Unlocking the Potential of Intelligent Automation (IA) in the Cloud

As part of Solutions Review’s Contributed Content Series—a collection of contributed articles written by our enterprise tech thought leader community—Adam Lawrence, the VP of Cloud Solutions at SS&C Blue Prism, dives into the things companies can do to unlock the potential of intelligent automation (IA) technology in the cloud.

The cloud can potentially deliver tremendous opportunities for businesses across all sectors. Many companies can capitalize on the benefits of intelligent automation (IA) in the cloud and manage effective migration. Despite the well-known benefits of the cloud, many companies struggle to effectively migrate to it, with 75 percent of initiatives running over budget and 38 percent falling behind schedule due to a lack of clear strategy, leading to budget overspending and lack of utilization, according to data from McKinsey.

However, with a strategically planned approach outlined below, companies can achieve seamless, cost-effective, and timely IA migration.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Current Environment

Understanding where IA migration to the cloud can add the most value and who to support you with the transition is the process’s first—and most important—step. The best way to find the right cloud partner is to measure and evaluate vendors with years of experience or a proven track record in your sector. Your partner must guarantee contracts, compliance, and SLAs for IA migration. A technology and services roadmap for the business can help determine where best to deploy IA cloud technologies to maximize savings.

Before considering the total cost of ownership, carefully examine existing and future architecture with your vendor. A security and reliability audit should be at the top of the list, followed by a look at the daily tools and features your enterprise uses and its cloud and migration capability. Security architecture and IA protocols need to be considered. Every industry has its security policies and regulations, affecting how a cloud platform should be deployed.

For example, regulated industries like financial services, energy, and health may benefit from a hybrid IA cloud solution, enabling them to keep some of their operations on-premises. This flexibility is essential to meet the security requirements in highly regulated sectors. Your IT security and infrastructure teams should be involved from the outset. Failure to involve the right people from the start is the primary way businesses lose momentum in cloud migrations.

If key people aren’t involved from the start and raise concerns with the implementation plan later in the process, the initiative may be delayed and need to be reworked. This step lays the foundation before you and your provider build a thorough project plan.

Step 2: Plan, Plan, Plan! (Your Biggest and Most Important Step)

Understanding your IA cloud goals is essential to the planning phase. What is your business trying to achieve? Are you looking to reduce overheads? Eliminate legacy infrastructures slowing down your business. Fill in skills gaps? Create better opportunities for innovation? Reduce costs and risks? Etc.

These goals should be assessed from multiple viewpoints—from the C-suite down. Compared to a bottom-up, department-by-department strategy, a top-down approach facilitates the fastest time to value, helping organizations rapidly achieve digital transformation at scale. All stakeholders should be invested in success. Key stakeholders include an executive sponsor and the C-suite, security teams, infrastructure teams, and, ideally, a project manager. The involvement of all these players facilitates successful migration and lays the foundation needed to use IA in the cloud to its fullest potential. 

As part of onboarding, ensuring your cloud partner understands your long-term strategy is vital, so discuss the benefits and challenges and focus on the best value. Think about resource-intensive workflows; these will offer the most value by being moved to the cloud.

Consider elastic processes. Airlines, for example, contend with unpredictable weather conditions, which—when bad enough—can lead to surges in customer demands for rebooking, cancelations, etc. The ability to easily scale digital workers up or down is a proven advantage for airlines. The cloud enables this ability to scale, enabling companies to avoid paying to maintain and update costly infrastructure year-round. 

Your long-term goals should also shape which tasks you prioritize moving to the cloud and which IA cloud technologies you adopt. Digital transformation is the most common reason companies want to move services to the cloud. For the move to be effective, stakeholders must be clear about which technologies will best help them. 

For example, most will benefit from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for support on document scanning and automated data entry, making it a valuable tool to start with. Generative AI technologies—whether Chat GPT, other Large Language Models, or generative image and audio content—can add value by allowing organizations to satisfy more use cases than traditional IA can and open up multiple communication methods. 

With the cloud, you don’t need to adopt all the advanced technologies in one go: your cloud infrastructure has the adaptability to have new technologies seamlessly added on or taken away as required, without needing to manually integrate and maintain them by IA specialists. A cloud-based intelligent automation platform gives businesses single-vendor access to a suite of technologies and the flexibility to design a bespoke automation program. 

Step 3: Time to Flip the Switch

Before beginning your intelligent automation (IA) migration, coordinate with your team and provider to ensure all the steps for a seamless transition have been taken. Once confirmed, it is time to start moving your processes over. If the needed planning has been done, this won’t take too long. Timelines depend on providers and unique organizational needs. 

Once the migration is complete, review processes to check and validate they are working as they should. Choose a vendor with the tools to help you automate this review process to reduce time and effort.

Step 4: Future-Proof

Your IA cloud migration will be complete at this point—but this is not a ‘one and done’ approach. To get the most value out of your investment, you need to be willing to commit to a scalable, future-proof plan designed to accommodate the organization’s future business needs. 

The agility of the cloud will play to your advantage. Coordinate with your provider when you need to scale digital workers up or down. Continue to update your pipeline—what automations will you build next? What technologies do you need to support initiatives? If your outcomes are not aligning with your goals, reassess your plans and change tack. Done right, IA in the cloud offers agility and time to value.

Cloud technology is changing how businesses operate, providing a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution for data storage and processing, providing on-demand access to intelligent automation technologies, and making way for faster innovation, increased productivity, and reduced costs. While many companies struggle with effectively migrating intelligent automation (IA) to the cloud, by following these key steps and focusing on long-term value, you’ll enable your business to unlock the cloud’s innovative potential.