The magical RPA tooth fairy is non-existent horse sh*t.

Once upon a time there was an automation fairy.?And that fairy was magical. With the wave of their magic RPA wand, they could digitally transform any business. And all of this magic was completely free.? Every analogue illness could be cured.? Dirty data would transform into liquid gold and shi**y processes become straight as an arrow. As a result, the people of make belief land became rich beyond their wildest dreams.?

All the people of make-believe land had to do was buy 50 robot licences from their vendor and wait for the magic to happen. Somehow, if all this magic did not happen immediately – as every story needs a twist to keep us interested – then with the simple addition of the magic potion known as ‘AI’, everything could be made right again.

Happenstance the evil (trigger word for the faint hearted) analogue spell was strong, then the automation fairy simply needed to bish, bash and bosh a pinch of task capture, a dash of process mining, a vial of multi-platform strategy and this would fix things.

Whilst this is a lovely story it is also a stinking pile of horse sh*t.? Yet this fable of getting untold riches from buying 50 RPA licences was the foundation upon which many an RPA sale, or digital transformation, conversation started.? Sadly, many have now discovered that the RPA emperors’ new clothes were not there. In fact, now that the RPA tide has went out there are a lot of naked automation leaders scrambling for cover.? And this is a good thing as I will explain. But who is to blame in this land of make believe? Answer. We all are.

Vendors:

Many years ago, RPA vendors sales terms were incentivised to sell licences. So, the more licenses they could get customers to buy, the better. Conference after conference, and talk after talk, extolled the virtues of having 50 licences. Anything less than 50 bots did not represent scale, and therefore your company was failing.

But who employs 50 people to do work, under employs them and then tells the world they are a success??

Vendors can’t make a living on licences and support alone.??Lots of vendors have not made money in years or many have lost huge sums of money using that model alone.? The model must change as we need intelligent automation vendors and their expert teams to survive and thirds.

We have learned that RPA has never been the sole solution to intelligently automate a business. Humans have multiple skills beyond the ‘clickety-click’ or RPA.?Hence the need to replicate all human doing, thinking, seeing, and interpreting skills and the need for ML, OCR, NLP, process mining and so on. More than one tool is needed in a digital tool kit.

Not everyone can be a citizen developer.

Vendors now realise business processes are messy.

Businesses need to have executive buy in, and a Centre or Expertise, a governance model, change management program and lots more to scale digitally.

People have left vendors. Yet movement to another vendor is sometimes not the right answer. Often it was not the tech that was broken but business processes, under investment, broken people or business cultures, adopting too cautious an approach to transformation, etc. But vendors were, and still are, a convenient get out of jail card for many a leader, despite the vendor doing nothing wrong.

RPA and Intelligent Automation Consultants:

Using the RPA ‘tin man’ to expand was seen as a massive opportunity for consulting firms to help business get to the end of the yellow brick road.

Multiple fable promises of business magic were made to many an eager executive team who were happy to drink this magic potion.

Fairy tale promises like - RPA is easy; vast swatches of FTE could and would be exited turning poorly managed businesses into fairy tale castle of yore. Process mining tools would work wonders all by themselves. You won’t need APIs as surface automation is the only ball to go to. RPA is ‘digital transformation’, yadda, yadda….

But as customers looked behind the curtain, they saw that nothing was there.?

Promises of golden eggs from the RPA goose were made, and eagerly gobble up, but were as naked as the emperor’s new clothes.

There was no golden eggs at that the end of the digital rainbow.

Millennial recruits landed into business but were not experienced in business transformation. That did not matter, as with no shared risk or ‘Outcomes as a Service’ model, consultants still got paid no matter the result (or rather lack of results).

Consultants over promised and came up against people or departments that did not want to transform. Quite often the business handed all accountability and responsibility to consultants to digitally transform business for them.? Businesses don’t willingly open like a magical pandoras box.

Life does not work like that when a business strategy was missing, the culture was silo’d, people feared for their jobs as ‘the robots came to replace them’, consultants did not have deep RPA nor digital transformation expertise, IT teams resisted working with RPA, business workflows were not read for automation, businesses did not have their workflows documented, nor could they explain them.

Businesses are messy.

As a result, rightly or wrongly consultants were portrayed as the wicked witch of the west when the business did not know or get what they wanted.? And when everyone stopped believing in magic then the magic no longer works.

Excellent, specialist RPA / IA firms who have delivered tangible business benefits were tarred and feathered with the same negative brush and everyone stopped believing.

Analysts:

Many in the analyst community bought into, and promoted, the notion that RPA was the best thing in make belief land since sliced bread.? With the notable exception of HFS, a great many analyst firms rang way too positive a bell for RPA and everything it could deliver.

Blind faith articles appeared on a daily basis by consultants who had never built a robot, let alone seen one working in anger.

When RPA did not work, analysts then did their own proper research and wrote about the myriad of reasons as to why RPA might not work (e.g., no CEO, processes needed redesigned, culture is key, change management critical, etc.).

This research was and is a good thing. Business leaders need to look at what is behind the looking glass before they can go on any journey.?Now analysts are starting to see the wood from the trees in the magical forest. And that is a good thing. We better understand what it takes to digital transform a business better than ever. This super tech can now live up to its real promise, not make believe promises.

Customers:

Customers often want faster answers to difficult business problems.? And no matter how many times things have not worked out as promised in the past, they still want to believe in one ‘magic golden goose’ technology solution to all their business problems.

