From Digital Transformation to Automation Revolution: The Importance of Enterprise Agility

Dayle Hall:

Hi. You’re listening to our podcast, Automating the Enterprise. I’m your host, CMO of SnapLogic, Dayle Hall. This podcast is designed to give any organization out there some insights and best practices on how they can integrate, automate and transform their enterprise. 

Our guest for today is an established opinion leader in the tech industry. He’s helped global businesses become agile enterprises, implementing efficient fast processes through automation. And the topic we’re going to get into, what we’re doing in these, it’s also been important that actually benefits not just their customers, but their own company and its people. So please welcome to the podcast, the VP of enterprise software engineering at Wolters Kluwer, Raja Gangavarapu. Raja, welcome to the show. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Thank you, Dayle, and you got my last name right. 

Dayle Hall:

We talk about these as we’re preparing. All you, listeners, we talk about these. And I guarantee, the second I look at that last name again, I’m like, ohh, I forgot how to pronounce it. I did it once on stage in New York. We did our Integreat Tour last year. And there was a guy from Kyndryl, and his last name was [Perpetua]. And then my English Tourette’s jumped in, and I called him [Perpetuer]. 

One of those crazy things that when it’s live, it’s live. But this is a podcast, so they’d probably just edit out what I just said, anyway. 

Raja, welcome to the show. We’re so grateful to have you on here. A couple of things I want to start with, is one is tell us a little bit about the company you’re in, Wolters Kluwer, and then tell us a little bit about how you got into this position. VP of enterprise software engineering is a fairly hefty title. And so give us a little bit of background of how you made it to that position, what your career path was like. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Oh, absolutely. Thank you, Dayle. Thanks for the special invitation. The organization I’ve worked for is Wolters Kluwer, is a global provider of professional information, software solutions and services for clinicians, accountants, lawyers and tax, finance, audit risk and compliance and regulatory sector. So we are very broad and very deep in a lot of industries. We released our 2022 annual revenues of EUR 5.5 billion. 

Dayle Hall:

Wow. I love hearing about massive companies that you have no idea how big these companies are. Congratulations. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Oh, thank you. It’s really the executive team and how they drive is really very important. We are actually in 180 countries and really operating in about 40 countries with about 20,000 workforce globally. So our customers are working in the industry which impact the lives of millions of people every single day. So our mission is to empower professional customers with information, software solutions and services. They need to make critical decisions, achieve successful outcomes and save time. So that’s what we do. 

Dayle Hall:

That’s awesome. Again, I love hearing about these companies that end up being billions and billions of dollars that we haven’t heard of. There’s so much happening out there. We’ve done a couple of podcasts recently around AI and people that are using AI. And it’s amazing, the progress that’s happening that we don’t know about, which is why I love doing these podcasts because we get to hear more about what people like yourself are doing. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Yeah. With that note, let me answer your other question, how I arrived into this position, it’s more than 26 years of journey in the industry. And I started off after finishing my masters from University of South Carolina and went into custom building software. Back in the days, ERP was just at a nascent stage, people are looking at implementing, particularly manufacturing companies, obviously. So I joined the company, build a custom software, grew into a start-up on its own because we learned the business side and the technology side and part of their journey for some time, then went into dotcom era of e-business, e-commerce was in 2000 time, and then was in consulting for a few years, and then went to the corporate side of IT, in the financials industry for some time, manufacturing industry, and then healthcare and a great time to be in healthcare when Affordable Care Act is about to be implemented. So a lot of changes in industry, transformational, many of them, in nature with exchanges coming impacting the public life. 

And then after several years in that organization and in that space, I moved on to Wolters Kluwer where I am today.  I’ve been here for the last eight years. I have a very diverse set of portfolios. So we have a corporate application. So we have this- where some of the SaaS solutions like Workday, since there is now an all exist. And then I have business intelligence. And I take care of two different divisions of the business unit and several ERP systems underneath, on several custom end products that we support and we develop for the business and then for the end customer. So very diversified, very heterogeneous in nature, if you call it. So sometimes, I’ll be talking about infrastructure, ITSM process, security operations, how we can make it better. And then in the next two hours, I’ll be talking about HR processes, what we can do. And then in the next two hours, I’ll be talking about ERP and what we need to do for business. So my day goes very interesting from that standpoint. 

