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Leveraging design thinking in enterprise automation strategy
Building for performance
Design thinking can turbocharge automation value. By applying design thinking in enterprise automation strategy, you can drive return on investment (ROI) exponentially, not incrementally. Are you ready to build for performance?
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- Positioning automation programs for greater value
- Design thinking in automation techniques
- The bottom line
- Explore more from the opportunity of enterprise automation series
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Positioning automation programs for greater value
Does this sound familiar? Last quarter, you were able to execute on your top 25 automation candidates, based on your established criteria. These automated processes provided significant benefits, from freeing up 25 percent of a critical employee’s time to significantly reduce the need for a vendor that costs your organization thousands of dollars a year.
These are certainly success stories, and you plan to continue your automation journey. But collectively across the automation, you’re not seeing the operational transformation you know is possible.
Many organizations that have implemented automation at scale are in the same position. They have realized significant returns but are left wanting more: More value, more ROI, more impact. So how can you uncover new opportunities for larger-scale transformation? And how can you position your automation programs for greater value—right from the starting line?
The answer may lie in the use of design thinking—the discipline that consumer-focused companies have long used to develop new products and services.
Think about your favorite experiences as a consumer. Maybe it’s hailing a car using a ridesharing app or renting a fabulous condo for your next vacation. It’s very likely that design thinking techniques went into creating that experience.
Simply put, design thinking (aka human-centered design) is an immersive process that helps organizations build leading products and services by looking beyond individual tasks (requesting a car on your phone) to the larger intended outcome (arriving at your destination). Applied to automation, design thinking shifts the focus from individual business actions that accomplish specific tasks to broader strategies that accomplish entire outcomes, resulting in more comprehensive transformation and higher returns.
Here are some design thinking in automation techniques that can help you move from small-scale success to large-scale transformation:
Bring people together
In the same way a consumer company might study its customers as they try to meet a need (like getting a ride to a concert), companies can engage their employees to understand the actions they take to accomplish business outcomes.
Take your accounts receivable team. To focus on a major outcome, say processing invoices for the month, you should engage the people involved in the individual tasks leading to the outcome—from the employee responsible for generating invoices to the teams responsible for following up on outstanding receivables, as well as the managers and executives who oversee the entire process.
By bringing together a representative sample of these players, you can better understand the meaning behind their actions, see the connections among their roles, and uncover opportunities for deeper automation.
See the similarities
To achieve true transformation through automation, you should look beyond individual actions, to all of the actions that make up a major outcome of a department. Only then can you identify what it could take to automate a significant portion of that outcome. Affinity clustering is a design thinking technique that sorts items according to similarity. Applied to automation, this means identifying the actions that lead to a desired outcome.
Here’s how it works: Start with a prioritized list of automation candidates. Then, in a working session with a cross-functional team, create clusters of automation candidates by desired end outcome or large business goal. As trends emerge, prompt teams to discuss and rearrange their clusters, looking for connections.
As teams work through this process, they start to see clusters and groupings with a greater percentage of high-value automation candidates. They may also find situations where including a seemingly low value task allows them to connect clusters of tasks and create end-to-end automations. By creating groupings of tasks with the same intended outcome, teams can create combined automations with values much greater than those of the same number of individual automated tasks.
Make a map
Once you’ve moved beyond a prioritized list of individual automation candidates—and settled on a set of connected groups of tasks—it’s time to look across these processes and understand the who and why behind the actions.
Journey mapping is a design thinking technique that can work well here. It’s a way to document and visualize the people involved in the actions that make up the larger workflow—and uncover the meaning, desired outcome, and pain points behind those people’s actions.
Applying this technique to automation, as you move from one person to the next in the journey, you can deepen your understanding of what’s really happening within a process and why. The result? You may be able to uncover additional opportunities for automation and process improvement both within and between processes.
See the forest, not the trees
With a deep understanding of the journey toward a larger business goal, you can then work to identify the true value of the individual processes within that journey.
This is where the whole can truly be greater than the sum of the parts. Previously, you may have automated 10 high-priority automation candidates that resulted in 10 individual success stories and 10 individual ROIs.
But by applying design thinking in enterprise automation strategy, you may find that a mix of candidates—such as six high-priority candidates, three medium-priority candidates, and one low-priority candidate—can drive their individual returns and enable a business unit to reorganize. Bingo. You just found a way to deliver a much higher net return.
The bottom line
Design thinking can turbocharge automation value. By applying design thinking techniques across your automation program, you can be better positioned to drive ROI exponentially, not incrementally. You can shift your focus from reducing defects and cycle times to reimagining business outcomes. And that’s how you’ll get out in front of your competitors.
By focusing on the organizational, operational, and governance readiness aspects of automation—up front—executives can significantly increase the speed and scale of their automation projects.
As the competitive advantages of automation continue to expand, and the use of automation technologies becomes more common, the need for organizations to accelerate their automation programs and quickly move to scale becomes more urgent. It’s time to move into the fast lane:
- Choosing the right lane forward: Streamlining automation opportunity assessment and prioritization
- At the intersection of control, speed, and agility: How to optimize enterprise automation at scale with a center of excellence
- Building for performance: Leveraging design thinking in automation strategy
- Going the distance: Measuring the ROI of automation
- Leaning into the curves: Automation lessons learned from the driver’s seat
Let's talk
Valeriy Dokshukin
Partner | Digital Risk Management Solutions Leader
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
vdokshukin@deloitte.com
Michael Koppelmann
Senior Manager
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
mkoppelmann@deloitte.com
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