Three realistic goals for integrating Collaborative Intelligence into IT workflows
Collaborative Intelligence (CI) holds tremendous potential for IT organizations. As IT leaders begin or continue to integrate generative AI and other CI technologies into their workflows, setting clear and realistic goals is essential.
Here are three realistic goals for the following year. Achieving each would provide significant organizational value and begin to demonstrate CI’s full potential.
Goal: Streamline Operations
Target: Reduce the time required for routine and repetitive tasks by at least 30% within the first year following implementation.
Rationale: By automating time-consuming tasks, IT organizations can significantly reduce manual labor performed by valuable resources. Doing so allows staff to focus on more strategic activities that require critical thinking and creativity, which enhances overall productivity.
Example: IT organizations can eliminate the slow (calendar time), time-consuming, and painful process of requirements-gathering meetings. Have stakeholders record what they want and forward it to a compound AI that can transcribe them, translate them into different languages (if necessary), turn them into user stories, and then cluster them into epics. One company reduced its initial requirements-gathering process from 3-4 months (due to scheduling difficulties) to less than a week (waiting on submissions—the AI works in minutes).
Tangible Value Created: Accelerating delivery times enables organizations to gain the benefits from new systems more quickly. Increasing efficiency and productivity enables staff reductions or eliminates the need to increase staff.
Intangible Value Created: More rapid response times improve stakeholder satisfaction and engagement. Eliminating routine tasks from jobs boosts morale as teams engage in more meaningful and impactful work.
Goal: Improve Software Quality
Target: Reduce software defect rates by 15%.
Rationale: Generative AI can document code, explain legacy code, translate legacy code into more modern languages, debug code, suggest code improvements and optimizations, generate test cases, and analyze security vulnerabilities. Such things result in higher-quality and more performant systems and less technical debt.
Example: Redesigning workflows to assign the tasks above to generative AI has helped a software company increase the productivity of its development teams by 35%, increase its test coverage by 30%, and improve software quality by 25%.
Tangible Value Created: Reducing defects reduces development costs and accelerates delivery times and benefits realization. It also reduces maintenance costs and existing technical debt.
Intangible Value Created: Enhancing security and improving test coverage reduce operating risks. Automating the more mundane tasks enables developers to focus on architecting and developing solutions, which improves job satisfaction and should increase retention rates.
Goal: Upskill Staff
Target: Achieve a 100% participation rate in CI training programs for IT staff within six months and a 25% increase in the number of CI-related projects undertaken by trained staff within the first year.
Rationale: As CI technologies evolve, so too must the skills of those who work with them. Investing in comprehensive training programs ensures that IT staff are proficient in using CI tools and can identify innovative applications for these technologies.
Example: One company used a “cognitive apprenticeship” model (see it, do it, know it, teach it) to train the staff on how to think about, design, and use CI to improve workflows and product/service offerings. This work is ongoing, so performance data is incomplete.
Tangible Value Created: New CI-enhanced products and services should increase revenue. CI-enabled process improvements should reduce operating costs and increase productivity.
Intangible Value Created: Upskilling staff improves job satisfaction. Empowering staff to identify, develop, and deploy CI-enabled products/services and process improvements increases engagement and commitment.
Conclusion
Integrating CI into IT workflows can significantly improve operational efficiency, systems quality, and staff development. By setting clear, measurable, and realistic goals, IT leaders can significantly increase the likelihood of successfully transitioning to these new technologies and realizing their many benefits.