Robotic Processing Automation (RPA)

In one of my earlier articles on Disruption, Innovation and the Art of Business Architecture, I made the case that the concept of entropy is highly applicable in explaining the evolution of business organizations.

Generally speaking, entropy is the measure of disorder in a closed system, and it is a concept borrowed from thermodynamics - the branch of physics that deals with the relationship between heat, work, temperature, and energy in a system.

We are a year and a half into our Digital Process Automation program and have had some very strong successes as we learn new tool sets, build our enterprise capability center for governance and stand up an Agile way of working. Year one (1) we delivered over $10M in returned value on an investment of $3M. That early success buoyed our enthusiasm and optimism. It also pushed us to strive for bigger and better successes for year two (2).

We knew maturing, scaling and sustaining the new capability was going to be our focus for year two (2). However, that early optimism had us more bullish than perhaps we should have been. We were a bit stymied on the slowing of momentum as new and different challenges presented themselves.

Here are some field notes of our journey to date. This year, as we endeavor to drive forward and unlock business value using RPA/RDA capabilities, coupled with AI for Intelligent Automation, we have stepped back to assess, adjust, and learn.

2019 is going to be a very different year than the past few years. 2017 was a "pedal to the metal" year where almost all were making forward momentum with digital. 2018 started strong, but there was a shift to "steady speed" over acceleration. Many economic experts are now predicting a slight dip in growth which means businesses will be hovering their foot above the brake pedal just in case the turmoil in the markets takes a sharp turn.  What does this mean for business investment in Digital? This blog will be my best shot at predicting the likely trends.

Whether you are into BPM on a full-time basis or a general technologist, it is hard to not be seriously considering RPA or RDA (Robotic Desktop Automation) in the mix of any business solution you are working on lately. For Pegasystems specialist, you may have been introduced to RPA by their fairly recent acquisition of OpenSpan (now Pega Robotics). Pegasystems is rapidly assimilating the RPA into their BPM platform (PRPC 7.4).  Although, integration with BPM is a good feature, in the industry RPA is platform agnostic and considered a platform in and of itself. 

I have seen some organizations establish entire reporting units dedicated to RPA, even with a well-established BPM practice already in place. In discussions with technology leads, some seem to have a hard time enunciating how RPA fits into the overall architecture, this will be mitigated once there are enough RPA implementations and associated case studies disseminated.  

 The Future Is Now

Many companies are making the decision to step forward and implement various forms of Digital Process Automation, namely some version of Robotics Process Automation (RPA). There is a spectrum of Automation (Exhibit 1), from simple tasks that “bots” can easily handle to Artificial Intelligence. RPA is the next generation of process automation, moving from scripts and macros, to automating repetitive activities. Companies are choosing where to jump in and how to stand up to the new business capability.

Exhibit 1

Robotic Business Process Automation is all the rage right now. It is the new cost reduction initiative that many executives are eager to implement. There are numerous conferences focused on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and the evolution to Cognitive Processing or Machine Learning (AI). There are many emerging companies that show great promise and businesses are strongly considering adopting these tools. The following from Accenture, is a succinct depiction of the spectrum of Robotics, with RPA being the simpler end of the spectrum.

https://www.accenture.com/us-en/robotic-process-automation-software 

According to a recent article in Forbes, there’s a high level of consistency on macro technology trend predictions for 2017 by organizations such as Gartner, Forrester, Deloitte, Accenture, and McKinsey. That’s not surprising as “digital transformation” is pretty much the leading buzzword in today’s corporate lexicon and executives scramble to get up to speed on related concepts such as social, mobile, cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing, analytics, and big data.