RPA is Dead

Well there you have it. Phil Fersht from HFS research, one of the pioneers of research into RPA (7+ years ago) has finally come out and called it.

Supported perhaps also by the recent surveys from HFS and also from Deloitte, where only 4% of enterprises have reached scale in 2018 (up from 3% in 2017) and as only measured by 50 bots or more anyway, and worse, most are on the < 10 bot range. Whilst there are those who have been successful with RPA, it's all relative. I've seen significant success and scale with Pega Robotics RDA (RPA attended) as well as traditional RPA (unattended) but as I've written many times, I always knew, from when I started this back in 2005, it needed to be part of something much bigger. DPA, IAP, IA, Digital Operations, OneOffice or whatever it's called is the way forward. RPA band-aids are a tax on legacy (Gartner phrase I believe) and now it's been called out (as stand-alone) for the hype it is. I still say you can use RPA on it's own but by building your Robots on an Integrated Automated platform, you are not only setting yourself up for success but more importantly, putting yourself on a path to also end the need for the robots in the future. Not a bad goal given bots are wrapping all the old, still expensive to keep the lights on stuff!

Notice how in the last 5 or so years, more and more money poured into RPA vendors so they could simply "buy" numbers of customers but without a path or care on how to get them to real scale. The RPA vendors constantly and publicly stated how "easy" RPA is but still couldn't deliver scale. They said it didn't need AI. Now they say it does. They said it didn't need IT. Now they say it does. They said it only needed business people to build, deploy and manage. We all really know it always needed a CoE, governance, oversight and large teams to manage. And each time, the scale issue arose, in time for a new acronym to be thrown into the RPA mix, the investors got sucked in as each RPA vendor added the acronym to RPA. RPA scrapes the UI and can be made to work in the right circumstances - and as my CEO says, "it can help accelerate the time to value to true Digital Transformation". Meaning it isn't transformational on its own. Now the world is finally waking up to these facts. Go Phil.

To keep this brief (unlike me I know) and if you haven't read my posts over the last 12 months on this same subject and more, here are my quick links to recent posts that I think sum it all up nicely.

Also, I recently started a series on "what next after RPA" which I think more closely aligns with what Phil is saying (Phil?) but I'm waiting to see if it aligns with what he's calling "Integrated Automation" versus what Forrester calls Digital Process Automation (DPA). To be honest, I'm not sure we need another category to describe it so I will talk to Phil on what's behind his thinking. Is it different? Anyway, check it all out here;

Is RPA Dead? - Myself

What next after RPA part 1 in Feb 2019 and What next after RPA part 2 in March 2019 - Myself

The Big RPA Bubble in Forbes - Alan Trefler, Pegasystems

Digital Process Automation (Forrester) which interestingly, does not include a single RPA vendor where RPA is built in (except Pegasystems) but many RPA vendors are scrambling to be 3rd party integrators with the other vendors in it! Thanks for the kudos! Read the full wave here. Forrester.

And not forgetting HFS and Phils post that started this thread ; HFS - RPA is Dead - long live Integrated Automation Platforms

Here's the Deloitte report that makes interesting reading on scale!

And no, none of us are really saying RPA is dead. What we are saying is, it is is dead if all you try to do is RPA (or any one of the other singular acronyms being thrown in with RPA). Whether you are successful or not, few get to scale with RPA (and even AI) alone. Often though, after looking at how bad their processes are, RPA helps bring IT and Business together to actually solve the problem properly and they may end up, not needing any RPA at all!