Anchal Parashar

With the evolution of human race, Self prioritization tactics and techniques have also evolved manifold. In earlier times it was often used to align with a concept, which was later coined as Darwin Theory of Survival OR Survival of the Fittest. It was first drafted keeping living organisms at center of it and various skills they require to prove their credibility within a ecosystem for superior sustainability.
 
As time passed by, human knowledge, emotions, intellect and this rigor for sustainability grew too and various forms and shapes, which includes resorting to negative and positive means and ways. Till the time positive, meaningful and logical routes are used, it gives proportionate results. But resorting to negative, deceitful and maligning routes, leads to dis proportionate outcomes.
 
Above analogy hold true not only for a household, a class of kindergarten kids, a highly acclaimed academic institution, a highly competitive sports arena but also in the immensely competitive corporate culture too, wherein sustainability depends on the ability of an individual to convince oneself that he is apt to survive in any situation.
 
Adherence to the above tactic, at times results to a phenomenon called as SELF - SERVING BIAS, wherein, a person, for any positive outcome of an activity, takes the credit himself BUT  if things go negative, he makes others factors responsible for it, with zero acceptance of his failure.
 
In a typical DMAIC project, wherein decisions are taken basis the data, presence of Self-Service Bias, may lead to major blunders, potentially impacting the outcome of the project.
 
Impact of Self - Service Bias in RCA –
-          It could result in un-uniformed causes identification, based on self-assurance thoughts of a person or group of persons
-          Unidirectional brainstorming sessions, led by team members who have a say in the system either because of experience or superiority
-          Probability of losing on insights through data is more, as decisions are more based on self-conviction
-          Reliability of identified root causes is less, as they are based on limited cognitive thinking
-          High solutioning cost, as often they are developed basis output collected from few individuals and not the entire group
-          Low sustainability of solutions developed to mitigate root causes, as they are result of ‘bracketed cognitive thinking’
 
 
Avoiding Self Service Bias –
-          Building and sustaining healthy corporate culture, wherein employees doesn’t feel ‘judged’ if a failure occurs and for successes credit goes to the entire team
-          Coaching people on how making mistakes and learning from them is actually a sign of strength
-          Acceptance of certain degree of Self - service bias, so that correct cautions can be bought in
-          Before any RCA session, letting members know, the expectations from outcome and the objective
-          Rewards and recognition for the team members who are most active in challenging the status quo, so as to motivate them for logical decisions
-          Striving for Data Driven Analysis, instead of opinionated ones

AI Implementation for any organization is seen as a critical part of business strategy in todays world. With plethora of activities happening around this buzzword ‘AI’, it quite easy for any Strategic Manager to get completely soaked and fall prey to current AI glare, without giving a serious thought to the short and long term value creation through it. It is of pertinent importance that to reap the real sustainable benefits from AI usage, organizations should weigh all possible factors, that can make AI implementation successful.
 
AI strategy has to be long term in every sense as it takes time to integrate existing systems and create new ecosystem. But, there are numerous short term benefits too. Creating balance between these two is what should be focused on.
 
Key Factors to be considered for AI strategy ROI
 
Short Term Value Creating Factors –
 
-          % of routine repetitive tasks that can be automated via AI, leading to cost and efforts reduction
-          Identification of Quick to harness workforce who can easily adopt to AI method and practices basis their current expertise proximity to AI, this creating ready resources for future AI expansion
-          Facets of business handling large data manually can be processed through AI, hence minimizing the risk of errors
-          Small systems/processes already standardized can be synced with AI tools to make delivery faster and smoother
-          Better utilization of time made available due to AI usage on more critical and strategic activities
 
 
Long Term Value Creating Factors –
 
-          Change in organization DNA in a slow and steady manner, with workforce becoming more aligned with usage of new ways of working
-          Thought process shift from basic to data driven decision making, thus helping in well calculated decisions
-          Innovation in Product & Service Life Cycle by using emerging AI tools
-          Competitive Robustness for better market sustainability
-          Faster business propagation and diversification by using proven AI tools
 
 
 

Hyper automation – As the term itself suggests to be an amalgamation of two words – Hyper & Automation, which basically indicates automation being done at its full force, negating OR completing minimizing the need of any human intervention to get a task performed.
Its usually used for businesses or processes, wherein variety of applications or systems have to co-ordinate with one another to produce a desired outcome. These ecosystems are quite complex in nature and constant human eye checks are required to operate to generate a synchronized delivery.
 
As the efforts are towards reducing the needs of human intellect and precision, AI & ML powered applications and systems are generally used as the base for hyper automation strategy. Large Language models (LLM), are designed and deployed to replicate the human decision making to run projects/businesses by synchronizing the communications amongst all the processes involved.
Most important facet of Hyper automation is, it helps in integrating the processes working in isolation and thus creating a more intelligent and holistic enterprise level systems.
 
Hyper automation & RPA – Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a unique approach of automating the repetitive tasks by ‘mimicking’ human actions, which are performed otherwise.
 
It can be said that RPA is a single technology with benefits being delivered in pockets within enterprise while hyper automation is a bouquet of multiple such technologies with enterprise-wide benefits.
 
Usage and Benefits -
RPA has a major challenge of being used for ‘Structured Data Set’ only. This functional limitation of RPA can easily be controlled by using AI powered tools and applications, which can work, both on structured and unstructured data.
RPA strategy lacks ‘cognitive thinking capability’ and Hyper automation is based on LLM, through which tools and applications can perform cognitively.
Hyper automation increases the ambit of automation strategy of organization unlike RPA which functions in isolation or pockets of business.
RPA can only perform tasks based on set rules and thus needs to mimic them whereas Hyper automation uses AI &ML, Orchestration and workflow tools (PEGA, Appian,XTRAC) to perform tasks as efficiently as humans with decision making capabilities.
Hyper automation is now widely being used in industries wherein large datasets have to be handled and scope of committing an error are minimal. Some of the industries wherein hyper automation is being practiced are Automobile, Retail, Healthcare, Banking and Financial Services.