Intelligent Automation Is Finally Coming out of the Shadows

It’s time to address the business value of “Intelligent Automation” in the same vein as “Outsourcing.” While negative connotations of job losses can be tied to both terms, they are both valuable vehicles for enterprises to make significant productivity gains in today’s business environment. 

Many of the actual accomplishments and growing maturity of Intelligent Automation overall and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) specifically has been hidden deep beneath the market hype and paranoia, largely out of sight from the broader community of enterprises that would significantly benefit from these developments. 

Several HfS site visits to the delivery centers of service providers and shared services centers in the last few weeks, have shown us that this tendency to keep RPA on the “down-low” is abating. Both clients and their providers piloting bots are starting to realize some real value from the business process harmonization RPA delivers—often to a greater degree than they initially expected.

The historically adversarial nature of many enterprise–service provider relationships meant that many early deployments of RPA by service providers occurred behind the “delivery firewall” so they could measure the full benefits before using them (or not) to restructure pricing and contracts. When coupled with uncertainty from delivery center leaders regarding how the existing human teams will receive large-scale RPA deployments, we have seen a tendency to keep RPA under wraps.

But at a certain point, the market attention surrounding RPA, and the willingness of service providers and shared centers to display their achievements from RPA, is changing the perception tide. HfS saw this with a recent visit to Dell to see how the firm is using its Automated Full Time Employee (AFTE) Command Center to showcase RPA “bot” productivity, not just internally to the service provider, but in recurring governance and operational interactions with clients. By providing a “window” into the real contribution of “bots” to process delivery at the project level, the AFTE Command Center, Dell is making it clearer to clients how it is changing the mix of process delivery.  

HfS welcomes this model of greater automation transparency and sees this as the coming wave, as service providers increase the deployment of “bots” not just on transactionally priced or gain-share deals but across the full contract portfolio.

Recent floor walks on the new Accenture Operations Delivery Center (Bang 9) in Bangalore showed that RPA agents and other “mini-bots” are part of the delivery environment and how they are changing the dynamics on the floor as well. 

Nowhere was greater visibility more obvious than during the HfS visit to the ANZ Bank Shared Service Center in Bangalore. The ANZ team is really highlighting the integration in process delivery between RPA “bots” and human agents by giving their “bots” prominent placement (including window seats) in the center. By recognizing that “bots” have their place alongside humans, ANZ is helping to make RPA more acceptable inside the center, liberating teams to take on different work as a result.

Making RPA and Intelligent Automation an integral part of how firms deliver IT and business processes at the client-specific and sub-process level at least means stepping up and acknowledging that the “bots” are here and they are here to stay.

HfS will reflect these RPA developments as part of the updated to the Evolving Maturity Model for Robotic Process Automation, which we will release in Q4 2015. We are also hosting a webinar in November with ANZ Bank to look more specifically at what the bank has accomplished and what it takes to be successful with RPA.