Dayle Hall:

It must be very varied from day to day, which I’m sure is interesting for you, but I’m sure has a challenge in itself. Before we jump into some of these, because we’re going to talk a little bit about agile enterprise has been digitally agile, we’re going to talk about automation and hyperautomation and see where you think differently about how that progresses. But just in general, if someone’s out there, maybe they’re not as senior as you and don’t have a longer career, but they may be faced with some of the same challenges, like pulled into different areas, from ERP to business intelligence and so on, what are some of the things that you’ve learned over time to manage the shift in mindset, the shift in people, systems? How do you cope with that? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Ah, great question. Actually, a very complicated question, too, right? So the key thing is understanding the problem and finding the right solution, right? That is the key areas we need to focus on. And once you really understand the problem, that’s important, and then understanding the right solution or figuring out the right solution, and then eventually implementing the right solution, satisfying the business and everybody, once you understand the dynamics and is now from the point boundaries and maturity aspect you brought under different business areas and different sectors. So when I said that my first two hours go into one area and the next two hours into different areas is all because- and I’m able to move one area to the other is because I never forget that particular pattern, problem and solution. So you need to make sure you understand the problem and figure out the right solution. So that’s how I created my career around how to build the right approach to all of it. And as I dealt with more complex problems, I kind of developed a mechanism how I can solve multiple problems in a given day. Once you do that, in my opinion, based on my experience, then you can expand and grow and take multiple portfolios, and it can be in a consulting and it can be in corporate IT. But that’s how one can grow in modern technology world. 

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. I like that. Enterprise, IT these days, there’s so many things I have to think about, there’s so many things that they get pressure for. How is your relationship these days, or how do you manage your relationship specifics with the business units? Because we hear a lot about enabling line of businesses, the shadow IT, marketing is wearing off, spending a ton of money on their own processes, and so on. And for the most part, whilst I’m sure it’s happening, the organizations that I’ve talked to on these podcasts and where we’ve done events and we talk to our customers, shadow IT, they don’t really like that terminology because it doesn’t really highlight what the current challenge is. 

The current challenge is, how can IT make sure they support the business and get earlier in the process with the lines of businesses? Shadow IT just seems like something that- no offense, I’m a marketer, it’s like a marketer created it because they want to try and sell something different. But how do you work with lines of businesses that change over time and how’s that going for you? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Actually, as you’re asking, Dayle, a kind of an analogy popped in my head. Think about Google Maps, right? As you’re driving point A to point B, you punch in your address into an unknown location, you don’t know about it, or a different city you just traveled to, and you punch in your location, it give you a map, how to go there, you started driving towards it. Now there is a traffic jam. It gives you an option, hey, you can take an alternate route, cut down by a few minutes. Option is yours. What do you want to do? Based on the situation, you may choose option A or option B. And that varies from person to person the situation they’re in and what else they are facing. Apply the same logic to this business and IT enablement or lack of enablement. 

The business want to go in certain paths, certain direction, they want to go based on the plan in a three-year, two-year or single-year, multiyear strategy. And IT has established a mechanism to provide the value. Things do happen. There are a few things come in the way, disrupted your mechanism of your delivery, what you want to do. So it is that alignment between business and technology make the course correction. And this is where all of us stumble,  how to make that. Because after the result, one can second guess and who could have done that? I would say that I’m never a champion of, I truly understand business and business always agreed with me, what I’m doing right or wrong. Always I have feedback in my career, always. Even today. I think I did right, but I do hear, okay, I may not hear that what I’m looking for. But what I didn’t do is what I hear first. 

So it happens. And I would take this as how it goes. But the key thing is at course correction, how quickly get to the course correction, get to the end point. And never, never lose sight of the end goal or the direction where you want to go preferably on time, right? And if you lose time, how will you communicate that? If you’re arriving late to meet this important meeting, if you’re stuck in a traffic or something happened or a big accident, you want to pick up a phone or call, or you don’t have a phone, what are you going to do? These are the kind of challenges what happens in this side of business in IT. 

