For companies seeking to counteract the disruptive effects of the pandemic and its ripple effects on global supply chains, hyperautomation can ease the burden that repetitive processes and legacy infrastructure place on organisations.

Hyperautomation is used by businesses to identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. It involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools and platforms, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, business process management suites, low-code/no-code tools, and a broad range of other process and task automation tools.

Listed by Gartner as , hyperautomation is used by innovation-led organisations to drive operational efficiency, improve decision-making, and shift to a more prescriptive or predictive state.

In fact, Gartner believes hyperautomation is shifting from a nice-to-have to a condition of survival for many organisations. This is partly because, at its core, hyperautomation holds the promise of eliminating outdated work processes which are often cited by companies as a top workforce issue.

Shifting the needle on hyperautomation maturity

The precise manner of how hyperautomation is adopted within the organisation depends on which stage the business is at in its automation journey.

At the lower end of the spectrum are companies with mostly ad-hoc, manual and often paper-based processes. Here, tools such as low-code/no-code, digital forms, process modelling and analytics may be used to unlock immediate benefits. For example, a prototype developed at the Â鶹ԭ´´ Co-Innovation Lab would help South African cities reduce the pressure on call centres through a simple self-service app that allows residents to report service issues via their mobile phones.

Companies can move to the next stage of automation maturity by integrating their disparate data and processes to deliver integrated experiences. Here, companies may identify repetitive actions and deploy tools such as AI to automate responses, extend their channels of engagement with customers and reduce the workload on service teams. Aspects such as enterprise integration, multi-channel experiences and the use of bots come into play during this stage.

Integration can be hugely beneficial. One found that, while 57% of organisations that are involved with enterprise integration projects hoped to achieve improved data visibility, 90% actually reported improved data visibility when the project was complete. And while 56% hoped for greater business agility, 86% reported real gains in business agility following their integration project.

As companies standardise their end-to-end processes and adopt automation best practices, they may utilise process exploration, big data and process monitoring to identify loopholes for automation. This could take the form of simplification of key business processes.

For example, a company may choose to leverage structured and unstructured big data to better understand customer preferences prior to a sales engagement, identifying patterns or trends, identifying products of interest, reducing preparation time and delivering a more personalised experience.

Toward seamless automated processes and experiences

When automation capabilities mature, companies may move closer to the ideal of seamless automation that blends human-led and digital experiences.

Here, aspects such as robotic process automation come into play, with companies leveraging prebuilt content via process flows, forms, business rules and process visibility dashboards to trigger tasks autonomously and automate complex tasks.

This frees up vital internal resources and eliminates the need for inefficient manual processes, leaving workers to focus on higher-value tasks that drive greater customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and bottom-line results.

While few companies can claim this level of automation maturity, any company that is ready to leverage automation can drive continuous intelligence and enable a culture of predictive working.

Companies that are at the aspirational stage of their automation journeys can benefit from prioritising certain key activities, including:

• Leveraging process excellence;
• Shifting the company culture to one of exception-based working;
• Adopting predictive insights to improve decision-making;
• Improving the accuracy of their planning while also improving operational execution;
• Achieving a shift in mindset throughout the organisation to one of ‘automate-first’; and
• Elevating the value of human roles by eliminating lower-impact, manually-intensive work and allowing skilled resources to focus on value-generating activities.

All companies with aspirations of becoming an intelligent enterprise can benefit from investment in hyperautomation. Partnering with an expert tech provider can also ease the process of discovering, designing and delivering an effective hyperautomation strategy that can unlock greater efficiency, improved customer experiences, more accurate decision-making and increased competitiveness.

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Data Regulations with national reach like South Africa’s POPIA and Brazil’s LGPD, state-wide reach like California’s CCPA and multinational reach like Europe’s GDPR are already mainstream, to the extent where broad scale adoption by organisations has progressed and companies have growing skills and competency in adhering to policies and programs.