But there has never been a magic IT or technology potion that can be sprinkled over every business problem. So why would RPA be any different?

CEOs handed over the digital transformation wand over to the over eager IT team and 'abracadabra' see magic happen in front of their very eyes. Fragmented processes are fragmented processes; they need to be redesigned.

A lack of business strategy cannot be solved by a technology strategy.

A broken culture, cannot be fixed with magic RPA fairy dust, nor an intelligent automation wand, no matter how much AI it has in it.

Business leaders in magic land need to get their hands dirty. They need a business strategy, that is enabled by an aligned culture, people, and technology strategy. Technology helps delivers intelligent automation. Leaders need to lead and recognise that long term success is long term. Digital transformation, like a fairy tale, is an endeavour with many twists and turns. Much fun and many digital adventures can be had along the journey, but it is not a simple or easy journey.

Technology delivers intelligent automation – you must deliver the funds, strategy, process redesign capabilities, visual-vocal and active executive support.?Technology's role is technology. Technologists should know their numbers but are not accountants. It for the business to work with IT to realise business value. The best and most innovate digital CIOs can magic happen - and they should - but the very best magicians need stage managers and excellent partners i.e., the CEO and the finance team.

Too many intelligent automation endeavours have been stopped as the business simply won’t had over the benefits. But how can you get rich, from digital transformation, if you won’t take the eggs from the golden goose and do something with them?

Automation leaders.

Excited by the tech and the lure of fulsome salaries, automation leaders appeared, and repeated vendor promises of huge FTE savings etc. to their leadership teams. Yet then they then proceeded to struggle to deliver real P&L savings they tried to explain those struggles away with magic tissue paper savings e.g., hours returned to the business, happier staff, etc.

Sucky business cases are sucky business cases.

So they conveniently blamed their vendor or under supported consulting partner. With limited understanding or experience of the tech or business these inexperienced leaders found it handy to blame analysts, consultants, or RPA vendors; or claimed they needed a multi-vendor strategy when they could not deliver what they had promised their executive teams. As a result, 3 years later these tech leaders magically disappeared.

The only real magic in a business is P&L magic. Those that are still not delivering P&L magic are now nervously await the knock from the CFO or board asking about the lack of real returns from their considerable investments. Those CIOs or head of digital or automation are not worth the salary. We are in a business world not in a land of make believe - real magic is real in the tea leafs of a P&L.

Sadly businesses, who did not get the results they were promised, shut down RPA programs.

But done right, and there are multitudes of examples, RPA delivers fantastic results and Intelligent Automation has enabled businesses to magically transform.

Chatbots and NLP, IDP infused with AI and ML, voice assisted digital assistants, properly structured and governed citizen developer programs; RPA, IPAAS platforms, web forms, descriptive-diagnostic-predicative-prescriptive data analytics and beyond have created new value and business models beyond excitement.

Conclusion:

All that has happened in RPA make believe land has happened with every hyped technology before it. But as we now know there are no magic tooth fairies – sorry kids.?

The original fairy tale land of RPA make belief was not real.?

Vendors and their teams ages ago over sold a promise they could not possibly keep.

Customers want FAST answers to intractable business problems. To their cost, they found that buying more than one tool will not fix a lack of business strategy, a lack of CEO support, enable them to automate bad processes, fix a broken culture or lack of business strategy or any other business sin.

Consultants who thought they found an opportunity to land and expand found the journey to nirvana was not as easy as first thought or sold.? Their reputations and portfolio of projects suffered as a result. Now they are wiser.

Analysts wrote great stuff but only later did the better analysts look deep into the muddy waters flowing through magic land to see murky mess that lay beneath the surface. Now RPA and intelligent automation research is more comprehensive and complete.

But change has never been easy. Executive teams must own their own transformation.? Everyone in business needs to be involved. None of this is new; think over-hyped ERP or think year 2000 digital business models. Think digital tech businesses without solid a cash generative business plan.

There is nothing new in the world of tech. But the technology lessons of the past need to be adhered to.

RPA works but you must understand it first and truly invest in it. RPA can help you achieve amazing business results when it is added to with IDP, chat bots, AI, ML and all the amazing array of now available intelligent automation tools needed to digitally transform your business.

But technology alone is not the answer to every business opportunity or challenge. There are a lot of things needed to digitally transform e.g., executive support, the right digital culture, a business strategy, an aligned people and change management plan, a COE, and lots more.?

Thankfully our industry has now moved beyond the hype of fairy tale land, past the trough of disillusionment and into the valley of hope and prosperity. Businesses can now focus on purposeful business outcomes, not undirected effort, and hope. The journey is hard, and as in every fairy tale there are twists and turns.

2023 with its hard reality of looming global down turn, spiked interest rates and increasing wage demands needs automation as a solution. As what else is there?

But there truly is magic at the end of the RPA and intelligent automation rainbow. You just need to know where and how to find it. And if you can’t find it, go to an outcome-based provider who will risk their money to help you mine for ‘the gold in them thar hills’. Now we can get on with doing the right work with RPA and an intelligent automation toolkit and live happily ever after.

The end.

I am recognized as a digital transformation, intelligent automation, data analytics and social media strategy thought leader. And I recently launched a realist book which you can order from Amazon US -?https://amzn.to/3wkESd9?or UK -?https://lnkd.in/eS56t2wz