Even if IT is from Mars and business is from Venus, they must work together to enable success with RPA - Blue Prism
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Even if IT is from Mars and business is from
Venus, they must work together to enable
success with RPA
Old Mutual prioritizes IT and business collaboration to drive RPA
success
April 2020
Elena Christopher, Senior Vice President - Research
Defining Future Business Operations
© 2020, HFS Research Ltd. | http://www.HFSresearch.com | @HFSResearch
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Remember that cheesy relationship guide from the early 90s, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
A Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex? While it’s not topping any current bestseller lists, its title floats
around popular culture and can aptly be applied to the age-old corporate holy war of IT versus business.
Both sides are on a mission to digitally transform their companies, but they have fundamentally different
approaches to doing so. Take robotic process automation (RPA) programs as a timely example. Automation
programs that don’t strike a balance between IT and business generally fail. Business-led programs without
adequate IT involvement lack the standards and governance structure necessary to scale. IT-owned
programs lack the process and business context required to prioritize and deliver process improvement.
Regardless of the difference in opinion and approach, collaboration between IT and business is essential to
achieve the overarching mutual goal of transformation.
HFS, with support from Blue Prism, is showcasing real enterprise journeys with RPA. This report spotlights
Old Mutual, an African financial services group, on its quest for improved operational efficiency using RPA.
While its RPA program is currently delivering notable business results worthy of being spotlighted in Old
Mutual’s annual investor reports, it started as a cautionary tale of how things can go awry when IT and
business don’t collaborate. Old Mutual leadership was lucky enough to recognize the disconnect and
galvanize the teams toward the same outcome of driving cost efficiencies and improved customer
experience. Lo and behold, when incentivized to work together, they found more common ground than
ever imagined and developed an effective model of broaching transformation from both sides.
IT and business disconnects are a matter of will versus skill
HFS’ research has found that the disconnect between IT and business is often a matter of will versus skill.
We asked 100 C-Suite executives split across IT and business what was holding them back from achieving
their Digital OneOffice goals (Exhibit 1). Business leaders indicated the biggest issues are a lack of digital
mindset from both business and IT—aka the will to change. IT leaders cited a very execution-focused
response of lack of internal talent—aka skills.
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Exhibit 1: IT is from Mars, business is from Venus—the disconnect between them is often a matter of skill
versus will
Q. What are your greatest challenges holding back your journey to achieve the Digital OneOffice
Framework?
Sample: C-Level Enterprise Executives = 100
Source: HFS Research 2020
Rather than trying to unify the opinions, HFS recommends that enterprises leverage the differences by
bringing them together with a shared purpose. Enable business to drive change through process
improvement and reinvention. Let IT enable change through execution. This combination of will and skill
with a mutually agreed mission allows for a balance between people, processes, and technology, which is
essential for any technology-enabled transformation program.
Old Mutual’s strategic growth imperatives underpin its automation
program
Old Mutual Limited, founded in 1845, is an African financial services group offering
insurance, investment, banking, and lending solutions to individuals, small- and
medium-sized businesses, corporates, and institutions across 13 African countries and China. As expected
of a 175-year-old company, it has a storied history, including global expansion efforts throughout the 1990s
and 2000s. Since 2016, it has made a concerted effort to refocus on its African roots; it completed a process
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of managed separation, in which it separated and divested its non-African entities. Old Mutual Limited
emerged as the new entity and moved its primary listing to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in June 2018.
As part of this refinement exercise, Old Mutual identified eight key “battleground” tenets of its strategy. As
illustrated in Exhibit 2, tenets one through five relate to line of business and geographic priorities. Tenet six
applies to people and has a strong skill and diversity edge to it. Tenets seven and eight support technology
renewal and cost optimization and are the impetus driving Old Mutual’s RPA program.
Exhibit 2: Old Mutual’s “Eight Battlegrounds” strategy tenets
Note: SA is South Africa
Source: Old Mutual, 2020
Getting beyond lip-service in business and IT collaboration
Old Mutual’s RPA program was born from the business two years ago initiated by a centralized services
team akin to a shared services center. As part of its strategic growth imperatives, it expected all divisions of
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the company to contribute. The services team identified RPA as a potential tool that could drive
efficiencies, and it developed a blunt business case based on time and motion studies estimating
automation potential. It was enough to gain executive sponsorship, and the services team went through
the process of selecting an RPA vendor and kickstarting its automation journey. Old Mutual ultimately
selected Blue Prism based on strong security protocols and availability of local support. It also hired a local
service partner that helped refine its proof of concept focus, helped set up its center of excellence (CoE),
and trained internal resources.
Old Mutual’s RPA program was business-led, with IT’s awareness rather than active day-to-day
involvement. The need for more active IT involvement became apparent during the initial deployments
when the QA and production environments were not exact replicas and buggy bots broke down.
“We realized we really needed to involve IT. We asked them to come and partner with
us, but not just for opinion, where we would mutually chase the same outcomes. We
co-located the IT resources with the RPA CoE and gave them the mutual mission to
drive efficiencies and CX. Since then, there are no conversations about ownership. The
team is galvanized around the same outcomes.”
Sebastian Whelan, Former Executive Head of RPA, Old Mutual
Sebastian Whelan, then the Executive Head of RPA, realized that the business-led initiative lacked
fundamental guardrails and standards. According to Whelan, “We realized we really needed to involve IT.
We asked them to come and partner with us, but not just for opinion, where we would mutually chase the
same outcomes. We co-located the IT resources with the RPA CoE and gave them the mutual mission to
drive efficiencies and CX. Since then, there are no conversations about ownership. The team is galvanized
around the same outcomes.”
