20 years of automation from my view...

View from 50,000 feet through my eyes, and a brief intro to me 5 min read!

Can you process a 10x increase in your *Pick Your Process* in a challenging period like this? 

I've been asking questions like this in major organisations for almost 20 years, well before the advent of the current buzz words around automation were created!. 

I've been coding since 1990 on commodores and amiga's thanks to my dad's own interest in it, before migrating to the new breed of x86 systems using DOS then upgrading to the new Windows 3.1, I still remember getting excited when we upgraded and we got an EGA (16 colors) monitor!, by the age of 18 I held a variety of academic qualifications around computing and the Microsoft stack, and had a true passion for all things tech, be it hardware or software!, this has made my professional life relatively smooth and enjoyable since 1998...

Since 2000 I always ended up assisting productivity in all business areas I worked in by simply understanding the process's and the end goal, then using some technical wizardry to help achieve it!, eventually this saw me end up as the leader of the development team in one of the largest banks in the world in 2005!

From here I was able to actually commit all my time to my passion and quickly built a bespoke set of tools which would allow the business to grow and scale effectively, I was able to assist a broad spectrum of areas from all touchpoints through the customer journey, be it new business, activations, fraud, customer service, collections, or dormant and account closure, I was even able to help out finance and HR!.  

This brings us to around 2011, a new term was starting to be thrown around 'RPA', naturally I was intrigued so started taking a look, most of the tools were simple for me as a dev to understand, but they were clunky, restrictive, and overpriced, not to mention a pain to use thus they couldn't come close to meeting our requirements, and the internal systems I had built were capable of so much more!... thus we made a call to monitor it and continue as we were, after all, we had already saved 10's of millions using our own approach!.

Around 2014, RPA reared its head, was there now a viable RPA solution?, was it true that what my highly skilled guys did could now be done by a standard non-technical end-user??....., I brought in a couple of solutions and a couple of consulting firms to find out, unfortunately, all of which were a waste of time and money, especially the consultants who while technically sound consumed 6 months for what I felt was training themselves... Meantime internally we were already starting to develop our own AI and cognitive abilities in our own platform, this was well ahead of what RPA alone could do at the time, combined with a resilient structure of 3 areas encompassing roughly 40 people allowing us to service the entirety of Europe under a new ethos of 'Keep It Simple'.

In 2015 we came across Automation Anywhere, albeit version 7!, this tool showed real promise and while good for basic tasks, still wasn't really viable without using your own script for the sort of tasks we conducted and couldn't be centrally monitored easily...

Fast forward to 2017, we had Automation anywhere as a complement to our own bespoke tools and have seen savings in the 100's of millions and watched the RPA market develop quickly, we had saturated the internal pipe and started to contract services out to the other Silos. 'RPA' was starting to become a mainstream term and Automation Anywhere was just starting out in Europe, so with my Seniors approval and blessings I left my 18-year corporate career and made a jump to a company just starting it's UK arm as employee number 4 this was, of course, Automation Anywhere.

While in AA, I had the pleasure of leading Sales engineering and services, this saw me travel the world and allowed me to work across all industries with most of the major players and names, especially in Europe, I was able to help each ensure they had a foundation and ability to drive their own success.

This brings us to 2020, the rate at which the automation market has diversified and grown over the last 3 years is nothing short of amazing, most provides have recreated themselves from the ground up to become a truly enterprise-level software and have been adopted in close to 90% of enterprise business's worldwide, they can now deliver on some of their promise's but a lot of the current marketing is still very forward-leaning. 

Overall remember this, automation is powerful, can be self-driven internally, and will enable you to scale your business or increase efficiency if approached correctly!. However, automation in any form, be it RPA, Process minining, AI, ML, etc is not without its pitfalls, which I will touch on in future articles!.

Have a fab day

#AutomationMan