Innovations
July 1, 2024
Innovations: Understanding and Embracing Hyperautomation
Get clarity about hyperautomation, its technology components, and the benefits of hyperautomating processes in your organization.
What is Hyperautomation?
Hyperautomation is a disciplined approach that your organization can use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. It involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools, and platforms, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), and other types of decision, process, and task automation tools.
Hyperautomation significantly expands the scope of traditional automation by applying an ‘automate-everything’ philosophy to every conceivable process. It leverages a broad variety of automation technologies and supporting infrastructure to improve each step that can be automated.
Individual automation projects can be seen as steps in an ongoing, iterative journey toward achieving overall hyperautomation.
An Array of Automation Tools
Hyperautomation is all about identifying and combining technologies with distinct functions—each applied based on its individual ability to tackle a specific task—to optimize the benefits of automation. Technologies can include robotic process automation, intelligent document processing, intelligent workflow, decision support, data fabrics, generative AI, computer vision, and more.
It’s important to note that the potential rewards of both automation and hyperautomation rely on the ability to sequence and orchestrate various activities. The right technologies, when used in the wrong order, may yield disappointing results.
Deciding Which Technologies to Apply
Successful hyperautomation initiatives must begin with your organization’s goals. First, identify the business processes at the heart of your operations. Is task automation an obvious entry point, or are you looking to automate or augment the sequences driving more complex processes?
The graphic above shows which hyperautomation components are best suited to the different requirements of task automation, process automation, and process augmentation.
What Processes Can be Impacted?
Practically any process can be elevated with hyperautomation. That increasingly includes processes happening in a physical environment.
As an example, think about the process of obtaining a business license.
Today, the licensing process incorporates digital steps, like applying online, and manual steps, like on-site inspections. A number of hand-offs between human and computer-based tasks impact the timeline for granting licenses.
Now envision a hyperautomated process that starts with a virtual agent on a mobile device, collects necessary supporting documentation, uses IDP software to process the documents, brings in a generative AI agent to analyze the application according to existing policies and guidelines, approves the application, orders a contractor to conduct an onsite inspection, dispatches an autonomous drone to take aerial photos and sends an autonomous vehicle to conduct an internal inspection. All the data is synthesized using another AI agent, and (finally) a decision is made regarding issuing the license.
This hyperautomated process isn’t fictional. It’s attainable—resulting in faster business creation and economic growth.
Hyperautomation Yields Benefits Across Industries
By applying a holistic, broad-based approach to automating every possible step within a process, your organization can benefit from previously unattainable levels of efficiency, reliability, and accuracy. The positive outcomes cannot be matched by automating processes in isolation.
Gartner has several tools to help you and your organization build and implement a hyperautomation strategy. Your technology investments are the framework for progressing through the maturity cycle of hyperautomation—extending automation beyond point-to-point workflow and human-in-the-loop dependent interactions. Each successful implementation lays the groundwork for less manual effort and higher efficiency.
If you’re interested in the Gartner tools for implementing hyperautomation let us know!
The ILINX Platform is a modular suite of solutions that enable hyperautomation across industries and business processes. Are you looking for a partner to help you document and achieve your organization’s hyperautomation strategy? We can help. Reach out to schedule a conversation.