Marrying Automation with Intelligence – Zoe Clelland, Nintex

This is Textron TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to text drug TV.

I have a first-time guest here on our show to introduce you to her name is Zoe Zoe Cleland. I hope I pronounced it, right. But Zoe welcome to Tech strong TV.

Thank you for having me Allen. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

So Zoe. Well, why don't we start with a little bit about who's Zoe Cleland is and kind of what where you know where you've been where you are what you do? Yeah, so I am currently at nintex and we are a Automation and process Excellence company and we'll probably get into sort of our view on on the world here as we go but I've been here for about eight years running our product management and user experience teams.

And that is a basically I think sort of my native skill set that I bring to this which is early on, you know, I went to school for an inordinate amount of time to to get my doctorate in human factors engineering and what I wanted to do with that was sign Medical Systems and I did that for a little bit really understanding how the human can learn and grow and change and what intuitive really means and then the other half of that is the engineering part about how to build software Hardware facilities that map to what that human needs as you probably won't be shocked by working with the FDA in the medical realm is a little slower than how we run here at About 2003 it became very obvious to me that this skill that's focused on the user needs as well as the core problems to be solved and be able to create products that work for those folks is exactly where I wanted to be and so that's where I've been ever since and a whole bunch of different places. But in Texas has been my home for eight and a half years now, that's fantastic. You know, it's funny.

I had a good friend of mine up in Boston who is a human factors engineering Person, she eventually was wound up working a lot with the MIT labs and stuff up there on stuff. It's such a great. Such a great field, right?

Because it has so many applications and you're living proof, right everything from medical devices and Technology all the way here to what you're doing in text, you know squirt squarely in Tech if background for the audience Yeah, so some Intex has been around since about 2006 and you know early on we were very focused on workflow and forms and sort of, you know core automation as that was coming up through the importance of digital transformation through the last I would say maybe six years and and you know, most critically in the last several years. It's become very clear working with customers that there's more than just automation that is required in order to get real change in the business. And so what we offer is essentially, you know, a set of products and functionality that help businesses transform what they do day to day using both Automation and process intelligence, right?

So what we're really focused on is getting those mundane little things out of the way and letting employees focus on the things that they're especially good at and what we all hire them to do right making work easier and better. excellent, so Look, I'm old. We used to talk about BPA business process automation.

Is that sort of doing Intex? Is that the field and it's just evolved beyond what I'm used to at this point or? Am I off base?

That's absolutely where it started right and and bpmn and that sort of approach right? Lots of rigor lots of sort of control around things lots of focus on productivity, but we also found that that ended up being a very technical sort of component of any business and what happens is the subject matter experts, right and the people who know the processes best get a little bit lost with that approach. And so, you know, we definitely started there and then as we started thinking about well, but how do you know what your processes are and which ones you should automate and you know, BPA great business process automation, excellent, but it's bigger than that and it's not just for it teams anymore.

And so I think the evolution has continued to accelerate certainly over the last five years in that day where it's really Automation and and Process Management for everyone. I love it. Excellent.

com about nine years ago. One of the principles with devops was you know was automated automated automate. We tried to automate everything but a lesson that I learned I think is just because you can doesn't mean you should when it comes to automation.

and I'm sure that's probably a wall that you guys have run into and have tried to figure out do I go break down the wall go over the wall go around the wall under the wall. Talk to us would you know your view of smart automation? Let's call it.

We're being smart about automation. Right and I think you call out an important point which is the only thing worse than not automating is automating something the wrong way or poorly. And so, you know, when you think about sort of right tool right time, what we've learned is, you know, when you know artificial intelligence started becoming popular everything is solved with that when workflow is popular.

Everything is helped our PA came, you know, you know the industry, you know, fantastically hard and a great way but there is no one right approach and in addition if you're just automating a process without truly understanding what the process is what it's Gonna Change what it should look like when it's finished being automated and you're not having this sort of infinite learning loot over and over again that optimizes all the things that you're building. You're not getting the value out of it. And so I think in terms of breadth of you know, the types of functionality that you need to drive digital transformation that's definitely evolved the type of people right?

So when you talk about through the wall or over the wall, you know, we're trying to knock the wall down. The biggest issue that we hear with. Our customer base is a lack of connection and shared understanding between the business users and those folks who really understand the outcomes and the technical folks.

We're building the Automation. And so what we're trying to do is really kind of poke a hole in that to allow those teams to collaborate better in a single space and that's been a challenge over the years with all the different tools that tend to come out of the market that are either highly technical or highly business focused. You need both in order to get the change that you want to see No doubt you really do you really do.

You know, so I can't throw a stick five yards without running into AI chat GPT iterative and Ai and so forth. And of course, this is going to be a big player. right And I don't want you to have to join the bandwagon, but let's elaborate on that a little bit.