Don’t expect instant IT and business chemistry
The formal addition of IT to the business team took place roughly six months after the program started, and
it helped set the right conditions for success. However, there was no instant chemistry. Sharon Vergotine,
Head of IT–Robotics and Cognitive Services for Old Mutual, led the embedded IT team. She quickly realized
that many of the standard IT methodologies, policies, and governance protocols that the RPA program
desperately needed could not just be applied as is. There were notable examples:
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0e363e1e• IT’s standards for software development lifecycle (SDLC) management, IT service management, and
release management didn’t meet the business’s needs for delivery cadence.
• Traditionally, developing “code” necessitated that IT comply with SDLC, AGILE, and Waterfall
methodologies and extensive quality assurance governance requirements. But this was overkill for
low-code/no-code RPA and burned unnecessary time and expense.
• IT policy required all employees to have ID numbers to facilitate access management and
credentialing. Addressing access management for digital workers required a review and potential
risk management policy changes.
Vergotine led the change initiatives to develop fit-for-purpose approaches that satisfied stringent IT
requirements while meeting business needs. As Vergotine states, “We had a case of two different worlds
colliding and needing to understand how to work with each other in a new robotic world. The success of
Old Mutual’s RPA program would have been impossible without making key changes to the way IT and
business worked and partnered.”
“We had a case of two different worlds colliding and needing to understand how to
work with each other in a new robotic world. The success of Old Mutual’s RPA
program would have been impossible without making key changes to the way IT and
business worked and partnered.”
Sharon Vergotine, Head of IT–Robotics and Cognitive Services, Old Mutual
Good things happen when you add RPA to the enterprise transformation
toolkit
By bringing IT into the business-led CoE, the RPA program got the standards, governance, and structure it
desperately needed. The collaboration also helped RPA gain broader visibility across the company as part of
the enterprise transformation toolkit. IT realized that RPA meets a variety of timely needs that its deep
integration roadmap would not even contemplate for years. Thus, by working together, IT and business
realized that they could address business needs and enable the transformation from different vantage
points with a mutual approach of always leading with the best solution for the problem.
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0e363e1eNow two years into its RPA journey, Old Mutual reports the following successes:
• The team deployed 151 bots across 43 different processes, with an estimated return to the
business of 5.3 million minutes in 2019.
• Old Mutual has run over 800,000 transactions via straight-through processing with no human
intervention required.
• Speed and iteration results continue to improve, with automation results hovering around 60%, up
from 20%.
• The company achieved a 30% improvement in its NPS score; bots assisting customer service have
led to notable cycle time improvement and happier customers.
• The company has a robust pipeline of automation needs that are evaluated based on which tools or
re-engineering will yield the best results.
• While the research for this report was done ahead of the current pandemic operating conditions,
Old Mutual notes that the existence and health of its RPA program helped it support clients and
employees and the transition to remote operations more effectively.
As Old Mutual strives to scale its RPA program, it is evaluating additional technologies, akin to HFS’
Triple-A Trifecta approach of integrating elements of automation, AI, and analytics to yield exponential
benefits. On its current shortlist are tools for processing and understanding unstructured data and
natural language processing to support sentiment analysis.
The Bottom Line: Collaboration between IT and business is essential to
achieve the overarching mutual goal of transformation.
IT and business may be from different planets, but they are ultimately unified by the mutual need to enable
their companies’ growth strategies. For Old Mutual, technology innovation and efficiency are two separate,
but complementary strategic imperatives that require business and IT to work together. In the case of its
RPA program, a well-intentioned initiative was nearly scuttled due to a lack of alignment between IT and
business. Formally bringing IT into the business-led RPA CoE made the teams work toward a common goal
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0e363e1eof using RPA where it makes sense to drive efficiency and CX and developing robust standards and
processes appropriate for a digital workforce.
While Old Mutual’s automation program got the enhanced structure and governance needed to run
effectively, it also elevated RPA to the broader enterprise-wide transformation toolkit. This helped the
business realize there are more options than RPA. IT realized that RPA has a distinct role to play for timely
automation requirements, particularly when APIs are not available or planned IT intervention is years away.
As HFS states in our report, A New RPA Manifesto for the Next Seven Years, IT and business’s ability to work
together effectively despite their differences is a prerequisite to digital transformation success. Old
Mutual’s strong IT and business collaboration is core to its success and a strong differentiation
characteristic.
8 © 2020, HFS Research Ltd.
0e363e1eHFS Research author
Elena Christopher | Senior Vice President - Research
Elena Christopher is Senior Vice President - Research at HFS. Elena leads HFS’ coverage of
Triple-A Trifecta change agents – AI, automation, and smart analytics. She is also
responsible for driving the industry-specific research agenda for HFS, digging into the
major trends impacting each in-scope industry and the implications for business process
and IT services. Her industry coverage specialization is Banking and Financial Services.
Elena brings more than 25 years of IT and business process services expertise to HFS..
9 © 2020, HFS Research Ltd.
0e363e1eAbout HFS Research: Defining future
business operations
The HFS mission is to provide visionary insight into major
innovations impacting business operations, including:
automation, artificial intelligence, blockchain, Internet of
things, digital business models, and smart analytics.
HFS defines and visualizes the future of business operations
across key industries with our Digital OneOffice™ Framework.
HFS influences the strategies of enterprise customers to help
them develop OneOffice backbones to be competitive and to
partner with capable services providers, technology suppliers,
and third-party advisors.
Read more about HFS and our initiatives on
www.HFSresearch.com or follow @HFSResearch.
10 © 2020, HFS Research Ltd.
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