So in that regard, if there is a shadow IT, again, that’s nowadays a lot of people saying it exists, let it go, it happens. And I agree with that, right? Because this is looking to achieve certain result, okay, if a main group can do, I’m going to figure this out another way quickly. So bringing it all together. But a key aspect is both need to be aligned, kind of start going to that direction. And if you don’t do, all kinds of negative things happen. 

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. It’s a balance of enabling the lines of businesses to do something, to act faster for the business, but also, you’re still working with IT, you’re coming together over time, that you have to [stop] going to the same goal at the end of it and on the same roadmap. That kind of weighs perfectly into our next topic, which is digitally agile enterprises. So I’ve heard the term agile enterprise, we’ve used digital pretty much in front of everything. I’m interested to know, when you hear the term or when you talk about the term, digitally agile enterprise, in essence, what does that mean? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

All these terms existed for a very, very long time. And one can argue, the very advent of computation or computer is making a digital from a paper, right? We used to write on a piece of paper, and we [still exchange] and computers came, started putting that into the computer making things started going faster. So we started this journey a long, long, long ago. All along the line, what we are talking about, digital, agile, process, enterprise. And we started to bring these words together in a certain order. So what it means really is how well connected an organization is and how effectively an enterprise is producing information for a consumer. This consumer could be an actual customer or a user, internal customer, whoever that may be, that information is consistently correct. 

And then what you can also do is, all my end-to-end processes are automated, in terms of other manual steps are just automated. They’re flying on their own with the right controls in place. System organizations, nowhere things are going to go wrong is important. So more of these systems are automated. Now, why that is more important to this agile enterprise is, now there are more tooling, industries maturing, bringing new tooling, quicker output, one of the complaints against this is, it takes time, it takes a long time. And by the time, end result may not satisfy them, right, or it’s a failure. So shorter- and produce the results in a shorter period of time makes course correction possible before we burn so much money as well is an important- that is also now an enabler. Now we have tools in the industry that’s making things happen. And the organizations, the ability to make decisions consistently correct, not only information is correct. Their ability to make the decisions correct is also- these are the characteristics, I would say, is what is constituted towards- or characteristics of this digitally enabled agile enterprise. 

Dayle Hall:

So I think one of the areas then were, in these types of podcasts, I always try and focus on- for the listener, as they’re listening to you talk about your experiences, and they want to take something away, they want to be like, okay, that was interesting. And obviously, Raja has got a lot of common sense, he’s got a lot of experience, but what do I take from it? So are there a couple of fundamentals to being a digitally agile enterprise that you would say, look, it’s basically- it’s been prepared for these three things. Now, I heard you mentioned planning a short period of time to get to success. So planning ahead, what does success look like, when are we going to get an ROI? So I like that one. So what are the other two things that you would say, these are the things that when we go into a project, or when we go into this kind of actions, this is what we always try and do? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Number two would be the information is correct through all the channels. Meaning, you presented your customer information, be there, all the orders with all the invoices that they have with us or that overall, you’re trying to produce an output for this end customer. Now is this information the same when the customer is going through a web system or calling the organization and said, this is the coding organization, hey, I think I paid last year my invoices correct. And the customer service, sorry, sir, I’ll come back to you or somebody will call you or an email. And if the same information is available on the web, and if a customer can get to it, or vice versa. So typically, they call customer service, okay, I can’t help you, but the same information is available on the web or a mobile channel or somebody, that will be great. 

But what is happening today is, that is very inconsistent. You call a customer service, you may get some, and you go to web, you may get some other information, and different channel or the data that you get from them may have a different information. Keep the end customer, produce the information consistently on all the channels, that’s where the data flying between the system is so important, consistently correct. And the third in this process, what it prevents all of that, one and two, which we just established is so many legacy systems because organizations don’t move. This is really the- I mean, sometimes could be the linchpin. It costs money. 

