Design Thinking in Intelligent Automation

Do you know what is common between a preferred brand of electric toothbrush, a bread-and-breakfast unicorn startup, a technology giant and a popular food delivery app? The answer you get is what would enable the next wave of digital transformation and automation initiatives across organizations. And it is Design Thinking.

“Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.” – Interaction Design Foundation

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka the d.school) describes design thinking as a five-stage process. These stages are not always sequential, and teams often run them in parallel, out of order and repeat them in an iterative fashion

• Empathize: Gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, typically through user research
• Define: Define core issues, challenges and problem statements
• Ideate: Brainstorm and ideate the problem statement from various perspectives for an innovative solution
• Prototype: Build inexpensive scaled down sample version of the solution
• Test: Rigorously try and test the solutions. The test results may also lead to redefining one or more problem statements

Fig 1: Design Thinking Stages

Utilizing/Applying the principles of Design Thinking, Hexaware has developed and deployed successful enterprise wide automation and transformation initiatives. As part of our Automate Everything™ strategy, Hexaware’s Intelligent Process Automation Services (HIPAS™) encompasses design thinking principles and delivers a strategic boost to your organization’s transformation initiatives.

So how can Design Thinking help you uncover new opportunities for a large-scale transformation or even position automation in your enterprise as a value driver for more ROI and impact?

HIPAS™ imbibes the principles of Design Thinking in identifying problems and solutionizing for our customers. Our methodology is industry tested and has led to proven ROI for our clients, in terms of dollars and efforts saved, post automation. Our methodology can be conceptualized as follows: –

Fig 2: Design Thinking with HIPAS™

• Who is our end user?

The answer is that it starts with you, the customer. Our IPA consultants and practitioners engage with Process Owners and SMEs in structured workshops to identify the stage of maturity at which the process is and unravel the deeper, more nuanced connections among the roles and tasks. We also leverage green field technologies like Process Discovery and Process Mining to automate the data gathering part of the process. This enables us to focus on the more important aspects, the people involved and affected in the process.

• What are their needs?

After we gather data on the process and people, we work with the customer to identify and define their pain points. Using our time-tested prioritization and complexity parameters, we categorize and define the priority for each process transformation. This enables us to formulate a complete business case, developed in conjunction with the customer which results in focus on the right problems from the start.

• How will we meet their needs?

Hexaware has well-defined, cutting edge technology capabilities and we use our technical and tool related expertise to design the best possible solution for our clients. We leverage new-age knowhows from Robotic Process Automation to Artificial Intelligence technologies such as Cognitive OCR, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition and Image Analytics. We have partnerships with the industry leading platforms for combining our expertise and delivering the best class of solutions. Our end-to-end transformational approach encompasses Dev-Ops and Agile Scrum delivery methodologies to create a constant churn of automated processes for you. Even post-delivery, we enable our clients with management and support for the automated processes and search for newer avenues for transformation that optimize operations further.

• Why our work matters?

Hexaware delivers innovational solutions based on outcome. Be it through process automation, shared services or digital workforce, our pricing models and outcome-oriented philosophy derives value from Day 1. Our industry leading transformation methodology has been tried and tested over years with several clients to drive value and ROI. This is revealed in our CSAT scores. We are one of the pioneers in the field of automation and still continue to be the topmost contender for being a strong player as rightly highlighted in several analyst reviews.

Design thinking emerged as a concept as far back as 1969 but few organizations have been able to make practical shifts in growth and profitability through design. Hexaware enables organizations to introduce Design Thinking in their organizational transformation strategy. We help organizations identify automation opportunities, select a reasonably high-outcome process, implement transformation and drive value realization from automation. We also guide you in expanding your transformation vision across business units and provide support in managing automation.

Thus, Design Thinking with Hexaware can boost your automation initiatives and drive a real and impactful change organization wide.

References:-

1. Design Thinking-Interaction Design Foundation
2. Stanford D.School
3. Leveraging design thinking in enterprise automation strategy
4. More than a feeling: Ten design practices to deliver business value