How do you ensure your RPA platform is fit for the future?
Virtual Operations
We work with organisations to help them build, support, maintain and grow their automated processes through AI and RPA .
Support might be the most misunderstood service within the Intelligent Automation industry
We were talking with someone at a conference the other week. He was part of his company’s Centre of Excellence – which is industry speak for the group of people responsible for overseeing RPA excellence in a company. He mentioned his company’s growth plans and his concerns that their RPA platform, which had already “broken” a few times over the past year, might not be resilient enough for the challenge. ?
This got us thinking about how we support clients with futureproofing their platforms with our Control Tower service at Virtual Operations. At VO this comes under the moniker of “support” but what we do goes much further and is far more proactive than monitoring or even fixing problems as they occur. We believe support might be the most misunderstood service within the Intelligent Automation industry.?
Towards a better definition of support?
We have come across many companies that focus on the exciting and “sexy” aspects of automation – the three D’s (Discovery, Development, Deployment) - but pay less attention to keeping it all going after deployment. Sometimes this can be seen as a job for the development team. When something goes wrong surely it is just a matter of fixing it??
In our experience, this reactive approach cannot last for long. With constantly changing business needs and processes, business applications are often pushed beyond their limits trying to keep pace. This means RPA can become fragile and unreliable if not supported to evolve with the environments they are part of. When a problem arises, and fixes are applied - this can mean fixes on top of fixes are rolled out over time, just to keep things running. With the complexity of RPA, this can compound at an accelerated rate, bringing risk to the core processes that are at the heart of the original business case for RPA savings and benefits.?
The bigger picture?
Most Intelligent Automation support services offer a "reactive" model, based around simple monitoring or resolving issues at the underlying code level. This is not a bad place to start, but it is just a single piece of a much bigger picture.?
We think of support at the macro level as housing 3 key areas: Process, Platform and Product. These are all interconnected, so need to be addressed together by support to keep everything going smoothly. What is key is how things are managed at the intersection of these pillars – for example how changes to Processes impact the Platform, or how Products need to evolve to properly support Processes as they change.?
Some examples of these interactions are shown below.?
All three components are important, but what makes the real impact is what can be supported within combinations:
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(1) Process - Platform
(2) Process - Product
(3) Platform - Product
Staying in Control?
We recently changed the name of our support service to Control Tower at Virtual Operations. After supporting clients such as such as a Fortune-100 FMCG company and a world-leading Healthcare Giant over many years with business transformation and future proofing their Intelligent Automation systems, it was clear that progressive businesses need support that helps them grow rather than simply fixing issues after they have arisen.??
Control Tower gives organizations the confidence and assurance that their RPA infrastructure is being supported and proactively optimized at the macro level in a way that is not possible with traditional support approaches. If you have invested time, money, and effort in building an RPA infrastructure, why wouldn't you similarly invest in ensuring that what is built continues to run at the same level of excellence??
Daniel Andrews is the Service Lead for Virtual Operations Control Tower, which builds on a decade of experience of managing multiple automation platforms and thousands of processes for major organisations.
Our service offers professional, cost-effective support that monitors and fixes issues, whilst uncovering latent problems and finding areas of improvement before they become incidents that affect the business. This enables an organisation's platform and processes to be scaled far more efficiently than traditional approaches. Find out more.