I’ve had an epiphany. Sadly, it’s about IT stuff – but I thought I would share it anyway! 

More specifically, it’s about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and when to use it. As you will see below, scenarios which appear to be good candidates for RPA could turn into very costly mistakes. 

Anyone who’s spent time in contact centres or shared-service centres will be familiar with the range and complexity of processes their work entails. I’ve spent a lot of time in these environments over the course of my career and without exception have found them to be filled with hard-working individuals who do a great job, despite not always having the best tools. 

A helpful way of thinking about these processes is to see them as a mix of ‘exploratory’ and ‘programmatic’ tasks; this is something that MWD Advisors recently highlighted in their report on Desktop Integration. Exploratory processes are those that are fundamentally human-centric, while conventional wisdom says that ‘programmatic’ processes are the ones in which automation services (e.g. RPA, workflow or BPM) can be used to remove tedium and accelerate task completion.  

My ‘moment’ came when I met an organisation who had recently reviewed their back-office programmatic processes. They had concluded that even though the process flow was repeatable, the need to interpret and act upon unstructured data sources from 3rd parties would make an RPA solution too fragile. Their view was that day-1 of using an RPA solution would be fine, but beyond that they would be faced with a never-ending maintenance nightmare.  

One potential solution for this organisation, would have been to drive the adoption of self-service (or APIs) into the third-parties and/or agree a data exchange standard. That’s great if you are a market leader in your field and can mandate change. What if you are not OR you don’t have a business case that would cover the costs and effort of this approach? 

UX integration (and the various industry standards that support it) are making it possible to simplify the user experience for exploratory and programmatic processes while keeping the user fully in control. Existing UIs can be composed and then augmented with new agent-assist components that gather data from suitable data sources before prompting the user to review and make amendments. All of this is seamlessly integrated into an optimised user experience that blends just the right amount of automation with human-override. The process that I witnessed had 5 enterprise applications, 6 files and 75+ copy/paste operations. Ideal for RPA? Think again.