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The mortgage industry has gone digital, in parts. Full adoption has been curtailed because operationalizing digital labor takes concentrated care and feeding to truly realize the full value this workforce can bring to your business. Without it, automation will continue to be applied here or there, change management will remain a struggle and where you are using digital labor will not be well orchestrated across other systems and human operator processes.
Part of readying your organization for a new automated labor force is understanding technology impacts on current workflow and processes. This is best achieved working closely with your vendor at the onset, as they know their solution best and you know your processes best. Mapping this out ahead of time also helps to establish organizational trust and acceptance of automation. When introducing new technology, overcoming a common hurdle that relates to changing the way staff is ‘used to doing things’ is critical. With that obstacle out of the way human work can be repurposed into higher value tasks. This can increase job satisfaction and further address hesitation among associates to adopt new technology.
From an architectural standpoint, your digital workforce exists in the cloud which offers additional benefits as it grows. Here is where you can leverage scalability, security and development flexibility that can aid you as the task complexity and volume increases for your digital workforce. Understanding the technology testing procedures and development cadence of your software vendors can help you assess their ability to seamlessly enhance functionality and help you expand digital lending at scale. As well, how they leverage the latest in cloud-native applications can add value for lenders looking to elevate their digital sophistication.
Just as training and experience hone the skills of any lenders’ workforce, the same applies for the digital labor. More and more, its automation incorporates sophisticated rules and algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence that is “trained” to gather data and perform tasks and will “experience” improvement through actual use. In mortgage lending, these types of digital labor skills are most aggressively being applied to data and document processing.
Finally, as digital labor automates the acquisition and use of data, you will need to address how that data will be shared across your IT infrastructure to further optimize your investment. This can either be done either through manual importing and exporting of information, but far greater efficiency can be realized through an integration or the use of an API client, which ever is best suited for your company’s IT skillset and workflow.
The care and feeding of a digital workforce not only requires an understanding of its role in enhancing your business processes, but also a keen awareness of the latest techniques for software development and data management that power its skills. Equipped with all of this, you are more likely to exploit the capabilities of a digital workforce to improve operational efficiency, codify institutional knowledge and enable data driven digital decisions that balance risk with growth and business goals.
For more insights on how to employ your digital labor force more strategically and elevate its value, download our latest technical brief, Field Guide for the Care and Feeding of Digital Labor. Content from this blog was synthesized from it.