Organizations don’t want to invest to get rid of them, to invest towards modern systems because money is money, right? Where can I invest, make more money is what organizations typically look for. But what actually happens behind the scenes is this legacy getting legacy error, and if that’s the right word to use, and you cannot integrate them longer, they stay in organization. So you will be at a point of no return there. It can’t connect and the data that comes out may not be what is relevant to you anymore. So that’s what impedes you to get to that traditional enablement. So those are the three. 

Dayle Hall:

No, I like that. I was interested. So when COVID happened, we had an analyst come and talk to some customers. And we were talking about automation and how it’s working. And he- one of the things he said to me and he goes back to your legacy point around, it’s just really hard to do and sometimes you don’t want to spend the money or you don’t see it. He actually said that when COVID happened, people thought that processes were fully automated were not. There was still someone handing something off to someone over email or in a spreadsheet, or pushing a button or running something. So what they thought was fully automated within their systems, there was still some legacy in there that someone had to do something. And once COVID happened and they weren’t sat next to someone or they were on the other side of the world in their home, it fell down. I think that definitely proves that last point. 

Let me ask you a little question about the data. You mentioned two things, one, the data has to be correct. And then you mentioned about, it has to be able to flow across one system to another or across the organization? How do you generally think about setting that up for success? Or if someone was to ask you for advice, how to do it in their own company, how do you first make sure data is correct? And then how do you make sure it’s flowing as successfully as it can do in a large enterprise? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

They both go a little bit hand-in-hand. It does not necessarily one come first and make sure you have rules if our data correct, our information is correct, and then start looking at the systems. They go hand-in-hand. So what actually need to be happening- and this is where it gets complicated and people get confused, in my opinion, it’s very important for all of this to happen is take a potential backseat and make sure you hit some fundamentals. Meaning, do you have your end-to-end process flow? Now the word end to end is up to you, how you want to define, right? Obviously, you can define your entire organization. 

So make sure you have your entire process flow. Take a look at it. It’s like a bird’s eye view, come in, okay, this is how I work, this is how the information is flowing or data is flowing, or people are talking to each other. There could be a man- person-to-person interaction, the process flow, the system-the-system or a person to the system, so somebody uploading the documents to their system. Once you have the picture, now you see where are your bottlenecks and how the information is flowing. And this is also the pillar for your automation and hyperautomation. You do that, you have your rules drawn, you have your exceptions clearly documented, right? When a human is there, you look at a piece of document, you make several decisions in your mind, how I need to do, who I need to talk to about this particular question? When you start automating, that means the data start moving between the systems, you cannot put all your words going through one’s brain into a system. 

The translation is key.  So a process first, and then understand what business is doing, that means the technology folks spend more time with business. And this is asked all the time, this is what pushed on. But technology has a challenge, they are developing coding and all, but you need to talk to each other more. Now with more tooling coming into it, this where the low-code, no-code environment, more SaaS tools coming and playing, coming together, again, that is what is pushing this whole journey forward, making it happen. So if you start doing and now you start integrating it, what is you’re going to integrate real time are not, sorry, in real time because some are not possible. Now you started looking all the options, you’re still on board, a whiteboard, right, you’re still drawing all of it together with a lot of folks sitting in the room. Now you’re going to implement all of it. You take a piece of it, okay, I’m going to implement this, and then I’ve got the next piece and start expanding it, right? 

Once you do that, your data is going to be correct because you already started looking at it, what I need from system A to system B, how it should be. And now you have technology in place and making it happen and you know what a failure means if something doesn’t work correctly, how an alternative flow should look like because you’re pulling out these human decisions into automation, not all could be automated, right? So sometimes a manual workflow is important, a person is important, right? Don’t take for granted automation, hyperautomation means taking every human out of the equation. That’s not possible, maybe one day. So those are key things to make data is correct.  You help because of your rules and it is flowing correctly because you have measurements and controls and metrics in place. And the third you how- in a whole system automated in a way you wanted it. 

