The top 1 mistake of RPA

I love RPA. I know more about the science and fundamental technologies behind all all forms of RPA (UI automation) that it's scary. From simple OCR to complex object injection, you name it, I know what makes your "lovely" windows desktops and applications tick - and even tock!

I have delivered some of the largest and longest running RPA implementations ever, to the worlds largest enterprises, the largest being 35,000 RPA attended bots that have been running in a Telco for about 13 years now and the 2nd largest being, a large international bank, with over 20,000 bots that have been running for 7 years.

But I am constantly frustrated by 2 things;

1st, the overhype of the RPA unattended technology that keeps promising "it's easy", yet failing to reach scale; and 2nd, the hundreds of papers written on the "Top X ways to make your RPA whatever".

I say, there's 1 top mistake that impacts why RPA rarely scales and the analyst reports from almost all of the top analysts are starting to confirm the same thing; "RPA will only be successful if it is part of something much bigger".

Now you might say I'm biased because I sold our OpenSpan RPA company, that we started in 2005, to Pegasystems. That would be fair, but I really try to be impartial and state facts. I've seen 1000's of RPA clients and implementations, good and bad. The very fact there exists, and you are expected to decipher from, so many expert "Top X ways to to make your RPA whatever" reports, is my proof in point. If it was all so simple to get RPA up and running, we wouldn't need to be chasing all of these different ways to be successful whilst still being promised some sort of RPA "is easy" nirvana.

Two top analysts have even declared RPA soon to be (2021), obsolete (Gartner) or Dead (HFS) which I believe is a deliberate wake up call to automation buyers that you need to take a step back and think bigger. Tactical stand-alone band aids are what is making RPA fail. 1 bot here, 3 bots there, 5 bots wherever, does not a transformation program make. Most processes you have left are rarely simple now, they been optimized over and over for decades. Sure, there are definitely still pockets where low-hanging fruit for RPA shines but it's as rare as rocking horse poop now, to find many more of those big wins.

And to be fair, what's really driven the current RPA frenzy (screen scraping part two), is not just the terminology or technology itself but the very fact that business units are fed up with the as-is. Their workers are frustrated, their applications complex, their processes are error prone and cumbersome, IT are too busy elsewhere to re-act to their optimization needs but ultimately, these business leads have been tasked, from the higher echelons of management, with making their units more efficient. So who can blame these businesses for turning to a technology that appears to be sent from the heavens?

So, what do I mean "RPA will only be successful if it is part of something much bigger"? The bigger is "Intelligent Automation". RPA can be part of it, but it is NOT the IT. RPA is not a platform on which to build transformation on. That's backwards. It's screen scraping so how can it be a platform?

There is a new rapidly growing tsunami under-pinning the "Intelligent Automation" movement and it's not just a sprinkling of AI on RPA (what is that anyway?) but a fundamental paradigm shift in how the world is building software. Businesses have been stuck for decades, in the belief that they will be tied to their the old "legacy" systems forever, so turning to RPA/Macro/scraping band-aids has been their only choice. But that thinking is over. Applications are being built again, from the ground up in days and weeks using low-code and even no-code technology. With other core technologies, like real AI, at it's heart. Replacing poor processes on even poorer macro apps. The companies that have turned to intelligent automation are truly digitizing their business units and optimizing en-masse. If you want to keep your old applications and keep piling on band-aids after band-aids, that's fine but the costs of maintaining the old applications, the old macros and now the "old" RPA is going to eventually leave your organization, falling further and further behind the digital revolution train.

RPA has it's place and that's why I love it, but use it to help plug gaps in agile transformation journeys to accelerate getting digital done. Thinking RPA is at the forefront of transformation is the number 1 mistake. So, here's some advice. Do a search for yourself on Google and see what the world (not just me) is saying about low-code and no-code (not low-code in RPA, because that's a myth). Go search for Forrester DPA and Gartner's IBPMS waves and quadrants (Intelligent Automation). Go look at the customers that have been successfully automating through low-code at scale, and rapidly. And if you want to see what I mean, without searching, you can just check out our site (plug); which is a summary of the compendium of technologies that is "changing the way the world builds software".

Or, jump straight to THIS VIDEO - It's 3 mins and sums it all up nicely :)

Enjoy the long weekend (to those having one).