INTU Intuit Inc

By Sara Castellanos 

Automation has become a top priority for Atticus Tysen, chief information officer of financial software company Intuit Inc., which is using software robots to automate repetitive tasks in the finance and human resources departments.

Mr. Tysen, who has helped lead employee-facing automation efforts at the company for the past two years, says several software robots are helping some employees do their work faster and more accurately. The bots also free employees to focus on "higher order" work, he said, such as managing relationships with vendors.

But he has learned some valuable lessons about automation along the way. Among them: consider carefully which processes need to be automated. "You don't want to deploy tons of bots, because you're going to automate bad processes. It's important to be strategic about which bots you build, " he said.

So-called robotic process automation is being used across sectors including finance, manufacturing, telecommunications and retail, in divisions ranging from IT departments to human resources and accounting. The bots -- some of which incorporate artificial intelligence -- perform tasks that could include anything from transferring information to disparate databases to compiling reports.

Eighty-five percent of CIOs are investing in automation software deployments over the next two years, according to the 2019 CIO Survey from Grant Thornton LLP in partnership with the Technology Business Management Council. Seventy-five CIOs were surveyed from companies that ranged in size from fewer than 1,000 to more than 10,000 employees.

At Intuit, software is automating a portion of the purchase order process in the finance department and automatically approving routine expenses.

Mr. Tysen, still an early adopter of software robots, shares below the best practices for developing and deploying the technology.

It can't be IT-driven. Development, deployment and support for software robots needs to come by partnering with different business divisions, Mr. Tysen said. "There has to be some business partner that wants to have the process improve," he said. Partnerships help IT learn about the intricacies of the business process that needs automating, and they help the business have a stake in the outcome, he said.

Start with a small team. Intuit created a small "center of excellence" of about five people that focused on automation projects. This was important in order to avoid the creation of multiple automation platforms, he said. It also helped establish governance and oversight. Part of the team's job was to monitor the health of the bots to ensure they didn't have bugs and weren't using too many computing resources.

Teach the business how to build bots. The five-person team worked with the finance and human resources departments to build the first bot. Then, the business divisions built the bots on their own. "It's about IT creating the capability for the company and stewarding, teaching and igniting the passion for different teams, and then figuring out what makes sense for them," Mr. Tysen said.

Rethink how a process works. The biggest challenge is getting employees from various business divisions to step back and rethink how a specific process works and which parts of it should be automated, Mr. Tysen said. "You don't want to re-engineer the whole process," he said. Automating certain parts of the approval of expense reports made sense because approving expenses can be repetitive and mundane for managers, he said. The automation software flags routine expenses so managers can skip over those and focus on expenses that might need more attention.

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 11, 2019 14:10 ET (18:10 GMT)

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