IT Brief, Australia: Director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work Says Automation is a Core Component of Future Business Strategy

“Businesses need to heed the call of automation not just to remain competitive, but also to drive major top and bottom line impact,” writes Benjamin Pring, Director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work and co-author of ‘What To Do When Machines Do Everything’. “For business leaders, automation brings about an interesting opportunity to change the cost structure of their organization, while increasing productivity and quality across the board.” Excerpts:

“In order for an organization to leverage the productivity and cost benefits from automation, it must be agile. For businesses to run smoothly and efficiently, businesses need to invest in automation technologies that will grow, adapt and react to industry changes and shifts over time. In addition, the ability to automate at minimal cost is key. Therefore, automation services that adapt or shift with changing needs and trends should be viewed as important long-term investments.

An important question to consider is where automation should take place in organizations. The best answer? In core operations, specifically back- and middle-office tasks such as billing management, sales support and fraud detection.

Fundamentally, the best tasks to automate are those where the machine itself can take over the majority of the workload without the need for human intervention.

To ensure a successful automation strategy, there are certain criteria that businesses can look to select the types of tasks to automate. These include tasks that are highly repetitive, tasks with low demand for human judgement, tasks that require a low level of empathy, and tasks that generate and handle a large amount of data.

Rather than attempt to fight the burgeoning role that automation will play, the organizations that recognize the great levels of efficiency and value automated processes present are the ones that will have a foot up as automation becomes a core component of any future business strategy.”

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