Welcome to the age of the never-normal, a new era defined by disaster. While the COVID-19 pandemic shows some signs of slowing down, in between the looming climate crisis,  societal/political upheaval and, let’s face it, the next pandemic, it's only a matter of time before the next catastrophe strikes. 

All of this is to say that maximizing business resilience is more important than ever, but also more challenging given the complexity of today’s global landscape. While automation can increase business resilience, it’s not a given. Doing so effectively requires intention.

With this in mind, here are 5 approaches to fortifying your automation project, as well as your business in general, against change, disruption and crisies. 

Security First Design

Chances are the company you work for has already experienced some sort of malicious attack or data breach. If not, as a cyber attack occurs somewhere in the world every 39 seconds, it's only a matter of time. 

Given the immense reputational and financial risks associated, adopting a secure-by-design approach to automation is no longer optional. In fact, it's the most important thing you can do to bolster business resilience this day in age. 

By making security a fundamental part of software and application development, you reduce the likelihood of flaws that could compromise security. This is important because patching or securing technology post-implementation is much harder and expensive than designing systems to be as secure as possible from the beginning.

Flexible Cloud Infrastructure

When it comes to rapid scalability, nothing beats cloud, at least at this point. With cloud computing, organizations only pay for the storage and compute they need, when they need them. If cloud requirements unexpectedly change, organizations can easily and quickly adjust service levels accordingly. 

In addition, cloud systems can be accessed anywhere enabling the smooth transition to work-from-home or reallocation of work to a new location in the event of an emergency such as a regional power grid failure. 

However, like with technology, cloud do occasionally experience outages and other disruptions. In addition to building resilience into your initial cloud adoption strategy, continuous systematic and chaotic testing is paramount to ensuring your cloud infrastructure can withstand catastrophic events. 

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Human-In-The-Loop Automation

While manual processes can be slow and messy, automation is not the end-all-be-all. In fact, over-automation is emerging as a major risk for organizations. In addition to being linked to increased worker burnout and cognitive carelessness, over-automation can lead to all sorts of ethical and regulatory issues such as the perpetuation of biased hiring patterns. Plus, many complex tasks simply cannot be fully automated given our current technological capabilities. 

In a machine learning context, human-in-the-loop (HITL) is a hybrid computation model that requires human intervention at specific stages where the algorithm is less likely to produce accurate results. HITL automation is similar in that it requires human intervention at specific touchpoints. However, unlike ML HITL which seeks to learn from human decision making, human involvement is a mainstay of HITL automation. 

As automation and AI technology can be quite brittle, meaning they simply weren’t designed to handle anomalies, novel situations or massive changes. HITL design acts as sort of a circuit breaker, a stopgap in the event that technology malfunctions or simply not delivering intended results. 

Democratize Automation & Innovation

Skilled workers are leaving their jobs at an unprecedented rate. In fact, an August 2021 PwC survey found that 65% of employees said they are looking for a new job and 88% of executives said their company is experiencing higher turnover than normal. 

Few workers are more in demand than those with digital technology skills such as AI developers, systems engineers and data scientists. Though it is probably not realistic to think you can train non-technical workers to become as fluent in technology as the experts, you can empower them to innovate on their own with a mix of target training and low code tools. 

Though creating an army of “citizen developers” will not replace the need for skilled technical talent, it can reduce the overall burden placed on IT and help bridge the talent gap in times of need. As an added bonus, this approach also helps non-IT workers become more engaged in the automation process and help shape the direction of future implementations. 

READ NEXT: Low-Code: A Butterfly Effect of Digitization?

Resilient Culture

Are your people prepared to tackle the challenges of the next 10 years? 

Employee resilience boils down to two things: confidence in themselves and trust in the organization. While training and coaching can help people gain the skills and mindsets they need to thrive in the digital world, if they don’t trust their organization to effectively navigate change, it will all be for naught.

READ NEXT: How to Cultivate Digital Transformation Mindsets

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