The State of Business Today

Carlos Martin

Money is the lifeblood of companies, plain and simple.

Beyond Porter’s five forces that every company needs to deal with. Much like a person, a company needs to learn to deal with its internal demons. In the business world, these materialize as excessive expenses, poor logistics, poor intelligence on its own business, hemorrhaging money in areas where it shouldn’t, not leveraging technologies appropriately, allowing strong operational silos, lack of communication, etc.

In the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, it was found that the technical team monitoring safety was not communicating with the tam managing day-to-day operations in the oil rig. Looking back, we realize a simple (and comparatively cheap) process of communication and threshold controls would have helped avoid such catastrophe. 

In the financial world, back in 2008 many banks collapsed and others got themselves in difficult situations of their own doing. One such example is that of UBS bank. The team of a few dozen people managing CDOs amassed $16.6 billion of AAA mortgage bonds yet the analysts did not manage to fully understand what really was behind those bonds and the risk and magnitude they represented. This created a situation that turned into a $37 billion write off.

These are just a couple examples out of a vast amount out there. The question is, would better controls, communication and threshold management have helped avoid or ameliorate these situations?

My thinking is “You bet they would!”

Enters RPA and AI.

The key to understanding these technologies and knowing how you can apply them to your business lies in understanding that you can’t put these technologies in a box. They’re amorphous so to speak. Because of this, they have the power to be the glue that ties many lose ends; they can create an amalgam to plug operational holes, gather intelligence about your business, monitor key indicators both in business and IT, alert of exceeded thresholds, etc.

Today more than ever, businesses are challenged with dealing with the new reality. Not only they need to be more efficient, they also need to be more resilient. Unfortunately many of us in the technology industry become enamored with our own toys; we think we have a hammer and desperately look for all the nails to hit. To survive, businesses need to identify their pains first and foremost. Only then you can start asking the questions on how these should be solved. That’s why RPA and AI are fantastic tools, they are perfect integrators.

In this book, we explore how to identify where to look for areas of interest to start or expand the automation journey. We study cases of efficiency and resiliency in the business world, what factors made some successful while making others unsuccessful. We demystify AI for you and offer you a glimpse from the business lens. Finally, we explore the type of questions to ask along the journey. 

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