Dayle Hall:

I like that. It’s interesting, you said something there which I’m hearing a lot more, which is, gives me hope for the future, Raja. We’ve talked about AI or automation and you mentioned about keeping the human in the process, the human is not going to be removed. And I think the more IT leaders and industry luminaries across the areas that we cover that I talked to, the more people have reinforced that. And I remember five or six years ago, when we’re talking about AI, and one of my last companies, the whole thing we were talking about was trying to explain to people, it’s not here to replace people and take people’s jobs. And it just feels like there’s been more of a shift where we’ve recognized that the human still has to be involved. The productivity gain we get can be immense, but it’s not something to replace as there’s still a need for that human element. So I’m really happy today you say that. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

See, an additional point to that, Dayle, is technology, in my opinion, with a long number of years, I learned and practicing is not necessarily what makes it happen, but what recognize not to happen. That’s key and that’s where the human brain really comes into play. Again, technology, you gotta be careful with technology. But the design got to be ready for failures, how to deal with it. And AI can help, machine learning is helping in the process because a lot of options like the example I gave, the driving example, many things can go wrong, depending [you’re in car], you’re on the highway is a different storyline, right? So that’s where decision-making process in the design is also maturing more and more. 

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. So let’s move forward a little bit and let’s talk about this concept, from automation to hyperautomation. And I think we’ve- a lot of us there in around the IT space in tech and software, we understand the concept now of automation. At SnapLogic, specifically, we mainly talk about the integration is still a key piece. Automation is once you’ve done some of the integration, then you can do things faster and more without human hand on it. And then we talk more about orchestration. But I’m hearing more things in the industry now about hyperautomation. So for the people potentially listening to this and like, oh, yeah, I’ve heard of that. What does that mean? How would you describe hyperautomation? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Let’s take a small step back in some definitions and putting some definitions together because that helps level set and we can go from there, right? So automation, intuitively, we all know what it means, right? But there’s a definition. I found it nicely from our International Society of Automation, the group. What they’re saying is, the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the production and delivery of products or services. I like the definition. And then nowadays, we are hearing more RPA, robotic process automation. The definition for that, I would think, is a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy and manage software robots that emulate human actions, interacting with digital systems and software. 

Moving on to hyperautomation. I found the definition of Gartner pretty apt. So according to Gartner, hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify that, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestration using multiple technologies, tools or platforms, including AI, machine learning, event-driven architecture or software, RPA, which we just defined, business process management tools and intelligent business process management suites that are available out there. And you have cloud in the mixture. You go to your iPaaS as an environment where your applications are running, custom or otherwise, then you have your low-code, no-code tools, that’s a key arrival into this whole mix. And then now you’re going more and more into SaaS-based, [package-based] software, how many- including all of it, how you bring it all together is what is defined as hyperautomation. I really like it. Even though it looks pretty elaborate, but it gives you a certain idea of your baseline, what you’re talking about as hyperautomation. 

Dayle Hall:

Yeah. It’s interesting because that description- and look, I have to talk to Gartner way more than I would like. They’re mostly nice people. But in general, sometimes we have challenges. We have different opinions. But that’s natural. When you think about hyperautomation is more of a business outcome, business focus, then what does that mean today for automation processes? And I don’t want to go into what RPA means these days because I think there’s going to be some shifts in the RPA industry, you’re seeing that already. But does that mean that a lot of the automation initiatives or things to this point have been less about business and now we’re realizing, hey, if we had some business outcomes, this would actually help our enterprise more? How do you look at automation versus hyperautomation then? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Among all of this, I’m trying not to make more noise out of it. The last 30, 40 years, what is the goal for all of these computers, computation? All of it is, at the end, we are providing a business solution, having, creating a shopping cart and making sure customers come in, check out, pay, and everything happens without any glitch. So it’s all business-oriented solutions at the end. The technology as- once you enable it, you don’t even see technology, you see all these people running these business processes. Keeping that part in mind, what is making digitally enabled with more clarity is having that solutions faster as well for business to go and do their business, right? 

