RPA in the USA

This title just made me smile. Especially as I mentally play it in my mind to the rock anthem “R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A.” by John Mellencamp (then known as John Cougar Mellencamp).

For those that haven’t been following along … RPA is Robotic Process Automation.

RPA is taking the world by storm. Companies like UiPath have made incredible inroads in making this technology trend.

Almost every horizontal ISV is getting in on the effort – from traditional ECM vendors like KnowledgeLake, LaserFiche, and Kofax to the more logical workflow and BPM vendors like K2, Nintex, Pegasystems, etc.

RPA is a hot topic. It can be especially relevant in the mundane and repetitive tasks that so many legacy systems impose.

The area is rife for innovation and I suspect there will be a lot of companies embracing the movement. The industry analysts are already following the trends and predicting a $1.3B market for software revenue in 2019. This is a small fraction of the consulting and deployment revenues to be made in this space. Typically, there is a 10 to 20x multiplier for a full lifecycle deployment of technologies. Meaning this is a $20B market. That’s enough to get people interested.

RPA is not new. It’s the semi-logical evolution of what once was the work of Frederick W. Taylor thru Alfred P. Sloan to W.Edwards Deming and later Hammer & Champy. Which is where I started with BPR at FileNet (now part of IBM) back in the 90’s. See Taylorism is Back … with a Vengence.

This does not to denigrate the fact that RPA is making inroads in businesses of all types and sizes.

Who Knows ... This might be the decade of RPA.

What Does RPA Do?
In a nutshell … RPA is the evaluation of processes for potential automation of repetitive tasks.

This is an oversimplification.

A more detailed description from TechTarget is:

“Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of software with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that previously required humans to perform. These tasks can include queries, calculations and maintenance of records and transactions.”

RPA is working hard to be everything BPR wanted to be

My former colleague at Microsoft, Joel Cherkis, wrote this post about the use of RPA in the USA, er Government. Joel is the VP, Global Public Sector Industry at UiPath. He held a similar role at Microsoft and he knows this space well.

He mentioned it here in this LinkedIn post which got me writing.

I’ve been thinking about RPA for 20+ years. Back in the day it has gone by many names. Including the pioneering efforts by Michael Hammer and James Champy in their seminal work for Business Process Reengineering, aka BPR. BPR got a bad rap in the 80’s. It was code for “layoffs” “downsizing” and other terms related to job disruption. Which wasn’t completely untrue. Ask me about Time-Motion studies at FileNet sometime. I’ll share a few stories from the real-world.

RPA is NOT a Job Death Knell
How many of you like to do your expense reports? Trip reports? Status reports?

Hint: No one does.

This is where RPA can help. Admittedly, this is a small area for RPA to have an impact on a business. But, imagine this … every employee … no matter how small or large an organization is … can spend the time they used to commit to these mundane tasks on more value added efforts.

It’s not hard to imagine.

People want to work on things that add value.

Sure, there are some tasks that are repetitive. That are boring. Yet, they still need to be done. RPA can help here.

What’s the Value of RPA?
This is the $1B question. Is it “worth it” for a company to spend money on automation?

This is a question that can only be answered directly. Not in the abstract.

It remains to be seen if organizations pick up and run with the RPA ball.

I suspect they will.

As a taxpayer, I hope the US government takes the RPA model to reduce the repetitive and mundane tasks from their workflows and systems.

And, I hope we get to benefit from RPA in the USA.

Stay tuned for RPA in the Milky Way. (that’s another post entirely)
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Tags:
#RPA #BPR #Process #Government #Workflow #ECM

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Jeff is business advisor, mentor and community engagement expert. He brings over 20 years of Channel Sales, Partner Marketing and Alliance expertise to audiences around the world in speaking engagements and via his writing. He has worked for Microsoft, Kodak, and K2. He is currently the Technical Alliances Manager at Zerto where he focuses on the Microsoft engagement efforts.

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He is a contributing author to Entrepreneur, Elite Daily, Yahoo, US News and to
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