Welcome to an Innovative and Autonomous 2018
Although we're already a week into 2018 for many organisations this is actually the beginning of the year as schools go back and everyone returns to work en-masse. But what will the workplace look like in the year ahead?
Innovation means culture - Business Model Innovation
Driving innovation will continue to be the way to thrive and survive in 2018, technology innovation leaps forward at breakneck pace, but organisational and operational innovation lags behind.
Innovation must lead to real action, we see organisations developing innovation teams who consider the number of experiments they've run as a measure of success. They're missing the point, the real measure of success is the practical impact on the company. How many experiments have made it through to the mainstream? Don't become a cottage industry, where "Innovation" is done by a crazy group in another building. Innovation needs to be part of the culture of the organisation.
Business Model Innovation is the first step to achieving just that, to creating an environment where innovation can thrive, making it part of the culture of the entire organisation.
Automation
No doubt automation will also continue to be a hot topic in 2018. The emphasis is already changing and more discussion on the impact of machine learning (or AI, artificial intelligence) is happening. For some this is a little premature, there are still many organisations of every size that can reap the low hanging fruit possible with attended and unattended types of robotic automation without the need to leap into machine learning.
Machine learning tools will become more usable in 2018, most major vendors have already started to integrate these tools into their automation suite and open source solutions are demonstrating terrific impact. While the ease of use, performance and scalability of robotic automation has moved it mainstream, there is still work to do before ML achieves the same level of adoption.
When it does, the combination of ML, which can handle unstructured information very well, with robotic automation, which handles structured information and processes very well, will become an essential ingredient of every organisation.
Wzarding Ways
Over Christmas we dropped a short few videos on linked in, if you missed them then I've linked them below, though now it's 2018 you can skip over the first 15 seconds of Christmas music!
Last week was a short week but we've been working on developing a online training which demonstrates how the tools and techniques of lean thinking can be applied directly to the topic of robotic process automation. Recording is about two-thirds complete, please get in touch if you'd like to know more or check out the trailer here.
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