The Virtual COE - Enter the Matrix

An automation center of excellence is responsible for supporting the people, processes, and technologies necessary to maximize the benefits of automation throughout the enterprise. But most of the time, Automation COEs are an afterthought.

Why would you want to make a huge COE staff investment up front without a guaranteed ROI?

Why would you want to overload current staff with COE tasks/responsibilities?

Why would you overpay for a tech provider biased third party system implementation partner that’s never been an automation customer before?

“Why would we hire an entire team to support a technology we haven’t tested, Jim?” Is a question quickly followed by “Well Jim over here developed a couple of bots for the accounts payable team, he’s our automation guru now!” He’s proven the concept and now it’s time to maintain those things he built with UiPath Community Edition. No dollars spent! Just Jim’s time.

Now, Jim is a great guy. He’s previously built a couple of high impact Excel VBA macros and now a couple of bots which have saved a ton of time for his team. We aren’t here to knock Jim, but he’s got a day job and just got nominated to take on a couple more roles on top of his day job.

This is why we often see automation programs starting and staying in siloed functions.

Use case discovery is limited to what comes across Jim’s desk and he can only run one bot at a time on that old PC the IT Guy never picked up after the intern left last summer. After a while, people hear through the grapevine that Jim is building bots and out of nowhere the cyber security team hits him up on MS Teams and scaring the sh*t out of him with questions about ‘governance’, ‘two factor authentication’, ‘shared credential vaults’, ‘GDPR and HIPAA compliance’, ‘infrastructure requirements’, ‘on-premise vs cloud hosted’, ‘penetration testing’, and ‘data breach risk.’

A great idea with solid delivery now gets shut down because a high achieving employee was expected to do the job of a solution architect, developer, process data scientist, automation engineer, and implementation manager. Now Jim’s team is back to the old way of manually clearing invoices in SAP.

The real kicker is that Jim isn’t the first or last RPA enthusiast at his company, he’s just the first one to get found out and shut down. Automation technology is out there and is ready to be consumed by just about anyone in any which way they see fit. Smart and innovative employees are always going to choose the red pill.

These people need a Sherpa though. Or at least until they can get business case and budget approval for starting their firm’s Automation COE so they can scale solutions with the right enterprise governance and stakeholder support.

Enter KGAutomation’s Virtual Center of Excellence (vCOE). The vCOE enables people like Jim to learn how to avoid the most common missteps and obstacles which cause organizations to stumble on their automation journey.

KGA’s vCOE consists of industry recognized thought leaders and highly certified automation experts who have lived and breathed the real obstacles that enterprises encounter when trying to spin up and maintain an automation program including discovering use cases, business case management, solution implementation/maintenance, infrastructure upgrades, and everything in between. Our goal is for our past pain to be your future gain.

If you find yourself asking questions about any of the things above and/or below, the vCOE can help. The vCOE is not meant to be a long term fully outsourced COE solution, rather it’s meant to get both cautious and eager automation enthusiasts on the right footing by collaboratively iterating through a number of use cases/solutions with you and your growing team. This includes things like:

·       Agile development and comprehensive holistic testing

·       Solution implementation plan including change management / comms

·       Ongoing solution and infrastructure maintenance/support

·       Success metric and return on investment reporting

·       Grooming a continuous use case pipeline

·       Citizen development program launch and training

·       Finding the right technology partners

·       Working with IT on the right infrastructure

·       Identifying automation program sponsors and stakeholders

·       Finding use cases with process mining and/or traditional methods

·       Solution design driven by the selected tech’s best practices/design principles

·       Working through your business case process and getting budget approval

Members of the vCOE have done all of these things and overcome the challenges and obstacles that our friend Jim was facing. The vCOE is meant to get automation programs up and running with an automation operating model and governance structure that meets your nuanced organization’s needs so that you can run with it and the vCOE can transition off at the pace right for you.

Your KGA vCOE doesn’t need to go anywhere though, it can be on-call for critical issues, hardware/software upgrades, complex use cases, and even ad hoc business case needs.

The point we’re trying to make, is that there is a happy place between pre-maturely starting an Automation COE and never starting one at all. The time and money invested into your automation program should be focused on solution building and the vCOE enables that by getting you on the path to ROI faster and more flexibly.