Data Privacy and Protection was always considered a CEO and CFO discussion – with financial penalties making headlines for data breaches. As an example, Amazon’s €746m penalty topped the charts in 2021 due to consent management discrepancies related to cookie collection on web browsers, and the fine was nearly three times larger than that of WhatsApp the same year, who faced a €225m penalty for a lack of clarity around their data processing practices in their privacy policy.

But is the accountability and business relevance of data privacy and protection changing offices within the C-Suite? While financial risk is always a business concern, could the shift occurring in our now post-pandemic era of business be to the Chief Customer Office?

The shift to loyalty

Pandemic-era consumer behaviour dropped substantially around the world in 2020 and saw partial improvement during 2021. What has changed though, is the prioritisation of certain categories of spend and the shift away from brand alignment in favour of pricing, convenience and other factors. AÌýÌýdelves into one convenience factor, where 60-70% of US consumers in 2021 were shopping in a more omni-channel manner, with social media as a new channel. Brand alignment or loyalty was also impacted by poor stock-on-hand, with over 60% of consumers facing this situation and only 13% being willing to wait for stock to arrive.

Consumer preference has evolved. Relationships with new brands continue to be spawned out of need, interest, spite or frustration. Convenience, frictionless buying and accurate delivery are expected. What brands cannot afford to do now is give consumers a reason to look somewhere else, and the discussion around data privacy, consent, personalised communication and data protection is now a key priority for the most senior executive accountable for customer engagement, customer experience, and customer success.

The attention of a single customer is a hot commodity in the current era of business. The typical new eCommerce customer experience starts at a social media platform, follows a click-through buying process from a sponsored ad or post, requires the customer to select (and deselect) cookie tracking options, and hopefully not get distracted before completing an order, with convenient payment methods that favour the customer. Inject any notification or pop-up from another brand along the way and your customer journey needs to ensure that you remind that customer of their abandoned basket and offer them a limited time discount to come back to the store to complete their order.

This is the current expectation… but improve this through accurate understanding and prediction of their buying preferences and behaviour and you stand a good chance of closing that order and getting repeat purchases. Mess this up and you’ve lost the opportunity. Add a privacy concern, data breach or any friction in the consent management process and you’ve likely lost that customer for life.

Outlook

Financial risk associated with data regulation infringement is obviously still a priority. No business expects to face multimillion Euro penalties in any given financial year, and this would be a hard knock to both the bank balance and the brand’s reputation. Perhaps, to the CFO, this becomes more of a contingency and the likelihood of facing a penalty becomes more commonplace.

The shift in terms of strategy and competitive advantage with regard to data privacy and protection is arguably sitting with the Chief Customer Officer going forward. Customer journeys, customer insights and customer campaigns should always include an element of sense-checking compliance with regulations, even if the tick-box exercise returns the same results each time. Customers have less appetite to force alignment with particular brands. Even in the banking sector, where customers traditionally have held accounts for decades,ÌýÌýfor 2022.

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The severity of COVID infection seems to be waning, vaccination and antibodies are both on the rise, and employees are now more likely to be in the office and emotionally engaged than in the past two years. Those of us who are still here are the determined ones. We’ve escaped mortal danger that earlier waves of the pandemic caused at scale. We’ve navigated ‘The Great Resignation’ – the exploration of purpose and meaning by employees – and have either already made a career move or have decided to stay… both very powerful mindset and career stances.

As the great return to normality unfolds, it’s a good idea for businesses both large and small to consider two key themes for survival and growth in 2022 – Employee Relevance and Customer Value.

Employee Relevance

We don’t merely work for money these days. We need meaning, alignment, a deeper sense of involvement, accountability, respect, belonging, recognition, purpose and joy. If you asked a group of staff members what they value most at work now, I would argue that self-esteem factors rank significantly higher now than in pre-pandemic times.

We also don’t have time for friction. Office politics, gossip, inefficient processes, slacking colleagues, stigma, discrimination, unfair practice or antiquated tools and systems fall into the category ofÌý‘yeah, we know it’s a problem but it’s not that urgent’Ìýissues that businesses cannot afford to ignore any longer.

