Robotics Process Automation.

RPA.

Its something that companies are expected to spend over $2.4 billion on by 2022, up from $689 in 2018 according to Gartner.

But what exactly is it? And where does it fit in when it comes to helping companies with their digital transformation efforts?

These are big questions I was able to ask during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation I had with Francis Carden, Vice President of Digital Automation and Robotics for Pega a leading customer engagement and process automation platform provider.

Below is an edited transcript from a portion of our conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

Small Business Trends:What exactly is RPA?

Francis Carden: RPA stands for robotic process automation, and about a million things underneath it, dependent upon who you speak to. To me, it primarily started life as automating applications that run typically on Windows machines on desktops, and sometimes you could automate them a hundred percent and move those desktops to a VM, and they all run by themselves in a locked cupboard, right, properly governed and secured, hopefully. And then Attended RPA was basically, you put it on the desktop and it would automate alongside a human, so you could improve the humans performance by 20 to 40 to 50%. But if you get to a hundred percent, you dont need the human, so you would move it to the server room and [inaudible 00:00:39].

But, predominantly, to me, what it started out as, its morphed into some very different things, not necessarily rightly. But RPA was predominantly automating someone elses user interface, the keyboard, the mouse, the screen, because it doesnt change a process, it just automates the as-is process. And then, of course, it got, Throw some AI at it. That suddenly makes it uniquely different. Or, Throw some API integration in it.

But then, to me, those things arent really RPA. If youre automating a UI, youre basically saying, the old processes are fine. No, theyre not, right? You just keeping them alive for longer. Youre adding to debt, right? I think one of the analysts calls it a tax on legacy. Its so true.

And so, for the years Ive told very successful, large implementations of RPA, I never turned around to anybody and said, Oh, its transformation, or Its going to change your life. Its going to change the way you do business. No, its an operational improvement benefit.

Youve got intelligent automation, which is a myriad of technologies, which includes RPA, and RPA typically should be used as a bridge to transform your business. Because any business thats not transforming and just band-aiding stuff together with RPA is not going to be competitive a year or two or three from now, right? Because theyre peers are truly transforming their businesses and dont need RPA or very little of it. And thats got to be ultimately the goal. Nobody really wants screen scraping, right?

Small Business Trends:Talk about intelligent automation.

Francis Carden: I like to take a step back and think about work, right? Work that a human does at the desktop, thats really what were focused on because were not talking about necessarily APIs and the other stuff thats done. We can talk about that later because its of this, but predominantly RPA or the work that gets done by a human, theres a start point. It might be a mortgage loan application. It might be a call because theyre complaining that their network keeps coming down, or their mobile phone keeps breaking, whatever it might be. A call comes in, and then ultimately theres an outcome. And then if all you do is automate the existing way you solve that outcome, all the underlying debt stays around this. Its not a digital process.

Intelligent automation says lets rethink how we want that outcome to occur. We want it to happen faster. We want it to reach out to the customer before they call us. All of those things start to really evolve if you think about it intelligently. Automating a process is not about automating the as is, but automating almost the want to be. Where would you like as a business, that process? If you was to start a new company today, you dont go out and buy 6,000 legacy systems and use RPA to turn yourself into a digital business. You typically build, or you buy some technologies, and you build a digital business. And so you are intelligently automated from the ground up. And RPA is basically trying to not intelligently automate you from the top down.

And so its a matter of using the right technologies, and whats put people off in the past from being able to digitally transform a process, is some things are just hard to do. And so, technically, you might get such a roadblock, you might as well just use RPA. But what we believe is you can automate much of the process using intelligent automation, whether thats low-code or whether thats design thinking to reengineer a process or case management, and then use RPA to plug the gaps that wouldve prevented you getting further along the digital transformation story. And then think about replacing those RPA bots. Weve got customers that build bots only if theres an end of life strategy for them, right? I mean, thats very forward thinking and very creative and very right, right?

Small Business Trends:RPAs, theyre great for, like you said, automating routine kind of mundane tasks. And if the processes that are making up those routine automated, I mean, those routine tasks are bad processes, like you said, it just speeds up the failure and makes the failure more consistent in achieving, as long as you run those processes. But when it comes to actual transformation, thats in intelligence. Thats where, I guess, the umbrella of DPAs come in.

