The big RPA bubble

Given all of the news disrupting the RPA market and hype over the last few days, I felt the need to repost the reality check our CEO put out there at the end of last year. See link at end of this article.

My personal belief is that Intelligent Automation (IA) is being banded around as if it's candy at halloween. You don't just bolt technologies onto RPA and call it Intelligent Automation. I wrote about this before here; RPA is NOT a platform. Serious enterprise grade Intelligent Automation is a platform that exists as a sum of many serious parts. Some of which are;

1. Orchestration of work - be it executed by humans, RPA bots, integration (API's), Artificial Intelligence or indeed, new breeds of low-code developed applications. Hyperconnected Intelligent platforms are the only way to scale, securely and more importantly, with transparency across all lines of business, IT and the exec suite.
2. Enterprise wide governed and centralized Rules Engine - the end of hard coding business logic into bots or applications else you are creating the next generation of legacy shackles.
3. Low-code - the ability for business and citizen developers to collaborate to design and build powerful new re-usable processes and applications, digitally, from the ground up in days and weeks. And NO, the visual IDE's in RPA products are not low-code and bot builders are not citizen developers. You can build a much more future proofed career in Intelligent Automation and Low-code. RPA only careers are for Robots, not you.
4. Cloud choice - Everything you build from this day forward should not be restricted to any piece of hardware, database, language or cloud vendor. You must build and be ready for the dynamic future, not hard-code for only the present.
5. Visual Intuitive Designers for automatically building and deploying digital processes to any current and future user interface; for collaboration, for code/rules, for integration, for deployment, for security, governance and management. In fact, all parts of the application life-cycle from design to go-live to management and scale should be truly intuitive, not held in by future legacy walls. This is LOW-CODE and moving into, NO-CODE.
6. Self-documenting - Writing documentation should be a thing of the past - documentation should write itself and will do, if you live in an Intelligent Automation world.
7. Data agnostic - Yes, you have your existing legacy data, which you should be able to easily (low-code) connect to for all these new digital trends but for the future, data layers must be virtualized. Citizen developers can't learn and worry themselves with how the data gets into or out of your systems, be they databases, API's or even robots, or be they cached, virtualized or dynamic. A Data Virtualization layer masks the complexities and drives faster digital transformation for this generation and the next.
8. Built-in but open - and out of the box, RPA (attended, unattended and Process mining), AI, ML, NLP, OCR, orchestration, low-code, rules engine, cloud choice, automated email, automated document processing, and digital conversations. Built-in analytics, metrics, SLA's, mobility - BUT at the same time, be Intelligent and open enough to allow seamless integration to your preferred technologies / standards or 3rd party systems.
9. Artificial Intelligence - is not a thing you bolt onto a process as some would have you believe. Who governs it? Who makes sure it won't ever go rouge? Who handles the empathy side of its decisions? How transparent or opaque are you able to tell your customers or investors it is? Not only that, but real IA platforms with built in AI are able to consolidate data, massive amounts of it, in real time from other parts of your business. Sure you can plug in some AI for a chat or for document validation but REAL Artificial Intelligence and value comes when you secure it, scale it and join together all parts of the business. That's something humans can't easily do as we typically live in silo's - and AI doesn't have to when it's part of Intelligent Automation!
10. RPA - yes, you should be able to use RPA, out of the IA box to help you on your "digital" way. Maybe to get your customer service center doing faster calls that lead to less errors and re-work. Maybe to get your back-office some much needed rest. Maybe you need it for an API to tide you over for transformation. But if all you do, is look to use stand-alone RPA and AI as tactical band-aids, it won't be long before your competitors who already see RPA as just a small part of IA, will eat your lunch.

This is just a subset of IA and a bit of a Sunday afternoon blitz but the point is, IA cannot be allowed to be masquerading as another hodgepodge of silo'd and disconnected technologies that RPA vendors are trying to hijack and lay claim too. I say, enough! IA is real but RPA is not IA. Not even close.

Also check out these two video's if you want to see real Intelligent Automation at scale. Enjoy;

Commonwealth Bank of Australia - short video

Great American Insurance Group - short video