For employees, the elusive work-life balance challenge seems to have shifted where people now make time for work and life comes first, within reason. To drive productivity, revenue growth and profitability in 2022, businesses need to prioritise investment of time, energy and funding into the projects that will ensure employees want to work there and projects that remove the likelihood of giving them a reason to look somewhere else.

Customer Value

If you get employee relevance right, customer engagement naturally benefits as your internal culture has a knock-on effect to your customers, suppliers, shareholders and partners. Imagine the difference between a customer support consultant in a call centre who truly appreciates where they work and another who is disgruntled due to poor office culture. Now image the same comparison in a retail store, where your business is still trying to make the sale.

To determine customer value, we need the customer to tell us that the product or service they consume is adding value and to quantify or qualify this to some extent. We don’t get to decide customer value, we can merely perceive expected value. So, to achieve this, it means employees need to do a great enough job to convince a customer to make a purchase – be it online, in-store or through a partner, then we need to have the confidence and means to reach out to that customer in order to ask if the product or service was as expected and useful, and we need to convince them to give us the feedback as honestly and constructively as possible.

Seems achievable right?

Maybe… but the true measure of value delivered will be determined by whether or not they return to buy the same product or service, recommend it to others or buy from the rest of the product catalogue. Lifetime value can be measured once a customer repeats their buying behaviour or expands their range of products bought. You can start to drill down into their recency of purchasing, frequency of purchasing, typical monetary value per purchase, or total purchase value over time. As a business, if you achieve repeat purchase behaviour it means you’re getting something right. Either the customer loves the brand, or they value the quality of products, or they appreciate the way you personalise communication and appear to truly understand them.

In 2022, if businesses begin to put customer lifetime value top of mind, it will force the right line of questioning in every big business decision.ÌýDo we make those changes to the loyalty app? Do we invest in the track and trace capability, so customers can track their deliveries? Do we switch couriers or suppliers to improve lead times? Do we change the profitability dashboards, so that we know how much customers have spent on our brand? Do we create a single view of customer engagement and history so that our support teams know the status of orders or complaints when a customer calls in?

Progress

Good things come in threes, so a third consideration that lends itself to employee relevance and customer value is to measure progress. It’s no good introducing new processes or tools if you are not tracking the usage and value gained from those new additions. If there is a way to track data for one of these investments, do it and share the insights far and wide so that both staff and project sponsors can see the outcomes in near real-time. Providing some correlation between usage of employees tools and the reduction in sick days or growth in job satisfaction scores, or providing some correlation between customer-facing add-ons and the growth in customer browsing behaviour online or revenue growth, will do wonders to show the real positive impact being achieved through process and system investments.

Generally, when good news is shared in a transparent and authentic manner, it fosters a great working culture that is continuously improving and is willing to share and receive feedback as a means to do so.

There are only 365 days to make an impact this year and some of those have already passed by in the haze that is New Year.ÌýTo make this more tangible, try to commit to identifying one project that will improve employee relevance and one project that will improve customer value by the end of January. Don’t worry about how to deliver the projects just yet… just use the process to begin asking the right questions and getting the buy-in from colleagues and executive management to commit the right level of focus and attention to these two themes this year. Do this, and 2022 will be off to a great start!

This blog first appeared on .

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As the country hardest-hit by the coronavirus on the continent, South Africa has been regrettably slow with its vaccine rollout, with only having received a vaccine dose at the time of writing this.

A first phase, which focused on healthcare workers, concluded in mid-May, and the second phase targeting the elderly and other vulnerable groups, including teachers, is currently underway.

The vaccination of the South African population against SARS-CoV-2 is the most ambitious and far-reaching healthcare initiative in the country’s history, and continues to stretch the limits of our healthcare sector.

Much has been said about the slow pace of vaccine procurement and challenges with convincing parts of the population to vaccinate – thanks in no small part to the extraordinary disinformation campaigns flourishing on social media.

However, one somewhat forgotten aspect risks being lost: the importance of data, and the protection thereof, in building trust in the process.

Optimal usage and protection of patient data

Personal health data represent a particular challenge in terms of data security as a failure to protect such data could severely harm people and expose them to discrimination.

