Our Secret to Accelerating Enterprise Automation

Steve Jobs said it best: “Innovation is the only way to win.” An organization may increase profitability by becoming more efficient. A business may capture market share by lowering prices. A company may increase revenues by opening new sales territories. But the only way to win — to gain a sustainable competitive edge — is to innovate.

That’s why innovation is so highly prized. But, for most, it is also elusive. Why? Too often, people conceive innovative ideas, but organizations struggle to adopt new and better ways of doing things. People remain stuck working in the same way and aiming for the same outcomes as before, creating shortfalls in progress. Why is innovation so hard to adopt?

Cheryl in Chicago, Larry in London

Innovation does not easily thrive in complex organizations where people, processes, and data are spread across diverse geographies and functions. New ideas that could fuel innovation stay stuck without proper translation into the responsibilities of each impacted team and process.

Plus, management gauges workers based on well-established performance metrics. What’s the incentive to achieve new metrics — even if those would raise margins, improve customer experience, or speed processes — when the effort is unrecognized? And simply put, it requires time to maintain the status quo, leaving less time for being creative and thinking about better ways to do things.

Lack of support is another inhibitor. People with new ideas get little assistance or tools to help drive innovation. Many in an organization view innovation as someone else’s responsibility. They assume there’s a special innovation department somewhere that oversees all that stuff.

What if we could help our people achieve their day-to-day responsibilities and develop and adopt new ideas?

Automation can help organizations drive innovation

Automation may not be the first thing that springs to mind when fostering innovation, but it can be pretty powerful. Automation tailors innovation to specific needs.

With automation to perform more day-to-day tasks — faster and with greater accuracy — time frees up, and the opportunities to innovate become available. Enterprises that embrace this mindset excel. Automation is not about loss, quite the opposite. Automation maximizes the value of resources and people.

The following examples reveal how automation can make time and resources available to test the new ideas that underpin innovation and advance an organization. In our case, we combine our expert services with a suite of software products and a cloud-based platform — the NTT DATA Nucleus Intelligent Enterprise platform — to deliver outcome-driven automation. With Nucleus leading the way, we provide automation solutions that yield faster, higher quality, more agile outcomes. Hundreds of clients benefit from Nucleus services automation across a range of business processes, from applications to infrastructure to data intelligence.

Nucleus Application Transformation Suite simplifies cloud migration

There are a host of compelling reasons for migrating applications to the cloud. Doing so enables organizations to break free of the limitations of data centers and physical servers, scaling their infrastructure up or down to meet changing needs and paying only for the capacity used. Cloud migration also supports improved resiliency because organizations need not invest in redundant facilities for disaster recovery, and cloud uptime is guaranteed close to 100%. In addition, cloud service providers take over an array of responsibilities from in-house IT teams, freeing them to focus on business-building activities and accelerating time to market.

The problem is that migration can be challenging. If organizations manually assess applications for migration readiness, that line-by-line process can take weeks or months. Code interrogation is tedious, and the work is subject to human error.

Nucleus Application Transformation Suite uses automation to make that process easier.

• CloudART analyzes existing applications’ viability for migration to the cloud, generates code to adapt those applications to run in the cloud, and deploys those freshly scalable apps to the cloud. No error-prone human effort is required.
• Transformation Manager catalogs and evaluates existing application assets, generates code supporting new application architectures, and migrates the application and its data to the new architecture.
• UniKix rehosts mainframe applications to industry-standard infrastructures, automatically assessing existing applications for cloud migration and generating new cloud-native code.

Using these Nucleus tools results in accelerated application modernization and development and simpler ongoing application management. For example, Nucleus Application Transformation Suite rapidly assessed an advanced energy equipment manufacturer’s core 24 applications to migrate over 1,500 applications to AWS public cloud 90% faster.

Nucleus Storefront for Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure delivers agile management

Once migrated to the cloud, enterprises have many other opportunities to accelerate innovation with automation. Nucleus Storefront for Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure, for example, automates cloud infrastructure provisioning and monitoring.

Typically, IT staff puts considerable time and effort into managing complex cloud environments and performing routine tasks, such as backing up servers and updating antivirus applications. Nucleus offloads these responsibilities, even with third-party products. To make things even easier, it’s all managed from a single, easy-to-use interface with point-and-click functions.

IT staff can devote more time to business-building application development without those routine tasks filling their days. The most critical projects get the resources they deserve, accelerating enterprise innovation. A global paper manufacturer reduced ticket volumes and technician dispatches by 25% using Nucleus Storefront for Cloud & Hybrid Infrastructure.

Nucleus Intelligent Document Processing unlocks valuable data

Business process inefficiencies are great candidates for innovation. Still, there can be significant roadblocks — such as having unstructured and structured data trapped and inaccessible within physical documents.

Mobile banking apps have vastly improved the efficiency of depositing checks. Today we can deposit a check from anywhere via a smartphone because Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) automatically extracts the data recorded on that physical check, including the date, check amount, account number, and signature. What used to require a physical trip to a bank and a teller's manual entry of check data now takes just a few seconds.

Other use cases can be equally transformative. A North American health provider needed faster contract processing to speed up provider onboarding. Nucleus IDP automatically extracted key business data from paper-based contracts, processing 500,000 contracts in 3 months, reducing single-contract turnaround time from 45 days to one day and saving $2.5 million.

By automating the extraction of unstructured and structured data from physical documents, Nucleus IDP frees resources and allows an organization to get creative and retool business processes to be more efficient and deliver more value to customers.

From automation to hyperautomation to innovation

But automation doesn’t end there. Because data from these Nucleus services is stored, standardized, and secured on the Nucleus platform, users can combine capabilities from multiple products into a unified collection of automated processes. In other words, Nucleus enables clients to automate the automation processes, known as hyperautomation. Hyperautomation takes automation to the next level, ensuring that data moves securely, fast, and freely across departments. The Nucleus platform integrates products and services, bridges organizational silos, and allows innovation opportunities to appear.

Automation — and, for our clients, Nucleus automation — can help organizations remove the barriers to innovation. And innovation, as Steve Jobs said, is the only way to win, enabling a sustainable competitive advantage. Visit our landing page to discover more about our Nucleus Intelligent Enterprise Platform.