Why it’s Critical to Develop an RPA Infrastructure Versus Tailored Point Solutions

“Chappie” is the latest movie to come out looking at a future where robots begin to have the capacity to think and feel for themselves and all the consequences that then ensue.  For now, at least in the application of robots to IT and business processes, it is not the development of individual intelligence which should be our goal, but rather the creation of the infrastructure which makes it possible to deploy a flexible fleet of robots across clients and processes. 

In particular, software robots should be available as a common pool of capability with centralized management tools, cross-client and process work queue management systems to maximize utilization together with a financial mechanism that can chargeback that individual utilization at the contract level.  

Our latest update discussions with service providers deploying robotic process automation highlighted that, in many cases, they are sub-optimizing this technology by building our capability that is largely aligned to a specific client contract or process.  In doing so, the potential utilization of the robots is often reduced and unnecessary costs are built into the solution.  Developing customized solutions for clients has plagued the services industry for years, and RPA is no different.

In our HfS Maturity Model for Robotic Process Automation of November 2014, we identified that the creation of “Robots As-a-Service” is the most mature vision for process automation that exists today, part of what we called Level 3 or “Institutionalization”.   It is clear that some service providers agree and have set this as a vision, now they need to invest in building the centralized capability that can bring this vision to life in a better economic model than is available today. 

It may seem counter-intuitive to look at creating capabilities of the sort once built around time-sharing on Mainframes into this new processing environment, but that is exactly what we need today to get the benefits of both efficiency and effectiveness which are central to the As-a-Service Economy.

During the second half 2015, we will doubtlessly see many announcements and products that are about bringing cognitive capabilities into IT and business processes, but before we empower the individual robot we first need to create the capabilities to harness the power of the collective.