Digital Transformation Journey

We keep reading and as business leaders claim that Robotic process automation (RPA) has made great strides in fulfilling its promise to the marketplace. RPA has positioned as a no-code end-user computing tool, owned, and operated by many business functions, that automates routine work tasks with quantifiable business results. Now, businesses have a digital workforce in the form of powerful new end-user computing tools positioned and priced attractively to operations and finance leaders. It has the power to reduce the dependency on traditional automation delivered by IT, improve productivity and accuracy, reduce operational risk, and enable redeployment of expensive human resources to tasks that add more value. But how far this claim is true or close to the reality need to be rechecked... We all know that RPA maturity model is designed across industry around two key components - the first one around RPA strategy or RPA operations and second is the levels of RPA Maturity that can be used

The Robotics Process Industry is known for introducing & adopting several terms in its journey so far like - AI, IA, CoE, CV, CNN, DL, ML, NLP, NLG, iOCR, POV, POC, RNN etc. One term that is quite high in the list is “Proof of Concept”, or POC. POCs are not special to Robotics Process Automation, but very unusual if the RPA project doesn’t start with a POC. In general, a proof of concept (POC) serves as a stimulant for those businesses looking to leverage the RPA technology to improvise their business process outcomes. A POC can be built for one entire process or a small part within the process. Now a days the most surprising thing is that every company that is planning to use RPA technology believes religiously that they must start the work with a POC so that they can ensure and can see themselves that BOT software is working before full blown deployment. To a large extent this is justified, given the exceedingly high failure rate of the RPA projects. But it is bit difficult to ac

A Center of Excellence (CoE) is essentially the way to embed RPA deeply and effectively into the organization, and to redistribute accumulated knowledge and resources across future deployments. This is actually a shiny penny term that is used heavily in the RPA world. But unfortunately, the CoE is yet another item of absolute dogma in the RPA world that, as defined and currently implemented, directly and significantly contributes to the ongoing failure of RPA initiatives. Nearly every organization selling and supporting RPA claims that CoEs are critical to success. A Center of Excellence is NOT critical to the success of an RPA initiative. It prevents the success of the initiative and is completely opposed to what has been the unified hue and cry of the RPA world for the last decade. How could it be that consultants, vendors, pundits and analysts all be wrong about having an RPA CoE? The following points lay out my case. CoE misconception: Excellence should be centralized   The most im

These Days if you look around the RPA led business world, you will find that nearly every business leader regardless from which experience background he is coming is attempting to implement BOT's and that as well without the help of IT but surprisingly with a very technology focused approach. There is a strong acknowledgment that BOT's are just a software, and they require few things like specifications, process maps, mockups, configurations, hardware, software, and the like.  But if you take a deep dive into the system, you will find that this is a big mistake. BOT’s are not a software; they’re a new workforce pool or workforce having strengths and weaknesses, abilities and constraints, values and needs, and they must be managed as such for them to be successful. This is even more relevant when BOT’s interact with human co-workers, which occurs often.  True enough, RPA is software and it’s typical to manage an RPA project like a technology project.  This sort of works keeps in

If you closely look at Robotics Process Automation and listen what people talk about “robotization of processes”. You will find that everybody agrees that RPA can be realized in any of the chosen operating model- centralized, decentralized or hybrid manner. And it is critical that there is a well-defined governance overseeing the development and operation of BOT's. This governance will provide assurance of the quality of that automation, minimizing risk and avoiding rework.  But if you go few steps back and relook at this Governance, you will find that we all talk very high about this governance, and surprisingly it is there in the system from decades but is one of the most undervalued modules of running an RPA business model. This is considered as unnecessary overhead cost. Someone said very rightly that this module is treated a bit like toilet paper in a public toilet; no one wants to pay for it but feels that it better be there when you need it. If you look closely at RPA; you w

Do you know why vast majority of people or organizations invest in RPA projects? Actually no one has got the exact answer to this question. But mostly people / organizations invest in RPA projects for cost savings. As such taking the call whether to go-ahead and use the BOT or not is return on investment or ROI. And a positive ROI means that the cost of deploying the BOT was recovered in the saving that BOT has generated. The issue in measuring ROI is that when we are candid with ourselves, the process of calculating ROI’s is massively faulty.  But no worry, let's try to accurately model all the costs and benefits associated with an RPA solution. One thing we should always remember that accuracy of the ROI outcome is totally dependent upon the correctness of our inputs and our expectations.  A slight slippage here & there means, the calculated ROI is often meaningless. Sometimes this factual error is accidental, but other times it is quite intentional. While BOT's often hav

Don't you think this is very surprising that even after lots of planning, financial analysis & smart investments, majority of organizations miss to achieve the BOT return on investment (ROI). Is this due to a lack of understanding, a lack of insight or a lack of oversight? Personally, I think these are not the true drivers of failure, rather nearly all these failures generate stem from unreasonable expectations. If you closely watch, you will find that most of the business leaders are looking for different ways & means to leaning out their organization, and when a technology like robotics process automation comes along, promising to provide immediate benefits, for little cost, and little effort, they excitedly want to believe those promises. They buy into often crazily optimistic cost or benefits models, in the hope that those benefits will be realized. But with slight slippage here and there, investments in BOT fail to deliver the expected ROI.  If you take a deep dive, yo

Thomas A Edison said very rightly that “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” You must be wondering Why do so many organizations fail to succeed with RPA? Given the enormous promise of intelligent automation, and its inevitability, why does so many RPA projects fail? Business Leaders are increasingly turning RPA to deliver value to Clients / stakeholders and meet the new organizational imperative to do right. But you will be surprised to know that 30 to 50 percent of early enterprise RPA projects fail. The market for the technology is projected to grow around 31% by 2025, and it’s easy to see why. But nearly half of initiatives fall short of delivering benefits because executives haven’t laid the right groundwork. Most of them design BOT's in the vacuum of business process without actually addressing the complexities of the technology, so majority of them end up with BOT's that do little to solve the planned challenges. To make sense of

Recently while going through some of the articles on investing and ownership of BOT, came through an interesting analysis of PET analogy of BOT done by Surdak. To reinforce his pet analogy, he selected several of the types of BOTs he has seen companies deploy in the real world and came up with the analogous. The following BOT categories are typical of those found in the Automation industry today: Turtle BOT’s or TOT’s: This is a BOT that allows an organization to claim that they are using BOT technology, but only just.  Nearly all Proofs of Concept (POCs) or Proofs of Value (POVs) are TOT’s.  They nearly always work because their functionality is so limited, your expectations of them are so small, and the situation in which they are used is almost never an adequate approximation of reality. Crab BOT’s or CROT’s: A CROT is a TOT that sits in its own little house and doesn’t do much.  Hence a CROT is a TOT that runs on a laptop.  A Proof of Concept is likely a CROT.  So too is a macro i

Whenever someone start talking about robotics process automation. The first thing that comes to our mind is what is BOT? When you look back in the past 5 to 6 years, you will find that around late 2014 & early 2015 Robotic Process Automation (RPA), have roared onto the business world. Today almost every business / organization has deployed or somewhere in the middle of deploying it to drive efficiency and have better ROI from the business process. Robotics process automation and its older smarter cousin Artificial Intelligence has taken the world by storm, promising cheap, fast & good processes in place leading to quick / high ROI. But the question that came to our mind in beginning while the RPA conversation started remaining un-answered......what is BOT or what is RPA? The simplest explanation that comes to my mind is that BOT is a software that runs the software.  RPA is software that simulates the actions that humans make in operating other software. In this way they are