So again, we are talking about less IT failures, shortening time even further, right? And that’s where this tooling coming into play. We’re going more towards SaaS oriented versus- even earlier, as package, before a custom development. What SaaS-oriented solutions are doing is, it’s not super flexible, either. It says, this is how it works, almost you can take it or leave it. But what it does is, very quick, we are having information and a business process in place. Now as you go with this low code and with machine learning come together, these are my number of technologies there. But what actually is bringing is you’re shortening your time, bringing the value together very quickly. Business can see, okay, this is what I get from this, this is what I get from this. Okay, let’s bring them together. I think that is where this hyperautomation is. Hopefully, it doesn’t get too noisy in all of these people throwing all these definitions. But that’s where the cycle is getting cut short. And the word business driven is coming more because they’re seeing results quicker, that’s the bottom line for me. 

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, yeah, no, I like that. I think it’s hard to say, how long does it take to put this kind of, I don’t want to call it project or initiative. But if an enterprise is looking at hyperautomation, let’s say they’re starting with a business challenge, thinking about it in a hyperautomation type of way with certain technologies and processes is a way to solve this business problem. Because I think you’ve mentioned, and I’ve heard many times, starting projects like this is more successful when you think of the business challenge you’re trying to solve first. 

So great, let’s assume everyone’s out there doing that. What kind of timelines should people expect for planning, implementation and outcome delivery? And how much of their time should they expect to be like, hey, it’s 50% planning, then it’s 30% implementation and 20% outcome? Or how would you separate that timeline? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

That is the key question, how it make it all happen. So I will give you one example, what our experience is, is not necessarily covering the whole gambit of what we try to do, but I’ll try to simplify, hopefully, I make the point clear. As we’re doing this hyperautomation between multiple components, the SaaS tools and all coming together, we looked at who’s the beneficiary? There’s always, we talk external customer, but there’s also internal user is also very important. So we looked at both. But let’s take an internal user. So what we tried to do is, okay, we need HR system, this whole onboarding process, and having these user or a new employee join the company, having everything in place and get going from day one, having access to everything from day one, and solving the problems from day one or even day two. Can we make that happen? So that particular initiative is dovetail into many long-term initiatives between multiple groups, be it HR groups and IT and different groups, it’s distributed between them. It’s not necessary all of them came together and drawn this fantastic picture, but definitely each one have their own broader picture. So we start to bring them together as we build this system, right? 

Now in this hyperautomation and automation, so what we did is, we looked at one key process, end-to-end process, and several of them existed in this value chain, okay. And then you said, okay, let’s automate all of that as part of this hyperautomation. The first one took nine months. Because when you talk to business, they need to understand, when you have right technology to be in place, people need to be trained and comfortable with, and then different [trace], talking to people or the job in a day and understanding all of it, translating and all. It took us nine months, okay, to make an effective working system in place. From that point on, now we all understood, we came together. By the time we got to the third, that time shrunk by 75%. So from nine months, we came down to between two and three months, start delivering the value. It became a [repetitive]- even though we started gaining time a little bit, but we’re not cut down a whole lot. But now, two things. Business know what they are expecting from what they said, quote/unquote, requirements standpoint. And two, they know when they’re going to get it. So we started accomplishing results. Now we have seven or eight deliverable done within the same timeframe. Now we have a roadmap for this year going into next year. These are all playing to the broader initiative or hyperautomation initiatives. 

So as these other initiatives overall onboarding- are making this employee effective as a goal and as you bring different systems, HR SaaS system. Our ticketing system is another SaaS system, real-time API is going between all of it. But with this automation, ringing, shrinking in our timeline for implementation, data flowing between the system together, and these other initiatives that come together, start producing the end result effectively. Now our internal user/employee/whoever it is, having their pieces together very quickly, readily available, and now we are expanding to the global footprint. We took North America first and then globally because the different problems come in. Long-term view, people start implementing, they have a- somebody has three-year roadmap, somebody has two-year roadmap. 