Francis Carden: We both lived in this world for a long time. To automate a process properly, i.e., to rethink it, reimagine it, everybody thinks thats a big ticket item. Its going to take many, many years. BPM [phonetic 00:05:43] was known as its going to take forever, right? Its like ERP. I mean, thats the worst one, but everybody thought that [inaudible 00:05:49]. Ill implement an ERP system in six months, so we digitize the process in three.

But whats changed, DPA, intelligent automation, is that there are new technologies that do not require you to rebuild a process from scratch in years. You can do them in weeks. Weve got customers rebuilding processes properly in days and weeks. And that may or may not include RPA. Often, it does not, but its there if you need it. But if you think about an RPA vendor thats raised all this money, they have to push RPA. Thats their license revenue.

Now, what theyve done is theyve said, Well, lets add some intelligence to RPA. Lets add OCR and some AI around document readings, and lets add some API integration. Its like, Well, thats then not RPA. Thats the stuff weve always had, maybe done better than before. Give everybody that. But I do not believe a digital transformation platform should be built on screen scraping. No enterprise, no CTO Ive ever met says, Yeah, yeah. Were going to go and buy a screen scraping platform [inaudible 00:07:04] an RPA platform to digitally transform my business. It doesnt happen.

And so low-code, to me, is the movement, and underpinning low-code is that citizen developers and IT can collaborate together to look at a process and say, How can we improve this process dramatically? Right? Almost throwing away the existing and just say, Well, imagine that we were allowed to dream, and this is what my perfect process would look like. And then a few buttons later youve actually said, Well, we can start to do that in these days and weeks, instead of these years. And thats what were seeing. Its almost a competition. Its almost now cheaper to build a new process than it is to use RPA to plug the old one because if you take into account the cost of bot maintenance, if you take into account the cost of maintaining those legacy systems and the infrastructure required to do it, and IT and QA and everything else, but if you take a step back and say, well, again, to my point earlier, you lose a new digital business. Dont buy those legacy systems, but you managed to build a digital business, so that they say never the twain shall meet, but that twains meeting now, right?

You are literally seeing companies And we saw it through COVID as well. We saw lots of RPA vendors going out there building some bots, which kudos to everybody who contributed to helping through this pandemic. But we also saw a massive number of companies with Pega building applications from scratch in days, like loan applications in days. Instead of our band-aiding an existing loan application with RPA, we were actually building brand new loan applications where banks could put those online so that people could apply for loan. The loan be processed. And when you talk about building an application in a week or two, people dont believe you, but its true now. Thats DPA or intelligent automation.

Small Business Trends: So do you see companies looking to do digital transformation starting with RPA thinking they are doing intelligent automation?

Francis Carden: So, intelligent automation, you can start with it and use RPA, or you could use RPA and come back to it later. But every one of our clients, whether theyre with successful with RPA or not, needs intelligent automation. And thats the depth and breadth of DPA, or as Gartner calling it hyper-automation. I think HFS called it intelligent process or measure, whatever the acronym, its about doing it right now. And the time is now when weve got to automate these processes correctly. And that is the conundrum. The word automate implies automating something as is. Why does the word automate count to building something new, kind of is an oxymoron. Youre not automating it, right?

And I think of computerization as the automation of the way things were done manually, and RPA is just automating computerization. Its still the way things were built to do, what used to be done manually. Digital transformation or intelligent automation is about automating the way to do it properly. Now you can. You couldnt do it that way 10 years ago. The technology was too hard, right? Big projects. Now you can build things in days and weeks and months that used to take years, and its transforming the game for the entire industry in every sector.

This is part of the One-on-One Interview series with thought leaders. The transcript has been edited for publication. If it's an audio or video interview, click on the embedded player above, or subscribe via iTunes or via Stitcher.

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Francis Carden of Pega: RPA Doesn't Automatically Mean You're Adding Intelligence to Your Automation Efforts - Small Business Trends