Designing for humanity in Intelligent Workflows.
Transforming talent in the era of AI.
As enterprises adopt new intelligent workflows that support augmenting and automating some of the existing tasks and jobs that employees perform, it is integral that we adopt a human-centered approach that builds trust and transparency, leaning heavily on talent transformation and job-reinvention.
This article explores the interplay between disruptive technology, process re-design, business value creation and talent transformation. Human-centred design is at the core of creating these new intelligent workflows and we can leverage design to create better outcomes to utilise technology, engage people and meet strategic business outcomes. We present a framework to help design intelligent workflows and ensure that people remain at the core of the future of work.
Intelligent workflows must be designed with the user in mind.
Intelligent workflows constitute new and innovative processes where people work with machines to achieve tasks. As intelligent workflow design permeates existing business processes, and as companies move towards ideas about a “cognitive and remote enterprise,” humans and machines need to learn to work together in new ways. Historically, large business processes have been replaced with automation. These large business processes have embodied a clean “lift-and-shift” approach where a task which has traditionally been performed by a human is now replaced fully by a machine.
As core processes are automated, businesses are looking to further optimise their workflows though automation and augmentation of micro-processes. When these micro-process improvements are launched, they require humans and machines to work together to complete tasks in a workflow.
Humans must augment machines, just as machines augment humans. We should be designing intelligent workflows that account for all the jobs-to-be-done that humans and machines perform, working in a symbiotic way.
We cannot design intelligent workflows without the User in mind. Talent transformation and change management approaches must be closely adopted to ensure intelligent workflows succeed in enterprise settings. Involving Users in the design process dramatically reduces the anxiety and fear associated with this type of role change, and it starts the talent transformation process on day 1 of the MVP roadmap. More than learning new technical skills, our observations on talent transformation are about the mental and emotional shifts that come with job fulfilment. As intelligent workflows are deployed, what happens to the people who sit in those job roles? The only way to know for sure is to use a human-centred design approach.
Linking the User to technology, process, value, and talent.
Intelligent Workflow Design is a method for bringing together business processes, service design, technology platforms, and business and User values. We use intelligent workflows to create more optimal business processes, User experiences, and technology platforms.
Specifically, we want to design optimal experiences and processes for interactions between humans and machines both from an internal business and end-User perspective. In IBM Garage, we help companies vision how they might achieve better operational efficiency across their functions with these types of new workflows, and we track the anticipated value associated with the efficiencies projected. This gives business leaders and product owners the leading KPIs to know what success will look like when the workflows are deployed at scale. As part of the design process, we also provide suggestions for better job goals, job motivations and KPIs for the people who perform within these intelligent workflows to match the new experience.
Including Users of the process in design and delivery.
In both design and delivery, we include real Users to ground our work in a human-centered way. We use a human-centered design lens to consider the jobs that people perform in roles more broadly than the pure functional or practical outcome of that job. It is important to consider the social and emotional aspects of jobs performed as well as how satisfied the user is with how that job is currently performed. We consider the context that surrounds a job. The functional, social and emotional criteria linked to ‘job-success’ is critical here. While AI and machines can often perform the functional aspects of some jobs better than how people perform them, they often cannot reach the same outcomes relating to the emotional and social success of a job.
Functional, emotional, and social outcomes of jobs are important context when considering job changes. Consider a hypothetical scenario, maybe a role gets their sense of accomplishment at work from a certain job they perform. We should consider this before making any big changes to that job.
Functional: What is the functional, practical outcome/reason for doing the job?
Social: How does this job relate to a person’s team, other people, or their environment?
Emotional: Are there any emotions attached to the job? What emotions does the person feel upon completion?
The importance of talent transformation when designing intelligent workflows.
As we work with organisations to optimise their workflows, increase efficiencies, and use AI to expedite processes, the required technical and administrative skillsets once used to execute the process may no longer be a required.
Similarly, new, or existing employees with skillsets to support the new processes will be required. In this way, talent transformation is an important part of the IBM Garage way of working. During the discovery and process re-engineering, we work with real people who are performing these roles to understand what is going to change, and how that change will impact business outcomes and the culture of the organisation. Involving real Users early, and often, throughout the design and engineering phases of discovery and execution dramatically impacts the outcome. It is imperative that we work with organisations to re-skill, cross-skill or up-skill their workforce as required. The reality is that yes, jobs today may no longer be needed. BUT entirely new jobs that we have yet to be trained to perform are the future. Creating a work environment that accepts and promotes talent transformation, a growth mindset and lifelong learning is key to success.