Yeah, you know I kind of think about you know, Three core components that make transformation the most effective and I would say they go from very low Fidelity to incredibly High Fidelity high technology things like artificial intelligence process mapping. Are you able to articulate what you're doing? You know and the the sort of model that we have around here is that if you can articulate what your teams are doing, you don't know what you're doing and so being able to articulate those processes understand which ones are broken and need to be fixed from a priority perspective who can give you the most information about those and that can go everything from you know process Mining and and process Discovery to just talking with people right that then moves into a very good understanding of the process and what is supposed to be the outcome of that and that's where you start to be able to understand.

What's the right way to automate this right with the different tools, but the overlay on all of that is the intelligence and It's sometimes it's artificial intelligence or machine learning. Sometimes it's best practices from Big Data. Right?

But what we want to be able to get to is both allowing space for that incredibly smart subject matter expert to inject into the software their knowledge what they know and what they specifically can do as a human and then use that plus all of the metadata we have from the processes and the automation with artificial intelligence to make those outcomes better. And so when we talk about AI it's not just at the automation level. It's at the process of valuation level is should this be an RPA script.

Is this something we should automate at all? Let's use those practices right? Same thing about automating.

Can we take a process description and more easily use something like machine learning or language parsing that allows us and the customer to generate an automated solution from a process that they've document. It right and then the final piece around that which again is that that Loop that we talked about is now you've automated something. What's working.

What's not working? How do you keep those things in sync? And how do you make sure that everyone in the business has insight to the value that you're getting or not getting and so we really think of that as you know, Recommendation and insight driver for all different levels of the organization and we tried to not get stuck in the passion and excitement about Ai and say what is needed here.

Is this something a human can and should do then? Let's have them do that. Is this something that technology can drive for them to make their experience and the outcome better?

That's when we're gonna pull, you know, AI into the into the the mix of Automation and process Excellence that we do so we take a pretty broad swath and we use it at every stage of that transformation to make sure that customers are getting what they need. excellent so What market now those Zoe right so we have this AI that you're in there, you mentioned all of this. Let me throw.

Just one more camel one more stir on the camel's back. Karnak conditions right where we're dealing especially in Tech. I think for the first time Tech is leading in the pain where we used to kind of almost be immune how how's that affecting what you guys are seeing over it in text?

it's it's been almost completely opposite forces to be honest in some ways and what I mean by that is As people are out sick as the workforce is struggling to hire as all of those things are happening people need Automation and you know deep understanding of what the business is doing and what's working more than ever and so early on in the, you know, certainly in the pandemic and before cut some of these economic changes really starting to take hold of tech. It was a bit of a boom. We were seeing a lot of new customer uptake and a lot of need to try to get the job done in a different way with potentially fewer people as the Pressures have come up certainly customers are rethinking their Investments.

Right and what's critical for the business and what's maybe not critical for the business and we do see some of that and Obvious through you know, certainly the last six months in the automation space is you know, maybe two years ago. Everyone was happy to have multiple tools and you know the the value that people were putting on that was much higher and as budgets Titan, they're trying to find fewer solutions that can do more things. Right and I think that that really helped us also see that shift in the market where it's absolutely fine to have multiple tools and different vendors engaged right but when things get tight and you need to focus on your most critical bits having that sort of portfolio set of tooling that allows you to do our PA when you need it and workflow when you need it and AI when you need it is actually something that customers are really asking for so in in our experience when we've seen folks that just have part of the puzzle.

So maybe they've just got some light weight automation or they've got very heavy weight BPM in or maybe they've just got some Process Management that they run they're starting to question whether you know those Individual items are critical and what we've seen is of course, we think they are but it's the combination of those things that is actually most impactful and that you get the most value from with the best Roi so it's changing how people are sort of thinking about the tools that they want to have driving their business. Got it, okay. You know what?

We're running low on time for people who want to get more information. Where where can we send them Zoe? com.

And you know the I guess the big takeaway that I would leave is Automation and transformation is bigger than just, you know, the technical teams be thinking about how you get your processes mapped to be thinking about how you're optimizing all of the time and find a way for those technical teams to be working with the business teams. And that's honestly the key to success Smart Start small get some of those wins and keep driving across the organization. You'll have a lot of passion and behind you.

I love it. Hey, thank you so much for coming on here. You come back keep us posted on what's going on.

I I have a feeling this Ai and and macroeconomic conditions and just to continue to evolution of the whole automation kind of piece of it. It is it's going to you know, we call it Biz Ops, right? So it's beyond the deaf and it's gonna continue to get bigger.

So it's an interesting time. That's the luck and thanks for coming on. Thanks so much.

I appreciate it. com. Nintex was here.

We'll be back in a moment with another guest.