For example, inadvertently sharing sensitive personal health data of a person living with a dread disease could affect their job prospects and livelihoods. A mix-up in personal health data could lead to someone receiving the incorrect diagnosis or, even worse, the wrong treatment. This can be life-threatening under some circumstances.

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), which was finally implemented in full force in 2020, aims to give citizens greater control over how their personal data is stored, processed and used.

While all businesses that work with private data – including that of organisations and other juristic persons – are affected, it is arguably the healthcare sector that is under most pressure due to the ongoing pandemic and the unprecedented vaccine rollout effort.

Where is my data anyway?

The vaccine rollout in particular poses an immense challenge in terms of data security and privacy protection. Any clinic, hospital, private or public healthcare practitioner, medical aid or medicines firm needs to ensure they protect the personal healthcare data processed during the course of business.

This is easier said than done.

While government has taken steps to centralise the scheduling and rollout of vaccinations via its Electronic Vaccination Data System (EVDS) portal, and require that all citizens wishing to be vaccinated register on EVDS. The intention is that, as each population group (over-60s, teachers, healthcare workers, etc.) registers, each person receives communication with the time, date and location of their scheduled vaccination appointment.

However, the system is often unreliable, and many people simply get no confirmation of where they need to go or when. There is also little communication over the status of an application for vaccination.

Compounding the problem is that actual vaccination sites are run by a combination of public and private sector organisations, and in many cases are open to walk-ins who may not have received confirmation of their appointments.

How is the data of walk-ins, for example, collected, stored, processed and managed? Who is overseeing the full end-to-end process to ensure it is fully POPIA compliant? In the case of manual data entries, how is quality maintained to ensure data integrity? And how is this data secured from the rising tide of cyberattacks besieging South African organisations?

The role of technology

Public and private sector healthcare organisations should lean heavily on technology to assist with both the protection of vaccine patient data as well as better supporting the end-to-end vaccination process.

A patient experience management tool can give healthcare decision-makers insights into underperforming or misaligned aspects of the vaccination process – for example, insufficient communication around vaccination appointments – and help ensure a seamless process from start to finish.

A cloud-based analytics tool can help integrate healthcare data from public and private sector roleplayers and highlight critical insights that can point to trends, risks, opportunities and areas for improvement while maintaining data integrity throughout. Equipped with accurate and complete data, government and other decision-makers will be able to determine the most effective healthcare response and potentially save lives.

In addition, any vaccine rollout strategy should include a comprehensive customer data strategy, which helps to safeguard the longevity of each organisation involved in the vaccination value chain. Such a strategy should include relevant digital platforms that can ease or enable the process of managing patient profiles, and help manage access and authorisation to systems that provide self-service options for activities such as booking vaccination appointments or tests.

In terms of POPIA compliance, all organisations should have taken steps by now to ensure they meet the requirements of the Act, especially since the grace period for sanction and fines for non-compliance expired at the end of June. Implementing an effective cloud-based customer relationship management tool enables healthcare providers to have a unified view of each vaccinated patient, and gives them the power to limit how that information is used or even delete it (in line with the requirements of POPIA) if needed.

Critically, the customer data strategy should provide individuals with the power of consent to subscribe or unsubscribe to correspondence, manage their preferences for ongoing communication, and afford them the right to be forgotten.

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What is the outlook for the enterprise IT market on the African continent in 2021?

Three fundamental shifts have taken place in 2020 that will drive evolution in the enterprise IT market in 2021. The first is the financial strain faced by so many businesses on the continent, the second is the rise of the work-from-anywhere generation, and the third is the rise of ecommerce as a necessity.

What the continuous financial strain leads to is corporate strategy – regardless of size or industry sector – that aims to drive resilience and profitability. In the enterprise IT context, this translates to tech modernization investments that brings transparency to the financial wellbeing of a company and allows decision makers to easily identify much-needed actions to drive positive change. The scope for analytics, predictive modeling and intelligent working solutions is vast.

