Automation Outcomes, Not Just Automation Rates
How to judge an automation program’s success through overall business impact
Welcome
A note from Adam Famularo, CEO of WorkFusion: CIOs in Banking and Financial Services are rapidly adopting automation and artificial intelligence (AI) technology, helping drive one of the fastest-growing software sectors. Understanding the success of an organization’s automation journey can be difficult. How can CIOs best assess their return on investment for automation? WorkFusion advises a focus on business impact: The goal is not merely more automation but achieving true value from implementations.
In this Gartner Newsletter issue from WorkFusion, we share two reports that focus on automation outcomes.
- Our white paper, “The False Focus on STP,” explains the need to look beyond a common metric of automation success: straight-through processing (STP). While STP is an indicator of the level of automation, without context it can be misleading — which can set automation leaders down the wrong path.
- The Gartner report, “How CIOs Can Choose the Right Metrics to Quantify the Benefits of Financial Services Automation Investments,” is a strong complement to our white paper. It emphasizes the importance of business priorities, providing a comprehensive view of metrics to assess.
We believe that focusing on business outcomes is imperative for automation success, and we hope guidance provided in this newsletter will help CIOs and other transformation leaders establish an impactful vision and define a roadmap for success.
WorkFusion
16 September 2021
As automation continues to proliferate throughout countless enterprises, effective measurement of success is vital. But automation leaders often wear metaphoric blinders. By focusing on measuring straight-through processing (STP), the frequency of transactions that go end-to-end with no human touch, some go so far as to equate automation success with maximized STP. When pursuing new areas to automate, their narrowed vision of automation success is reduced to a simple question: “What’s the STP?”
Granted, this question and its underlying metric have some merit. People wanting to adopt and scale automation all want to automate well. Unfortunately, what STP-focused leaders don’t realize is that an exclusive pursuit of this one metric can lead them astray. Yes, it can be a useful indicator, but without consideration of the business impact and organizational context of automation, STP alone can be a meaningless figure, while other metrics provide smarter targets. Further, in looking at new areas to automate, staying fixated here may mean overlooking more impactful opportunities.
Think Better Transport, Not Faster Horses
Early innovation in personal transport is often discussed by the saying that if customers were asked what they wanted, they would have requested “faster horses.” Similarly with business process automation, when people equate automation success with STP, they are falling in a trap of a common perception — conflating the means (the horse; automation) and the ends (faster; STP) — while missing out on the overall opportunity (better transport, stronger organizations). [...]
4 March 2021
Misaligned metrics can stop any hyperautomation project and make it hard to build the business case for the next one. To combat this, bank, investment and insurance CIOs need to use metrics aligned to the business outcome. We provide a list of metrics with key considerations when making decisions.
Overview
Key Findings
- Banks and insurers find it easier to measure efficiency in terms of time saved and reduced FTE. However, they find that it is harder to correlate the success of automation initiatives to other necessary business results like risk reduction and revenue generation.
- A common challenge among banks and insurers is that without measurable attributes tied to the business goal, prioritization of automation projects reverts to internal politics and negotiation. Projects then get downgraded as they are wrongly assessed as not creating value.
- Employees are more likely to indicate that technology implementations are successful when they are involved in the concept and design phase than when they get involved only when the technology is ready to use.
Recommendations
Bank, investment and insurance CIOs driving financial services technology modernization and transformation should:
- Correlate each automation initiative to desired outcomes by choosing success metrics that are aligned to the business goal, using the suggested metrics in the downloadable file included in this research. These should be clearly defined at the start of each project. [...]