaboration platform
or tools where the it business owners can work through.
Like for example, automation hub is what they've,
they've talked Atlanta yesterday is
that's the platform where business users
can provide their ideas.
Like you provide process mining tools,
which can capture the process.
And the business users understand the process.
And they are the ones who are putting in
an opportunity on the roadmap.
So you have now a platform
where all the ideas are being cataloged.
And once you implement,
they're being tracked on the automation hub.
So that is providing a platform
for everyone to collaborate together.
The second one, which Brandon talked yesterday is,
the tool itself or studio X.
When we are talking about citizen developers or employees
trying to use and make it more user-friendly is
that's where the studio X,
which is providing that UI interface,
which is easy, intuitive for business users
to build basic automations and try to take that long tail
of opportunities that we talked about.
So all these tools are coming together as one platform play,
which you, I bought.
has been talking about all through the conference
and that is critical for everyone to collaborate
to make a progress versus only thinking it's an IT's job
to implement the automation opportunity, right?
>> That collaboration is, is business critical these days,
right?
Purna, thank you for joining Dave and me
and the program talking about some of the roadblocks
that you've uncovered,
but also some of the ways that organizations in any industry
can navigate around them and really empower those employees
who want automation in their jobs.
We appreciate your insights.
>> Happy to be here. Thanks for having us.
>> You're welcome.
>> For Dave Volante.
I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at UI path Forward IV.
We'll be right back with our next guest.