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The five-stage automation maturity model

Hyland Product Manager Ken Payne describes a five-stage automation maturity model that is designed to give organizations a sense of how far they’ve come and what they need to do to meet their objectives.

“The goal of the model is to help you understand what technology is available to help you automate these various tasks, what technology is on the horizon, help you understand what types of problems these technologies can solve and help you start charting your path forward,” Payne said.

Progression on the model doesn’t have to be linear, Payne stressed. Organizations have different needs and are at different points on their automation journey.

> Watch the webinar | The Automation Maturity Model

1. Content management

Notable examples: Ingesting, storing and retrieving documents

Key question to ask on your automation journey: Which of these statements is true related to my agency’s content strategy?

• We have an enterprise-wide content strategy that is adopted across our entire agency, and our most important content is always safely managed. 
• We have an enterprise-wide content strategy, but adoption is poor and we don’t know if our most important content is always safely managed. 
• We don’t have an enterprise-wide content strategy. 

Ideally, all of an agency’s content is stored in a content management solution. Often, though, critical data is located in filing cabinets, department email inboxes, personal email inboxes, network file shares, corporate-approved cloud-sharing apps, non-approved personal cloud-sharing apps and the native repositories of various data platforms.

Content management success story: Wasatch County

The Utah county partnered with Hyland to automate and manage content across all departments. Hyland OnBase’s automation capabilities, combined with workflow solutions and low-code modules, proved to be an ideal fit.

By automating once-manual tasks such as forms and applications for business and property owners, the county freed up its employees for more strategic, productive work.

2. Process automation

Notable examples: Capture, orchestration, robotic process automation (RPA), low-code app building, integration, case management, business rules engine

Key question to ask: Do we still have people performing manual data entry?

During a webinar that explored Hyland’s automation maturity model, Payne and Hyland Strategic Advisor Natalie Smolenski discussed an IDC survey in which case management, RPA and workflow were mentioned as the most widely used tools for automation. Organizations that adopted those three tools reported a 24% increase in productivity, a 15% jump in efficiency and an 11% reduction in costs.

Process automation success story: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

The state’s path to digital modernization started with “low-hanging fruit like forms and forms processing.” Once it generated proven results, Massachusetts moved on to bigger things, such as improving case management and procurement processes.

“We’ve fully automated our internal procurement process, which is a very, very large and involved process,” Director of BPM Platform Services Mike Syversen said. “We fully automated that and have taken all of the paper out of it. We’re also doing a lot of back-end, workflow processes for different agencies that need the help.”

3. Intelligent document processing (IDP)

Notable examples: Classification, search, structured and semistructured data, transformation, machine learning, natural language processing

In a report for Hyland, AI and automation experts Pascal Bornet and Kieran Gilmurray describe IDP as a solution that “surpasses traditional optical character recognition (OCR) and robotic process automation (RPA) technologies by using advanced, business-focused AI models to understand the text and structures within documents. With machine learning, IDP systems ‘learn’ to interpret and classify data, significantly improving the accuracy and speed of document processing.”

Key questions to ask:

• Do people in my agency upload large batches of documents that contain multiple different types of documents and/or formats?
• Do people in my agency import large documents containing multiple document types and formats?
• If yes, how are these batches and documents separated and classified? Automatically or manually?

IDP, with many potential use cases and an accuracy rate ranging from 80% to 99%, has emerged as an essential tool for government agencies. Research by IDC found that 52% of organizations have invested in IDP solutions in the past year, with an additional 44% planning to do so within the next 12 to 18 months.

Read more | 7 signs government agencies need IDP

4. Intelligent automation

Notable examples: Data integration, process analytics (process mining, task mining), unstructured data extraction, natural language question answering, predictive analytics, AI-driven decision support, generative AI

Key questions to ask:

• Does my agency have processes that include unstructured content or documents?
• Why types of unstructured content do we use?

At this point, organizations are searching for “more complex, more targeted uses” of automation, Payne said. A fascinating example is generative AI, which can produce responses to questions or prompts using the dataset it’s been trained on. The technology can retrieve information from repositories and external sources, generating use cases such as text summarization, image and text generation, image enhancement and virtual assistance.

“Gen AI isn’t taking over for the human,” Payne said. “What it is doing is augmenting the human and making those steps a little easier. It’s taking the boring work out of the way so you can focus on more important things.”

Read more | Intelligent automation 101

5. Hyperautomation

Notable examples: Internet of Things, blockchain, AI-led process improvement, AI-enabled integration, AI-led development

“This is everything you can dream of,” Payne said. “This is everything that’s out there over the horizon.”

Key question to ask: Does my agency issue or rely on any of the following information assets?

• Certificates
• Contracts
• Permits
• Wills
• Deeds
• Trusts
• Criminal records
• Credentials
• Diplomas
• Transcripts
• Military records

Hyperautomation success story: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

MIT partnered with Hyland to issue digital diplomas to select groups of students. The diplomas — which recreate the official look of MIT’s historic diploma — are registered on the Bitcoin blockchain so they can be shared peer-to-peer and independently verified.