The work-from-anywhere expectation of employees implies a continued investment in productivity tools that allow teams to connect and collaborate online. Not only would the adoption of the software platforms continue to rise but a set of new job niches open up for people and companies to provide masterclasses in using particular workplace productivity tools or to assist in scouting and planning the right combination of productivity tools that are best-fit for a particular team. This includes a rise in security strategy offerings to ensure companies are working with minimal risk of exposure to external parties.

Lastly, eCommerce as a necessity is a result of companies needing to drive revenue through alternate channels during lockdowns. Many who were new to digital strategies would have seen the light, with digital offering lower costs of sale as compared to brick and mortar stores. Further investment in both eCommerce and CRM platforms to improve customer journeys and online shopping experiences will be witnessed, with investment in logistics and warehouse management system modernization to accommodate this increase in demand following soon after.

What key technologies should CIOs across the continent look out for in the year ahead?

Most tech enthusiasts will continue to keep a close eye on 5G and the opportunities it opens for connectivity, for people and for things. AI will continue to stretch into more mainstream corporate applications, the same way we unknowingly train thousands of machine learning models daily as an individual, corporate applications of machine learning will continue to rise with no obvious disruption to work tasks. We can expect to witness growth in job functions such as business architecture, automation engineering and process optimization.

One major shift in technologies will be greater adoption of low-code and no-code platforms to build enterprise applications, from SMEs to large enterprises. The agility, ability to prototype rapidly and the time to value offered by these platforms makes this an obvious choice for corporates looking to drive cost efficiency across their businesses. The skill of programming will continue to have a place but there will be a shift to software architecture, reverse engineering and user-centric design over coding in the coming year.

ÌýWhat predictions do you have for the African enterprise IT market and what should CIOs be paying attention to?

As part of a longer-term strategy to drive down exchange rate fluctuation as a key factor in corporate spending, along with the growth in tech sector start-up and scale-up investment through venture capital funds and the impending rise of additional mega-cities on the continent, Africa will begin creating more African solutions that solve global problems. The tech start-ups that are trying to solve an issue about proximity or lack of expert resources or removing friction in a process will gain traction but will have continental origins.

As a CIO, creating alliances with early stage businesses, whether to outsource the build of enterprise applications, or to funnels into a corporate growth strategy focused on investments – will be essential for long-term survival. New ventures offer an opportunity to drive competitive advantage, or to gain market penetration, or to provide a new essential service to other stakeholders in your current industry sector. These outcomes will feed new business models, operating models and revenue streams, making a current business a lot more diverse and arguably more bulletproof for future economic shocks. At the least, the insights gained from working with new ventures will drive internal mindset shifts that should spark more innovation internally.

Given the shift to remote working brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, how do you see this shaping up in 2021 and how can CIOs and CISOs improve the security posture of their organisations in Africa?

The ability and willingness of employees to work remotely will not fall away for the foreseeable future. Naturally, some roles cannot be performed remotely, but remote working for at least a known proportion of a business can be properly defined and the correct infrastructure put in place to drive team performance.

Further investment in workplace productivity, the software and skills for communication and collaboration, will continue to rise in 2021. If not already in place, companies should be looking to introduce enterprise architecture, information architecture and security architecture capacities to their teams – whether in-house or outsourced. With the next normal of working, new challenges will arise – from mobile device enrolment where there was never a need, to procurement systems and policies to accommodate self-service buying by staff needing home office equipment, software licenses or replacement devices, to ensuring data encryption is in place through secure communication channels when dealing with sensitive data.

At the least, companies should be educating the workforce on safe working practices and to highlight the risks associated with using public WIFI networks, social hacking, unattended devices, phishing and improper classification of documentation for internal, external or confidential usage. Then, following a maturity curve or security implementation roadmap to introduce more hard controls to reduce the risk of improper access to corporate systems and data would be needed.

What do you see as challenges for enterprises across different industry verticals in Africa in 2021?

African businesses and its investors will look at hedging for supply chain integrity. The lockdowns of 2020 caused major disruption to businesses worldwide and a general shift to identify and secure local, domestic or continental suppliers is underway. Across industry sectors, this would have varying levels of readiness to completely replace prior international suppliers. Some may have fixed contracts in mind or preferred suppliers internationally, based on pricing or quality. Supply diversification may not also make sense for all sectors.

