Cost savings turned out to be illusory, so where next for RPA?

The first wave of RPA may be over but it may have a big future in self-service IT

The first wave of RPA is over, expectations having peaked in 2018. By October 2019 Romania's UiPath, which had been valued at $7 billion, had laid off 11 per cent of its 3,000 employees, a downward trajectory that was also followed by Silicon Valley 'unicorn' Automation Anywhere six months later.

Roy Illsley, distinguished analyst at Omdia, says RPA has been hit by a double whammy. First, RPA's cost-cutting capabilities were overestimated; second, the uncertainty wrought by the pandemic has led to a return to the relative simplicity of traditional outsourcing.

"The technology has delivered some success stories, but where it is failing is the realisation that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The effort required to put these solutions into organisations needs to be driven by more than just cost saving," said Illsley.

We don't need no automation

User acceptance can be an uphill struggle, as exemplified up by an IT leader in manufacturing during a recent Computing Delta focus group: "It was well-received by a small group of people, but it was difficult to gain traction anywhere else. People saw it as a threat to their livelihoods instead of a tool that could save them time and effort, and inevitably it died."

The first VC-inflated bubble may have burst but automation isn't going anywhere. The underlying industry trends and motivations - automating repetitive tasks to save money, yes, but also to drive efficiencies and streamline processes - have not changed. As the world emerges from the pandemic, the longer-term strategic drivers will start to take precedence, Illsley believes, and interest in RPA will regain some ground.

However, we can expect to see fewer standalone bots, more consolidation, and also convergence with other technologies.

We commonly see clients start tactically with cost take out and, over time, find higher-value and more strategic use cases, Dennis Grady, Pegasystems

Dennis Grady, senior director, product engineering, intelligent automation at Pegasystems, agreed that cost savings were the original hook for RPA, but that this generally leads to organisations taking a more strategic view of what automation can do for them.

"We commonly see clients start tactically with cost take out and, over time, find higher-value and more strategic use cases," said Grady. "RPA alone will not enable the shift to the higher-value more strategic objectives."

Grady sees a natural synergy between RPA and low-code/no-code systems that enable non-coders to build apps using a GUI. But whereas RPA has historically been focused on point solutions - chat-bots and the like - low-code has been the preserve of platform players, like ServiceNow, Salesforce, OutSystems and Pegasystems.

"As people build low-code apps, they may need to include or integrate with a bot. And people building bots want low-code tools that make it fast and easy to build bots," he said.

RPA and low-code may be on the same spectrum, but starting with the latter might provide a simpler path to adoption, said Illsley, given that RPA is often seen as an IT-led approach with the not so hidden aim of reducing headcount.

RPA can be seen as an imposed approach and therefore meets with some resistance and scepticism, Roy Illsley, Omdia

"The platforms with low- or no-code are extending capabilities and are making the current users lives easier," he said. "RPA can be seen as an imposed approach and therefore meets with some resistance and scepticism. While they are mostly doing the same thing, it is how they are seen that separates them."

Consensus building

Perception is all important to adoption, and there are right and wrong ways to introduce RPA and low-code, according to Grady. The mistake some companies made was to install a few bots with the expectation that benefits would be achieved without much further effort required, missing the vital element of consensus building. He recommends that organisations set up agile grassroots ‘communities of practice' containing about eight ‘builders and makers' (business process owners plus non-professional developers who can help them to build apps) to one coach. These teams can work up FAQs and training materials, and support new users as they come on board.

"Over time, the community will grow organically and people who started as makers naturally grow into coaches to help scale the community," Grady said.

At a strategic level, organisations will also benefit by creating a practice committee to provide direction and governance of the RPA initiatives, he added.

"We typically see someone from IT heading up the practice committee but in strategic partnership with business leaders that benefit from the technology. It is a win-win situation when IT can provide technologies that enable the business to innovate while at the same time putting in place the right level of governance and controls to help scale low-code and RPA programmes while keeping the business safe."

So, RPA will likely find itself one of an interconnected network of tools dedicated to helping business people help themselves with data, but for this to really take hold barriers between IT teams, line of business, and across departments will need to be broken down still further.