Hello, my name is Jamil Spain, Developer Advocate with the IBM Cloud.
And today's topic that I want to discuss is Hyperautomation.
Now I'm the product of two parents that had a long career in education.
So naturally in my household growing up when we didn't understand something,
the first instinct, like a word, was to break it down to the smaller parts here.
I wanted to kind of do this exercise with you today as we analyze this work.
And a second thought, as technologists, you're going to see a lot of terms that occur here and there.
So it's helpful to kind of understand the context.
So get a good method to understand context, just by breaking it down to different parts.
So let's take the first part, the "hyper".
Now, with hyper as an adjective that can naturally mean that you are extremely ...
had to stick that in there, sorry for the typo ...
extremely active for what you're kind of working with, so you can say like something as, well,
is kind of used to describe the word hyper,
but then you have the other context of it being like a prefix like hypersensitive, hyperactive,
and that kind of means kind of like "beyond" or kind of "above".
And these are all from merriam-webster.com, one of my favorite places that I like to do.
So we kind of use that context here to really kind of understand what it kind of looks like.
So we're really talking about above being very accessible or going the extra mile with automation.
Now, "automation" - another word you can't just really break it down that way,
but we know from technology that the automation really applies to
some techniques to facilitate automation from a technology perspective.
And let's go through a few of those from what we kind of learn from these other videos, and I'm just going to summarize it here.
And then we'll put the two together for a small use case to show how we can be hyper,
how we can hyper-automate, all right, I made a little verb there.
All right, so the first is the word RPA.
So you have RPA, one of the most popular techniques here.
I would try to write all that out, but let's say the Robotic Process Automation there
is the process of using using bots to accomplish redundant tasks.
So the most popular way is that you have a website that you want to kind of do the repetitive task of data entry.
I can feed a bot a JSON object or some data payload,
and it takes that information and does the process of filling out a web form,
which hereby gives me data input there.
So bots do data input.
One of those scenarios that can happen there as well.
So we have a second use case for AI, or NLP, so that's using Artificial Intelligence or Natural Language Processing,
which is generally the process where it's pretty much making systems understand human language.
I'll abbreviate that there.
So, I can feed it a sentence and it kind of understands some context of what I'm kind of referring to
and making some decision based upon that particular context that we're talking about.
Now we did a video, I did a video on business rules may want to check that out,
but that brings up my next topic of BPM or ... I'm going to abbreviated as Business Rules.
But we'll say the BPM is Business Process Management.
And when we went through the business rules video, we kind of discuss how you can have certain template sets of actions in place.
So again, I feed it a data payload or some type of data that describes a particular workflow that I'm going through.
And based upon it, I have preset actions that will execute based upon the information that has been supplied.
So definitely being able to actually make decisions, all right, based on the data.
OK, and lastly, in this context of automation and building these cool tools, you're going to have something usually a low-code, no-code UI.
So, you have the circumstance where I'm able to really orchestrate
and experience using different amounts of these tools
with a particular interface that helps me kind of build this and really accelerate
the way I can build these processes and go from there.
Another thing with the BPM, at some point I can make decisions not just how to process data,
but I can make decisions on when I need human interaction as well.
And because we kind of go through in building these type systems, they can be reused in many different contexts here.
So we defined the hyper, which we know going above and beyond.
Let's use the positive aspects of there.
And then we have the what facilitates automation, from that perspective.
So, "Hyperautomation", putting them together, is using one or more of these methods.
OK, we've gone above and beyond.
We're not using one.
We're using a series of these in a workflow to accomplish a task.
So let's take a look at what something like that might mean.
And when I said, OK, how can we illustrate something that really defines this?
I have kind of seen some particular scenarios that I think may apply here.
So let's take the process that I've seen, maybe of you renewing your license
and I've seen many systems kind of facilitate that process.
A very repetitive task, definitely, that needs to scale out across many, many different people.
And although we love going to the local driver licensing office and standing in line,
it's a perfect activity to be facilitated through Hyperautomation.
Let's break it down here and prove my point here.
So let's say that this start off, you have maybe some ...
let's add one more piece here,
one thing that you can do with AI is having bots that intake data.
OK, the reason I mention that is because this use case is definitely going to use that here.
So let's say that we start off by having a chat bot.
And I'm going to be at my computer and you tell me that in order to
to be able to renew my license, I have to first interact with a chat bot.
Which is going to ask me a series of questions that it's going to use a little bit of natural language processing to understand my request.
OK, it's going to probably ask my registration, what's my title or maybe my license ID,
use that, interpret that to go back and make queries to understand what is going on there.
And from that state, it helps then useful to kind of process me into a BPM, or some process engine,
or a business rules where I can say that I need to actually, maybe say, is it active?
All right, has it been a little while?
If so, maybe I need to route you to talk to someone, or maybe I want to check secondary systems.
Maybe I want to check to see if you have a safety inspection filled out on file already, or I want to check with other agencies.
Maybe, maybe want to check with Death Records to see if there's someone that is deceased and not actually alive.
So maybe the check for fraud or any other circumstances there.
Just throwing out a couple of scenarios there.
But I can make decisions to route you in a certain way,
or actually, and take your data that you've given me and ask you more questions,
and then take that, build me a full object that I can then pass off to maybe some robotic task here.
Maybe the system that we use to actually order the new licenses or new registrations,
maybe a legacy system, so instead of paying someone to fill out paper forms,
send that data in, mail it or fax, and then they have to manually enter it into a system.
I can use the chat bot to ask questions using NLP to get the right data set that I then need to feed into a bot,
which can then fill out the process.
And next thing I know, a week later, my license arrives.
Now this is just one example of a use case that you can do,
but you can definitely see how all these elements can kind of work together.
And most importantly, having a low-code user interface to orchestrate
that whole process and have the visibility and operational aspects there to work.
But definitely take a look at any of these methods.
Definitely learning or being able to hyperautomate yourself requires you to have some context
of these different areas, but put them together.
And I'm interested to find out what you can create for your next project.
Thank you for your time.
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