And then within that, we started bringing automation, shrinking the time it takes, everybody seeing the value, okay, let’s go, let’s go. So now data is flowing smoothly across hyperautomation journey in terms of all the system come- they’re still staying the course of time, three years, two years, from one year, whatever the timeline they have is a global, let’s say all hit- everybody is on one global HR system, everything is well connected. That is a multiyear strategy for any organization. To make that happen, along with that comes this automation shrinking timelines. And from nine months, we didn’t have any expectations, whether how long the first one takes, how long the second, third, fourth. But our focus is, we need to shrink the time, business need to see the results. And we accomplished it. And it’s playing heavy into this hyperautomation journey without impacting the timeline. 

Dayle Hall:

So that’s interesting because one of the things I’m interested to know, what were the things you identified that helped you cut down from, whatever, nine months 75%? What are the couple of things that you notice that you maybe you’re still iterating on, which could be happening, or it’s still in your organization? And was this focused on- was it a company-wide project, was it one business unit? And then how do you replicate it across other business units? Because those two things, I think, what are the pitfalls, what’s to watch for and how do you replicate across the business? If I’m out there listening to this, those are the two things that I would want to hear so I can go back to my own business tomorrow and say, hey, we have to think about this. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, what led to us shrinking the timeframe, as I said, we didn’t expect is going to nine months, 10 months, one year. We don’t have that when we started this. But what we firmly established is, okay, both the parties come together, work together and have a process in place. And the technology people need to understand what this person is doing in their daily job, fully understand it as you document it. And then some few things took us some time, connectivity, security, right? People are doing whatever they want, saving documents everywhere. Now we’re bringing it all together, right? For that, mentality needs to change. 

So start with process flows, that’s what we did, all the rules and exceptions thereof. And then as we talked to them and started showing the results and they understood what they need to do.  So that’s what took nine months. Six months, could be one year. But nine months is what it took for us. We didn’t second guess that and then moved on and then where we improved. And then by the time the third one came, and that’s where we hit two and a half months’ timeframe, that’s become consistent on that. That’s what I do. Along with that, we develop the framework. That’s a golden rule in technology world, having repeatable, reusable framework. We did not start with a framework, let me put it that way. Our goal is to cut the time, make sure business is well, those are the key goals we start out with. After we accomplish, how we scale it, how we make, take it to the others. And obviously, one solution doesn’t fit for all. So where we need to provide that adaptability in our framework is what we developed.

Dayle Hall:

Okay. So the framework concepts- again, I know there’s a lot of that within technology and managing large-scale projects and so on. But one of the other areas that I hear a lot about for things like for these kinds of projects and trying to get better governance and communication as you rolled out whether it was the initial one or as you started to improve, did you have a governance and communications model? Do you make changes to be more efficient and faster? And what are some of the things that you’ll learn as you go through these projects around governance or communication, specifically, bringing in the right people, who to communicate within lines of business? What are the things that you will learn that, again, someone out there is thinking about these things that they could take back to their own organization and use? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Right off the bat, we looked at it and made some changes to way IT and business work. So typically, in today’s technology business world, there are requirements. So business gives requirements, IT takes it, start noodling it down and as questions go back and forth, then they’ll go into design and delivery and develop and move on. What we did in this case is, as part of this hyperautomation, different tooling coming into it, well, customers are key, important, right? Is that what you want question. But more importantly, we started looking at the process flows. Okay, we want to automate- eventually, this automation is part of this overall hyperautomation journey. What do you do? Let’s walk me through on it. So we started documenting on it. 

Now what happened in the process is, the technology is talking to the business directly and taking notes on the fly and going back to the business, is that what you do? That establish a relationship already, which is one of the difficult things in the technology business enablement, right, that connection. So as we started going back and forth and business said, oh, I used to do this. And as a- I split this document ten multiple ways and send to these people, that many people, okay, who you send it to? Now we started finding out where the document is being processed by, where it’s stored at, oh, you can put this in a sensitive document, you can put this in OneDrive, even though it is encrypted in a cloud is a sensitive information. 