Consumer behaviours also shapes sector evolution. For example, grocery consumers would favour both quality and price and would arguably suffer from a lack of variety in order to retain value for money. Understandably, this new consumer behaviour may be born from their direct outcome of national lockdowns impacting their disposable income. The knock-on effect to the retailer, consumer goods manufacturer, co-ops and farmers is reduced demand for some produce and increased demand for others. Within the telecommunication sector, the work-from-home era puts the majority of the workforce on home WIFI networks, shifting the spend from voice calls to VOIP calls via chat platforms.

Hard hit sectors, such as transportation, would look at innovative ways to drive additional revenue. One example is a shift to more pay-as-you-use models for vehicles, or all-you-can-use models for trains, buses, trams, planes or bicycles. The knock-on effect for the stakeholders in these value chains is immense. A survivalist approach, with a relevant business offering and a business model favourable to the consumer, will see a company through the next wave of transformation.

What emerging technologies will take off in 2021 and what will drive the adoption of those technologies in Africa?

Less of a technology and more of an approach is the adoption of sustainability as a corporate strategy pillar. More businesses are realizing the need for purpose-led corporate culture and are feeling the pressure to align business decisions with their purpose with an aim to build more ethical and sustainable businesses.

Technologies to support this, such as Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s Climate21 initiative that features a Carbon Footprint Analysis solution to assess your company’s ongoing contribution to climate change, will help drive the transparency needed to make the right changes for sustainable outcomes. Other solutions in the circular economy, health and safety, and waste management domains, drive these climate action outcomes even more. For this to be successful, leaders need to ensure that sustainability outcomes are measurable and that the discussion on progress is being represented in the boardroom across the continent.

Beyond sustainability, and to support a focus on cost efficiency and the retention of almost only the critical skills within a business, is the rise in Intelligent Robotic Process Automation. For companies to work smarter, they need to shift to working on exceptions and not trawling through lists of tasks. This means employees shift their work to focus on higher value-add tasks and the rate of productivity within a business should increase. For this to succeed, all representatives at the board level need to understand the benefits of automation and the journey to get there, to help identify opportunities across their respective business areas and to effectively communicate the impact and positive outcomes for the human contingent within the business.

What technologies will be most sought after in the year ahead?

Once people realise that 2021 will continue in much the same light as 2020 has, there’ll be a renewed enthusiasm to work simpler and smarter. From a home worker perspective, hardware and software that adds simplicity to video and voice calls – from headsets, to presentation and video editing software, to smart desks and audio-visual and lighting equipment – will be on the hotlist. From a corporate perspective, audio-visual equipment to sustain team calls and remove the need for individual connections from within the office will be on the wish list, as well as team performance dashboards spanning different departments (such as Â鶹ԭ´´â€™s Digital Boardroom) to show a holistic view of the business with the ability to drilldown to detail or correlate data on demand. The transparency created by dashboards feeds a rise in relevance within decision making, which in turn feeds an automation strategy.

How should CIOs tackle the skills challenges the African technology sector is facing at the moment?

There is a comparative shortage of tech skills in Africa. To combat this, a long-term strategy should be adopted, whereby CIOs and other leaders are supporting growth opportunities for currently skilled and future tech specialists. Growth can take the form of formal funding for schooling and tertiary education but can also be demonstrated by creating opportunities to collaborate with the youth. For example, a corporate hackathon can include students or scholars, so they get familiar with the industry sector, business challenges represented in the hackathon, and the technologies used to help solve those challenges. Not only is there an opportunity for potential internship placements after the event, but there’s also the growth of awareness at a young age that can help recruit future techies. One organisation – AI in Africa – has been focused on giving high school aged girls exposure to AI concepts successfully through a similar model.

Work experience opportunities, in the form of tech academies, startup challenges, incubators or internships, designed to bring people in and get them collaborating with others of mixed expertise, will broaden their minds and appetite for learning and growth while growing their networks.

What CIOs can also do is share their stories with the world.

Follow Mervyn George on Twitter @mervynonline

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