A conversation about Digital Intelligence with Robert Youngjohns

Yeah, thanks Bruce. It's a great opportunity to speak with you.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question, Bruce. I mean, because digital intelligence is probably widely used in the industry, so I think you have to be fairly specific about what it is. And if you look at most businesses, they still have huge numbers of manual processes which are often reliant on data sources that are either scanned or printed documents. It's amazing how, in spite of the fact we all thought we'd move to the paperless office, very little of that has actually happened. I think digital intelligence is an umbrella term to cover many of the sort of processes that enterprises carry through every day. It's about how you take content and how you digitize that content to make it relevant, how you help people use all the analytic tools available today to make their jobs easier, and as a result how you actually make all the business processes more effective and more efficient. You know, that's how I think of digital intelligence: those sort of elements. You know, people really critical to this, processes and content. You know, how you apply all the analytic tools, all the new tools we have in the world of computing to those three things.

Well, I think it's evolving, frankly. And I think many companies have started by saying, let's identify some very obvious processes, let's go automate them. And that's great because it's a good proof of concept, but it's not necessarily tackled the core processes, the most important processes that a business has. And I think as we move into the next phase, companies are going to be looking for tools to help them identify the right processes to automate and put into this new world of digital intelligence, the ones where there's best ROI. And I think that's still evolving. The ability to have those process investigation tools, then have all the things that fit behind that to allow you to take that analysis and then turn it into a digital process is actually still evolving. And it's one of the things that excites me about ABBYY is I think actually ABBYY is turning out to be a leader in that space.

I think content is critical because I think without it, the process is actually never going to achieve the ROI as you try to automate it. And I think one of the challenges that the sort of quote traditional—it's odd to talk traditional about companies that have only been around really for a few years—RPA vendors are all struggling because actually if you don't have digital content and intelligence around that content, because content in itself without intelligence layered upon it is not that useful. You need to be able to interpret a document in context. At a simple level, if this is a purchase order, you need intelligence that can go in and extract product name, product number, pricing, etc., and make sure those are ready to get fed into the automated process. If you end up having to have people do that, we sort of defeat the object of automating the processes. These things do go hand in hand, but I think digital content and digital intelligence as it relates to that content is absolutely a critical part of that value chain.

I think digital content is critical to the future success of RPA, and I think it's a weakness in the RPA vendors right now that they haven't—they're not as strong in that area as they probably need to be. And customers are beginning to find that because as RPA projects are emerging from experimentation and trial or very highly defined existing processes and moving into the more generic, messier world of the enterprise, the absence of good digital content, particularly content in context, is really becoming an issue. So I think it's a critical aspect. You can't do RPA successfully at scale and at massive value unless you can allow it to effective digital content management.

On top of that, I think ABBYY's investment in things like Timeline is part of this process discovery industry, which I think I alluded to earlier as being so important to the effective use of RPA. Understand what your core processes are, how they actually operate in practice, because one of the challenges of RPA is you often try to automate a process the way you think it works, and that's not actually the way it does work. In practice, you'll find there's many loops that go on in the process that you never envisaged when you set it up in the first place. Having a tool like Timeline allows you to explore that and make sure you're actually automating the right parts of the process to get the maximum ROI. I saw one example which was just an error management example. Never envisaged in the original description of the product, the number of times this particular process was flipping backwards because all the data wasn't correct or the data wasn't presented correctly was really making a mockery of the original process map. Understanding that and being able to automate that is critical. Against all of those things, ABBYY has products today and has a really exciting roadmap of products in the future that are going to help clients move through that.

I think analytics has massive potential there. If you think about the way that most businesses have enacted processes over the last 20 or 30 years, they went from a world where you had organizations of methods people would go around with clipboards trying to work out what people actually did and then write that down. Every business had its own set, and then you had the emergence of standard off-the-shelf software, ERP particularly, and many companies then said okay, there's no point in inventing our own processes, I don't get any intrinsic value-add from it, I may as well use the processes off the shelf from SAP or Oracle financials or whatever. But I think with process intelligence and the new analytics tools, you actually have a third wave that could be developing. That is that as you analyze how your business actually handles process, how you actually handle tasks as they move through the enterprise, how you collect data about those tasks, you can start to innovate around processes, which is something that people haven't really thought you should be able to do for the last 20 years because it's just been not worth it. But now with the tools you can. You know, if you have four or five processes that are end to end and you have a tool that looks at them and says, if you went from process A to C rather than A to B to C, that's a trivial example clearly, it would be much more efficient if you had the analytics to go support that. You can then go and enact that as a business. So I think the combination of RPA and process intelligence gives businesses the capability to innovate around process and become much, much more efficient in a way that they probably couldn't have even dreamt of 10 years ago.

Thanks, Bruce. It's been a lot of fun already.