Age of Invisible Machines

CHAPTER 10Teams and the Co-Creation Mindset

Co-creation is the secret sauce of hyperautomation. It's critical to get your team trending away from the land of centralization and silos and toward the co-creation mindset—because, while it's true that certain IDWs will only serve certain departments, their evolution is a company-wide endeavor. This is where your core enablement team comes in. Their mission is to get people involved in the creation and evolution of the skills in your company's ecosystem. Your ultimate goal is that everyone will use and contribute to your ecosystem of intelligent digital workers—helping design, improve, and evolve the skills that their own department's IDWs carry out.

The core enablement team is similar in makeup to the “fusion teams” that have recently cropped up in many organizations. By Gartner's estimate, 84% of companies have what they call “cross-functional teams that use data and technology to achieve business outcomes.” There's generally at least one IT person on a fusion team, and they work best with a diverse makeup in terms of function, ethnicity, and gender. Gartner has also discovered that 70% of fusion teams use different technologies than what IT suggests or recommends—even if an IT representative is leading the team.[1]

This compulsion is actually beneficial in the context of hyperautomation, where the idea is to orchestrate separate technologies to create better-than-human experiences. If a certain piece of technology works better ...