Your RODI depends on it
What is RODI?
At Genzeon, we are nuts about RODI. – But what is RODI?
Rodi is our mascot, our squirrel with the Genzeon hoodie. But RODI represents our commitment to all our clients. Our mascot stands and fights for "Return on Digital and Data Investments."
So, what does RODI have to do with hyperautomation, and whether it is a strategy or a technology?
Focusing exclusively on solving challenges in healthcare, we encounter a lot of clients who have invested in automation. Much of the time we encounter teams that are unable to realize or measure the value from their platform investments. As we look across the spectrum of our clients, we see a growing pattern. It's with that insight that I decided to write this article and share the findings with the broader community.
Origin Story
Before diving into the details, I want to share the inspiration behind this article. The Genzeon team recently spent time with our UiPath partners and returned from the UiPath Forward event in Las Vegas, which prompted me to reflect on our nearly decade-long automation journey with clients. Our focus on healthcare has allowed us to tackle similar challenges over the years, revealing key patterns in the process.
These patterns highlight two critical aspects: first, where clients are in their value realization journey, and second, how the concept of automation has evolved—from basic automation to intelligent automation to hyperautomation and now to agentic automation. Furthermore, we’ve witnessed a transformation in automation from individual building blocks to sophisticated, integrated systems.
In this first article, I will explore the value realization journey and discuss the implications of choosing automation as either a technology platform or a business strategy.
The Hyperautomation Value Realization Pattern in Healthcare
While we at Genzeon focus exclusively on solving challenges in healthcare, we encounter a lot of clients who have invested in automation. Many of the time we encounter teams that are unable to realize or measure the value of their platform investments. As we look across the spectrum of our clients, we see a growing pattern. It's with that insight that I decided to write this article and share the findings with the broader community.
Stage 0: Initial Proofs of Value
So, what happened?
An organization has significant amount of manual work being done across the various business functions. With an objective to remove the manual effort and automate those tasks, a technology platform for hyperautomation is brought into the organization. The program starts with significant organization aspiration and momentum with an executive sponsor for several processes. In most cases, these use cases deliver on the initial promise and show savings. So far so good.
Where's the problem here? There isn't one.
Stage 1: Use Case Identification - "Envision"
Expectations rise as the organization looks to build upon the momentum. The main stakeholders then need to identify additional opportunities across new business processes. This also means identifying new executive sponsors that are willing to commit time and energy to automate those processes.
Identifying Processes for Automation Success
There is a science involved in identifying automation opportunities and it goes into understanding business processes, tasks, and process mining, optimizing existing processes and narrowing down the automation opportunity.
After you have gone through a lengthy analysis of various processes and identified a few automation opportunities, comes the hard task of determining the RODI (you have probably figured out by now that I am a hard-core fan of driving RODI for our clients). We have built a strong science around how to determine RODI with our value intelligence framework that determines measurable, visible and hidden value that drives the return for the organization.
We've seen a few organizations fail at this stage. With help, you can survive and get through this stage, especially with a partner who has the science, experience and the value framework that allows you to focus on your business. So, in a happy scenario, we will assume most companies will get past this stage with a partner.
So now, where is the problem? No problem - let's move on.
“The transition from automation proof of concepts to hyperautomation requires a shift: from cost center to value center.”
Stage 2: Enterprise Realization for Hyperautomation - "Launch"
The next stage is when an organization realizes value and excitement from the first few use cases for hyperautomation and sets expectation to do this at scale. "Let's do this across the entire organization - this is amazing!" one would say. And it is - or can be.
It matters now – “Is hyperautomation approached as a business strategy or a technology platform.”
Still image from UiPath Forward 2024, talk on agentic automation
If the hyperautomation platform is viewed first and foremost as a technology platform, it is likely driven by the IT organization as a tool that is made available when required, just like a collaboration platform like Teams or Slack. In more mature organizations, the hyperautomation initiative might even warrant a Center of Excellence in the organization with participants from interested stakeholders in the organization.
In both cases, the hyperautomation platform is still viewed as a cost center. There are many costs involved: license costs, implementation costs, maintenance costs, and support costs. But in the end, they can all be justified when and if you are regularly driving new automations and creating additional savings.
At this stage is when we see organizations truly struggle. The transition from automation proof of concepts to hyperautomation requires a shift: from cost center to value center. It requires a shift from being a technology implementation to an enterprise strategy for it to scale. It requires a shift of ownership, a change of executive sponsors, a commitment to tracking financial metrics, and, one of the most important challenges, creation of an automation factory to scale automations effectively.
Here's the problem. This isn't easy, and most companies fail to get past this stage. Instead, this now leads to a different, significant shift; a shift from excitement to disenchantment on the value of hyperautomation. Most of the organizations will either blame the technology, the partner, or the internal executive who leads these efforts as having failed them. While any of these could have a part in the setback, the primary failure is that the organization approached hyperautomation as a technology and not as a business strategy.
Stage 3 or Stage 4 – Rolling the Dice
At this point if you succeeded, you are in Stage 3 - Thrive. Congratulations!
If you failed, you advance directly to State 4, Revive. You do not pass Go, and you do not collect $200 (I am also a big Monopoly fan). Getting to Stage 4 or not depends on what happens next.
So, what now? That's a topic for part two of this article that I intend to publish in the next couple of weeks to discuss the evolution of automation and how we have not only seen partners like UiPath evolve in their journey but also how healthcare client investments have evolved as well. I will bring some of Genzeon team findings from the UiPath Forward event with you as well.
Thank you,
Harsh Singh
Your Healthcare Hyperautomation Partner
