Rajat Sharma, SVP and Global Head of Technology Ecosystem and Growth for Zensar Technologies.
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Automation professionals are the backbone of all enterprises today, and they provide a competitive edge to business in today's software-defined world and API (application programming interface) economy, leading us to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Generative AI has further fueled the role of automation professionals and has further accelerated the journey to an intelligent and predictable enterprise with optimized utilization of resources (industrial & operational) and zero waste smart manufacturing adhering to Industry 4.0 norms.
There are three core domains within an enterprise where automation professionals play a critical role in enabling high-performance enterprise:
Corporate Systems And Business Processes: This includes various aspects such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resources, legal and finance.
IT Processes: Automation has revolutionized IT processes, starting from the software development life cycle (SDLC) and extending to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Operational Technologies (OT) Processes: The automation of operational technologies focuses on the entire lifecycle of manufacturing systems, from concept and design to distribution and delivery. This involves leveraging technologies such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), distributed control systems (DCS), programmable logic controllers (PLC) and ultimately, product lifecycle management (PLM).
Three Areas Of Impact For Automation Professionals
1. The Formation Of “Common Roles” Across Domains
There are common automation roles across all three domains: workflow automation developers, rule engine developers, integration developers, data automation, ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) developers, automation modelers and AI developers.
Aggregating data coming in different shapes, forms and protocols from different sources of IT, OT and business systems, standardizing in a common format to create co-relations to drive meaningful inference to become a smart enterprise requires automation at each step from aggregation to standardization to analytics/visualization to intelligent inference and actions (through autopilots and co-pilots in the new world of generative AI).
• Enterprise Automation Architects And Designers: This role involves developing an automation roadmap, selecting appropriate tools and designing the future state of automation within the organization.
• Data Automation Developers: These individuals develop automation solutions using various programming languages, tools or scripts for data cleansing, validation, aggregation, co-relation and visualization.
• Automation Testers: Automation testers incorporate automation into the testing function, ensuring that automated processes perform as intended and meet the required quality standards.
2. The Emergence Of “New Roles”
The second major impact of Industry 4.0 will be the creation of numerous new roles for automation professionals, leading to exponential market expansion. Let us categorize the automation professionals into levels and functions they perform—the hierarchy and how they grow in their careers. The automation career architecture will have three core streams. Business process, IT (information technology) and OT (operation technology) and professionals will be growing vertically from an analyst/mapper to architect within one stream, or they will be growing horizontally by bringing a converged set of automation skills covering process, IT and OT. If we look into any business system, IT system or OT, there can be common roles, though they may be named differently:
• Automation Process Mappers: Individuals who are responsible for process mapping across different flows and identifying potential candidates for automation.
• Automation Systems Analysts: These analysts can convert processes into automation requirements, analyze the systems involved and determine how automation can be implemented effectively.
• Automation Integration Developers: These professionals specialize in automating the integration of disparate systems, enabling seamless data and application integration.
3. The Creation Of New “Engineering” Disciplines
Thirdly, new curricula will emerge for engineering disciplines, with integrated courses between industrial and software engineering. Additionally, integration engineering will become a core discipline. Industry 4.0 is impacting automation professionals in a very similar way to how IT professionals have been affected by the evolution of digital engineering. Individual professionals like systems analysts, developers (frontend and backend), testers and deployment specialists have transcended into full-stack engineering. Similarly, core IT operations, such as infrastructure administrators and configurators, have transformed into infrastructure and network developers.
With the emergence of smart factories enabled by IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), digital twins and cloud technology, OT (operational technology) professionals will also transform into what I call "converged full stack engineers."
These professionals will possess skills in industrial engineering and information technology and bring expertise in network, data and security. Just as a full stack or DevOps engineer takes end-to-end responsibility for the code from design to operation, Converged full stack engineers will assume end-to-end responsibility for design, manufacturing and maintenance. There will be a high demand for API developers who can understand multiple formats and protocols. Some of the new “converged full-stack roles” will look like this:
• Automation Change Agents: Automation change agents manage change on both the system and user side, ensuring a smooth transition and adoption of automated processes.
• Automation Modelers: Also known as data scientists in the new world of AI, automation modelers design and develop AI models for intelligent automation and inference.
• Automation Analysts: These individuals run, analyze and report operational data. In the new world, they often work with AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) and genAI to optimize performance.
• Automation RoI And Value Stream Mapping Experts: This role involves defining the value of automation programs and measuring their return on investment (ROI). These experts also engage in value stream mapping to identify areas for automation improvement.
Finally, automation will become pervasive, and the adoption of low-code (pre-packed SW modules and frameworks) will be prominent in operational technologies such as industrial design and development, expanding from its usage in corporate business operations and IT operations.
Automation will transition from generative intelligence to focusing on the next era through seamless integration and interoperability of physical (OT), virtual (IT & web) and mixed reality (metaverse). This shift has already been observed through the utilization of generative AI models.
Keep an eye on these skills and potential employees—they may make all the difference for your company.
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