February 23, 2022
Enterprises must be more data-driven, productive, innovative and customer-centric in today’s fast-changing market. However, many companies are hindered by aging, increasingly complex and less reliable IT estates.
In this Q&A, Vinod Bagal, president of Cloud and Infrastructure Services for DXC Technology, discusses how companies can leverage hyperautomation to enable significant operational resilience and efficiency through predictive service management to quickly respond to market needs.
Q: What is hyperautomation and why do organisations need it?
A: Hyperautomation provides a disciplined approach for identifying, reviewing and automating as many IT processes and tasks as possible. This helps businesses improve response times and therefore efficiency. Automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) enables speed and agility in early problem detection and resolution. This is especially beneficial to organisations that have complex processes and multiple tasks across many systems.
At DXC our north star for hyperautomation is providing stability and efficiency across the Enterprise Technology Stack to deliver an exemplary customer experience. We are driving operational excellence and efficiency through hyperautomation-powered intelligent operations using lean processes, analytics and automation augmented by DXC Platform XTM. We have over 14,000 bots and solutions driving silent operations at scale for our customers while eliminating tens of thousands of hours of labor cost.
Q: How do organisations accelerate hyperautomation in-house?
A: Data is the “fuel” driving the intelligence behind the automation; intelligence is generated from AI/ML models and analytics that act on, and learn from, the data. Data patterns can be visualised in intelligent dashboards and graphs displayed in a portal. This enables engineers to see the results of the automation and interact with the AI/ML models to develop additional insights and add more automation.
DXC has a central knowledge repository that enables both automation and infrastructure scalability across the Enterprise Technology Stack. The data helps us categorise groups of use cases across the IT estate and identify candidates for deploying or scaling automation. Our goal is to achieve intelligent process automation across the Enterprise Technology Stack.
Q: What is the development approach companies can take to create the automation solutions?
We have adopted an approach to innovation that emphasises innovation in everyday activities, without waiting to come up with a big idea that will change the world. Many big ideas take a long time to materialise and often don’t get off the ground. So, to drive everyday innovation, we have a mixed approach of DXC citizen developers and a central team of automation experts who train and coach smaller teams that are organised by business unit or function. These dedicated teams understand the business problem and can apply the automation in a way that ensures actionable outcomes.
The idea of having citizen developers is to engage people who are not professional developers to create automation solutions using automation tools including low-code/no-code tools. Citizen automation empowers all levels of the organisation to contribute to a wider need. This helps drive mindset and behavior changes across the organisation.
As such, hyperautomation is a lever to drive transformation and culture change because it helps organisations transform and optimise their business processes, technology and people’s roles enterprise-wide.
Q: How does the business build a culture of citizen automation?
A: At DXC, we nurture citizen automation by providing automation tools and encouraging participation through ideathons and hackathons. You can also stage events to help staff identify and leverage existing solutions or develop new automation assets. In addition, you can use gamification and recognition of top citizen developers to expand your citizen automation culture to more parts of your organisation.
It’s also important to raise the knowledge and skillsets of citizen developers through mentor relationships with automation subject matter experts (SMEs) and central automation teams. The central automation team provides intelligence and business insights through analytics and algorithmic models, which guide strategy, planning and decision making for automation at every level. Citizen developers can leverage these assets to create new automations aligned to the organisation’s goals.
Q: What operational business outcomes have been achieved from hyperautomation?
A: Hyperautomation has significantly improved operational resilience for over 1,000 DXC customers that generate approximately 20 million user contacts per year. Hyperautomation has enabled us to:
- Reduce the number of high-priority operational issues by 60%
- Improve restoration time by nearly 40%
- Deliver application releases faster and with high quality using automated testing and deployment
The result is silent operations at scale — businesses keep running and can focus on strategic priorities — and an efficient, hybrid workforce of people and bots working together.
Q: What’s next for DXC’s hyperautomation program?
A: We will continue to focus on scaling predictive analytics and a composable enterprise model to proactively resolve customer issues, and partnering with customers to improve their business outcomes through intelligent automation and rapid digital transformation.
Vinod Bagal is president of Cloud and Infrastructure Services for DXC Technology. He is responsible for Cloud Right™, DXC’s cloud transformation approach to modernise, optimise and integrate cloud and on-premises IT – infrastructure, cloud, security and enterprise applications. In his previous role as executive vice president of Global Delivery, Vinod focused on delivery innovation to improve service to DXC’s customers, including process improvements, talent development and innovative technology to automate processes.
Vinod holds a BS degree in mechanical engineering from Mysore University, India, and an MS degree in engineering management from The George Washington University.