DECEMBER 20169This is a time to change the mindset for CIO organization and start evaluating RPA as a catalyst to their strategiesimplement the same. Typically RPA Initiatives are driven by the Business side of the Organization with very late involvement of IT Organization. The fear of losing RPA early benefits in the over-all long term IT transformation strategy compels Business leaders to hide their initiatives. Often, this results in a huge mushroom farm of Robots, managed manually through localized teams. This poses multiple hindrances to the pace of long term IT strategy Implementation and finally slows it down considerably. This is a time to change the mindset for CIO organization and start evaluating RPA as a catalyst to their strategies. Yes, THIS IS POSSIBLE. Let's take an example,Considering enormous customer base, difference in their preferences of interaction style and the very nature of business itself, "Digitization at source" might be a 3-5 years long term strategy but still, RPA can effectively be designed with right hooks to the source data and implemented in 3-4 months. Good portion of benefits will then be realized much earlier than that of the previous approach and further benefits will be realized along the journey of digitization. In my view, focus towards API based echo system is the key to strike the most optimal balance between speed to drive the productivity benefits and the changes to support the dynamic nature of the Business.Market has observed exponential growth and evolution of RPA technologies in the last 2-3 Years. Therefore, it becomes important to have a careful selection of Products. Apart from company's performance, credentials and their Product commercials, the other important consideration revolves around its current abilities and future roadmap. Product's flexibility to integrate with different technologies and support enterprise level centralized Architecture to promote the virtual workforce concept in true sense, is the most important criteria to evaluate the current abilities. Alignment of Product's roadmap with emerging trends like Artificial intelligence, business domain specific solutions and e2e Business Process management workbench, is another aspect to consider. RPA is always implemented as a combination of virtual and manual workforce. However, split is highly skewed towards virtual workforce. RPA is designed and capable to provide 100 percent accuracy for the processed transactions but throughput varies from process to process. Typically 10-20 percent effort is kept aside for the manual workforce to handle functional and technical unknown exceptions. Return on Investment is the most important aspect to be considered while designing the Robot. Many a times, the rule of 80-20 is applied to accomplish the maximum benefits. Low volume exceptions are typically kept out of scope for the Robots. Effective change management is the key to success of any RPA implementation. This is also one of the major reasons for most of the failures in this space. There are primarily three sets of possible changes ­ Process, IT infrastructure and Applications. This needs to be thought through along with the respective organizations, first to align with their roadmaps and secondly to carve out the right process for change management. If we look at the emerging trends in this space, most of the Products are working towards increasing their breadth in the Spectrum and thus focusing on building capabilities like intelligent automation, Optical character recognition, natural language processing, virtual assistance, image and video analyzers, etc. Another group of Products are primarily focusing towards Business domain specific solutions and provide RPA as a Service offering. RPA indeed has emerged as one of the strong levers to transform both Business & Knowledge process Organizations, if implemented in planned and structured manner.
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