IT technical services in the game
While utilising your non-technical staff for your business processes through low-code/no-code services, this doesn’t mean that your technical staff can’t utilise this for your IT services either.
Your technical IT staff, such as your software developers or infrastructure technical staff are a major critical resource in your business. But how do these staff relate to business process automation if we’ve talked mainly around low-code/no-code being aimed at non-technical staff?
The answer? Testing.
In all walks of life for your technical services within your organisation, testing changes or new functionality regardless of where that resides and regardless of form is incredibly critical to provide confidence in times of rapid change.
With the rise of DevOps and automation-as-code for infrastructure, and rapid continuous integration/continuous development for application developers, testing all aspects of your application or infrastructure change is absolutely essential as new changes come at an ever-increasing rapid rate.
The significant issue with testing is areas where automating tests can be nearly impossible to perform or sign off without performing these manually, but these areas are no less critical, such as:
- UI changes
- Usability regarding existing application processes
- User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Legacy applications that can’t be automated mixed into processes that have been changed.
From a UI change perspective this could be something such as changing of layout that causes unexpected issues from a usability point of view.
In order to perform this, traditionally this has relied on an organisation’s everyday users of the application or users of the related infrastructure to create a test plan on how they actually use the systems overall, including the changes that have been made. This is often fraught with difficulties, especially where you’re trying to do more with less staff, and actually getting your staff’s time and required outputs will be harder than ever going forwards.
This is where business process automation services have a rather underutilised use case in terms of being able to emulate your user’s behaviour as part of your testing processes and procedures.
This is due to the ability with business process automation being able to act more like a human interacting with a changing application, and reporting where errors or issues reside, minimising your reliance on staff time and speeding up overall development.
HR and human error is catastrophic for security
In our modern world, retaining staff starts with how well you can onboard your staff and integrate them successfully into your business systems. This onboarding all comes down to your processes and procedures to achieve this.
These processes and procedures however are often not simple. These can range from something as common as creating a new user’s email inbox to something more complex, such as onboarding users to certain applications and data that are heavily customised to a business.
Where this becomes a major issue is when organisations get down to volume regarding onboarding users and actioning their related processes per onboarded user.
Certain industries are affected differently to others in this area. For example, in the hospitality industry, seasonal temporary workers are commonly hired for 6 months, but the hiring and setup process can be intense, and requires a lot of work upfront. Equally healthcare may also have a lot of temporary workers required in certain scenarios, such as pandemic, epidemics, or seasonal illnesses.
When creating and configuring users manually, even with certain guidelines to follow, human error rate will always be a factor.
Human error, by nature, is normal, especially when performing repetitive tasks at volume.
These errors are often contributed or even exasperated based on certain factors, such as environmental factors, intrinsic factors to the individuals performing the work, as well as stress factors.
For a repetitive task that is done by hand, it’s common to see between 10 and 30 errors per 100 tasks or processes in the workplace."
Lifetime Reliability
https://lifetime-reliability.com/tutorials/human_error_rate_table_insights/
Now imagine how that might impact onboarding your staff for your business. This could translate for every 100 users, 10-30 users will be set up incorrectly. This also applies to the leaver process as well. Not only does this require a large amount of human effort, effort that could be used elsewhere in your organisation on more important tasks, this also breeds potential catastrophic security breaches and errors in your systems.
Think of users that require access to healthcare records as part of a temporary 6-month assignment and are offboarded to leave the organisation at the same time, and a particular user's access isn't revoked correctly.
This means that you have an employee that has left the business but still potentially has access to extremely sensitive information and would be a serious breach.
Another area is joining the business. Imagine a user account is created as part of the new user process and multi-factor authentication (MFA) isn't setup due to human error, allowing that user to logon with only a username and password. MFA as an extra security barrier has been known to evade serious infiltration in terms of logging in to access and copy sensitive data, or even worse, to place compromising malware or ransomware, crippling a business.
"These [manual task] errors are often contributed or even exasperated based on certain factors, such as environmental factors, intrinsic factors to the individuals performing the work, as well as stress factors."
With the best will in the world, performing even small volumes of your joiner, mover or leaver processes by hand not only costs you a large amount of time from your existing staff, but it is inevitable something will be missed. It is just human nature when doing repetitive tasks.
Many industries are seeing a significant rise in joiners or leavers for various different reasons, but largely related to COVID-19 as businesses adapt to the new normal. For example, with hospitality recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, the volume of new workers being onboarded is higher than ever as they see an increase in customers wanting to take holidays.
How organisations handle this efficiently and without pending catastrophe will be critical over the next few years.
