The Pega Discover event series delivers insights on the topics and technologies that solve today’s business challenges and prepares businesses for the future. In our recent, interactive Intelligent Automation Online Summit, guest experts from Siemens, Accenture, MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research, and others shared their strategies for building agility into the workforce, simplifying the complexities of distributed enterprise architectures, and growing value in challenging times. “Changes in the world have massively changed technology and massively disrupted business,” says Pega’s Founder and CEO Alan Trefler. “All of this means re-imagining your technology platforms, not as technology, but as a business architecture. It's about defining and operationalizing your business logic so it expertly powers customer business outcomes.”
How data is driving today’s digital workforce
According to Dr. Kristine Dery of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the development, delivery, and use of digitization and employee-facing technologies. As someone who has studied the connection between technology and the way people work for the past 15 years, Dr. Dery recognizes the speed with which businesses are evolving. The ones that want to survive and thrive are relying on technology to give them the flexibility and fluidity they need to manage a workforce that may need to shift locations – for example, between in-office and remote settings – as well as shift roles or work across new teams. The upside: Businesses are adopting new technologies at a faster pace. But it also means business need to re-skill or up-skill employees to be able to use new technology and adapt to a more agile operational structure.
“We suddenly have an opportunity here,” explains Dr. Dery. “The challenge is to be able to capitalize on that going forward and to take that into a place where we're really building a future-ready workforce.”
To do that, businesses leaders first need to take time to understand the employee journey, just as they would a customer journey, to determine what their workplace and workflow will look like going forward. From data available through workplace technologies, businesses can gain new insights on how to digitize work and break it into components that can be configured in different ways to maximize reuse. This approach helps build the “digital fitness” of an organization – the ability to apply a set of skills to new or unknown parts of the workplace. It also builds a foundational framework that enables a fluid workspace and innovative thinking.
“What [leaders] are doing is they're bringing together these two capabilities, the digitization of work and the skills and capabilities required to do that,” says Dr. Dery, “and they're doing it in a way that enables people to really unlock these new creative capabilities and deliver value. They're learning to listen. They’re listening, and then they're getting out of the way and allowing people to really deliver value.”
A journey in end-to-end process optimization at Siemens
How does a 170-year old company with more than 380,000 employees around the globe continue to grow and deliver value? “We are convinced that digitalization is the biggest growth market,” says Jürgen Schönenborn of Siemens. “That’s why we’re focusing on intelligent end-to-end digitalization for our customers and also for Siemens.”
Siemens has always been a technology-driven company. But with more than 280 office sites across 150 countries and a diverse business portfolio, their internal IT systems were complicated. There was no central process governance and no central decision-making structure. They needed an enterprise-grade solution that could support easy workflows as well as complex business process management applications – a modern and integrated platform.
Five years ago, they adopted a low-code, Pega-based solution that continues to empower Siemens’ innovation. In that timeframe they’ve implemented more than 30 applications on the Pega cloud, improved processing efficiency by 80 to 90%, and enhanced collaboration between IT and business groups. By using an Agile approach and taking advantage of Pega’s reuse and specialization capabilities, they are localizing application components and implementing new features and application changes on a weekly basis.
“It’s really important to identify integration points as early as possible to involve the responsible people and align timelines with them,” advises Jürgen. His other tips for successfully managing a complex digital transformation project include: Understand the business needs and requirements; think big but start small; identify a minimum, viable, or loveable scope that can be implemented quickly; and include people that are passionate about the project to help drive it to completion. “With their clear vision and enthusiasm,” says Jürgen, “they will influence the project team to go the extra mile for your successful project.”
Creation of the intelligent enterprise
“If there’s anything that we have learned in the last year, it’s disruption is everywhere,” began Reshma Nuggehally, Pega Practice Lead at Accenture. “To survive and thrive, we need to be prepared and able to leverage technology to unleash value. A shift from a traditional enterprise to an intelligent enterprise will help you turn threat into substantial growth.”
The shift involves reimagining business processes, focusing on data to fuel intelligence, building in automation to support human and machine interactions, and connecting it all through a cloud-based platform. Using intelligent automation, this next generation enterprise platform coordinates BPM, RPA, AI, and manual task work to increase efficiency and accelerate value through the cloud.
With this approach, Accenture’s customers are seeing real success. One recent implementation used no-code, RPA, and AI to create an intelligent customer care platform that helps agents better understand the context of a customer inquiry so they can resolve issues more quickly and increase customer value. “This is a classic example where we are using intelligent automation to shift from operational efficiency towards value creation,” said Reshma.
And it’s why Accenture is investing $3 billion over the next three years in their Cloud First group to help clients accelerate their digital transformations. “Together, Accenture with Pega is not just transforming processes and systems, but fundamentally reimagining the work and the workforce to be much more agile and resilient while achieving sustainable growth in the future.”
Watch the replays and get the full stories on how agile, low-code development, and intelligent automation are accelerating enterprise transformation and creating real value.
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Keynotes |
How data is driving today’s digital workforce – Dr. Kristine Dery, MIT Sloan School of Management in the Center for Information Systems Research; Don Schuerman, Pega |
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A journey in end-to-end process optimization at Siemens – Jürgen Schönenborn, Siemens AG; Adam Field, Pega |
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Creation of the intelligent enterprise – Reshma Nuggehally, Accenture |
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Spotlight Talks |
Intelligent automation improves customer experience and delivers operational excellence – Bertus van den Hof, Achmea |
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The fall of the Alt+Tab champion – Amrendra Kumar, Cognizant; Maurits Cleremans, ING |
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Intelligent automation using Pega in grid modernization – Timothy Hicks, Southern California Edison |
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Provider onboarding at over 50% faster speed – Valbhav Srivastava, Virtusa; Sri Ramesh Eevani, Healthfirst |
Want even more insights? See content from our Discover Events on one-to-one engagement and customer service, plus join us and connect with brands from around the world on the latest tech, ideas, and success stories at our largest virtual event, PegaWorld iNspire!