Re-skill: Employees develop new skills to enable them to work in a new role or work in a new way.
Cross-skill: Employees develop adjacent skills to enable them to work within the context of changes in the business.
Up-skill: Employees grow their existing skill set to become more proficient in their roles and deal with changing contexts in role augmentation and automation.
Re-deploy: Employees are moved into a different area of the business or are redundant.
A global bank was looking to bring better customer service to its customer call centres. Deploying AI and animated support have become popular choices for many companies looking to improve experiences and reduce costs and overhead. The bank also realised the journey to AI is a long one, that takes years not months, and that to train an AI to be as good as its human workforce, they would need to work together. The bank cross-skilled hundreds of customer service representatives to help train the technology, critiquing and correcting responses. The customer service representative role was an entry level position that used a narrow skillset to perform the role with large headcount turnovers every year. The role transformed into a data and AI specialist, moving into a job category that would be desirable to many people and companies.
Linking the design of intelligent workflows to business value.
When we are proposing augmenting or automating a job that someone performs, we need to develop a compelling business case for change. After understanding the core jobs to be done that a role performs within a company, we can assess them by some critical factors including:
Most value-adding jobs for the organisation;
Most time-consuming jobs for the organisation/role performing the job;
Current satisfaction with how the job is currently completed;
How important the job is to the person performing the job; and
How important the job is to the end-User.
It is important to quantify the jobs that a role performs in terms of:
- % of an average day currently spent doing this job
- Baseline cost of activity ($)
When considering improving a job, we can estimate, based on the proposed improvement:
- % of an average day spent doing this job after the improvement
- New cost per job ($)
- Saving ($)
These factors can help build a compelling business case for investment into a new process or piece of technology for job-improvement.
A framework for approaching the design of intelligent workflows.
We have developed a framework to help enterprises design intelligent workflows. This framework uses a human-centered design approach to consider the core jobs we want to focus on to unlock value for the business. We consider how these jobs relate to the individuals performing them and the functional, social, and emotional aspects of these jobs. We also assess the job outcome satisfaction and business criticality. Disruptive technology that can impact the jobs is accounted for and a value case is tied to these jobs where we can quantify business impact. Finally, this framework invites us to consider change management and the alterations needed in businesses to facilitate the deployment of new intelligent workflows in practice.
We have combined IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking framework with the Jobs to be Done Framework by Clay Christiansen. Both are complementary to each other and have improved our understanding of how people identify with the job or role they perform, the degree of satisfaction they get from their performance and the motivators to a job well done.
What’s even more important is that by using these two frameworks together, we can create a value case for every role in a company and correlate how each individual impacts shareholder value. This helps people in an organisation see the quantified benefits they are expected to produce and the quality of the experience when producing them. We’ve dubbed the artefact we produce a visual map of one’s “essentialness in the company.” One of IBM’s core values that guides our work is to Be Essential to every person’s and organisation’s success.
In summary, the relationships between disruptive technology, process re-design, business value creation and talent transformation are crucial to designing intelligent workflows. Humans and machines can work together in a symbiotic way to unlock the most value for enterprises and to realise business outcomes.
AI and automation facilitating job-replacement of procedural work will not occur as a ‘big-bang.’ Enterprises need to design intelligent workflows in a human-centered way that is firmly grounded in talent transformation and change management practices.
The framework we use at IBM can be used to get started designing these intelligent workflows. It can help identify key jobs and tasks to transform and unlock value creation for companies.
Design research of the Intelligent Workflow Design Framework and Playbook developed by Chelsea Owensby and Kim Bartkowski.
Credits and references: Clay Christiansen, Jobs to be done; Adam Cutler’s work on Data and Design for AI at IBM.
This article is the third in a series depicting the design work performed at IBM across our product and consulting services organisations.
Related articles: The Design Blueprint for an intelligent enterprise;
Intelligent Workflow Design inside IBM Garage