So we pull back and how we organize ourselves- in the process, we saw many such problems too, data proliferation, we’ll reduce that data proliferation, that threw a problem, but now we know what the problem, how to solve for it.  In all of it, business is looking very closely about what is happening here. They understood. Another problem, outside of that technology is the go away, right, and come back with the design and then voila, after. And business, I’m not sure about that. Because of this interaction, that is a key in making automation and hyperautomation, why technology is able to do today versus previous days and can do more is, they don’t need to spend time, a lot of time per se on each technology area, right? There’s low-code, no-code environment. There’s still heavy Java-based application, dotnet applications out there, you need to go into it. But because of the SaaS and different solution, they know more what that output would be, right? They don’t need to figure out. That is helping in this for technologies to focus on overall solution. 

So that’s what I would suggest, constant engagement, answering a question. Communication governance is, we’re pretty much and every day together until there’s a resolution in place. That took us time. Now both understood what they need to do each other- from each other’s perspective, fun for the group. And they went back and started doing it without that, but I know what to do, right? So that’s how we shrunk the time. That’s what I would suggest in this automation and eventually hyperautomation. 

In terms of hyperautomation, there is strong technology components. For example, real-time integrations, it could be API-based, and this is where it becomes heavy technology. So that’s where technology need to focus on how we bring that together, this is part of hyperautomation. One need to pay attention to how I can shrink the timeline and engage business more. Again, bottom line, engage business more, show more results, talk to them, talk about exceptions. And that is the success of hyperautomation. Don’t get me wrong, we have some failures too, right? And we did learn from it, and some are hard failures and some are we can’t do anything about it. Overall, we are going towards where we want to go.

Dayle Hall:

I like that. But I’m sure we could talk for another two hours. Unfortunately, the podcast is supposed to be between 30 and 45 minutes. So I want to finish just with something based on your experience and the things that you’ve seen happen over the years, your thoughts around projects that you run in your organization, some of the things that you read about across the market in the industry, automation to hyperautomation. What is- what are the few things that you’re really excited about with the technology space? It could be around the move to hyperautomation, it could be around AI or something like that. What are the things that you will look out into the future 2 years, 10 years? You tell me and think, what are you excited about, what are you excited to see and what do you think could be another gamechanger for the enterprise? 

Raja Gangavarapu:

It is the ability to deliver faster and quicker results to the business that they are really looking for. And they can build on top and have that ability to make a change if they wanted to. It is just a Google Maps, it gives you instantaneously which way you want to go often is yours, right? Of course, it doesn’t tell you what happens if you take this versus that. It doesn’t know your situation. But that’s what I am excited about. This hyperautomation is a wonderful term, but one has to peel beneath and really look into it. Don’t stay with the term. Cloud is very important in this journey. Having that infrastructure quickly available for you, it’s a time shrunk, and you have what you need, that’s what the cloud is all about. And that’s what everybody is excited about. Now with all of them coming, it is very exciting. But really, next year or 2 years, 10 years down the line is, obviously, not all the problems can be solved, but we have an opportunity here to provide the value quicker, faster and efficient and the ability to do course correction rather quickly. So that’s what I’m excited about. Let’s see how it’s going to progress. We’re going to learn next year something new, for sure. 

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, I’m sure. But until we find the next best thing, I’ve really appreciated the time today. I love the discussions. I really try and pull out the key things from your experience of what other people can learn from, that they can take back and that they can help improve their own position and their own enterprise, help their enterprise be more successful and their customers that’s why we do what we do. I appreciate your candor, your honesty in sharing your experience. I’ll just say thank you and maybe we’ll do another one of these in the future. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Thank you, Dayle. And this is a fantastic conversation, very dynamic. Appreciate your understanding of the industry, that’s really important because your questions are well connected, even some are a bit dynamic in nature. I appreciate it. And a great conversation. I learned definitely from this as well. Looking forward to future endeavors. 

Dayle Hall:

Yeah, absolutely. There’s always the opportunity as we move forward with these podcasts. I always like the opportunity to do another one, a follow-up. Maybe we get more specific on some projects. But until then, Raja, thank you so much. We appreciate it. 

Raja Gangavarapu:

Thanks, Dayle. Take care. 

Dayle Hall:

Bye, everyone else. Thanks for listening in today. And we’ll see you on the next episode of Automating the Enterprise.