Why it’s Important to Establish an Attainable RPA Vision

Over the past several years, one thing has stood out as a differentiator between organizations that have built a wildly successful RPA automation program and those who haven’t. I can summarize it in just four words: Think Big, Start Small.

Thinking big can kick start the innovation process within an organization. We couldn’t have landed on the moon without thinking big. But that big thinking requires leaders to be able to establish the vision for the big idea and then clearly communicate it to the rest of their teams to jump start the collaboration.

Building an RPA vision offers people in the organization an opportunity to think differently about how they accomplish their work. However, that RPA vision must be translated into an intelligent automation strategy roadmap to show everyone where the organization is headed.

Executives tend to play a key role in developing the intelligent automation strategy and RPA vision, as they determine the course of the organization based on market trends, industry standards, regulatory requirements, personnel engagement, and organizational alignment.

Like the old paper maps, an intelligent automation strategy roadmap offers the big picture of the journey. Everyone on the team can get an understanding of where the organization is going. But like an old paper map, as the journey gets larger, the details along the way become less clear to allow for a broader understanding.

With an RPA vision, this is where the Center of Excellence (CoE) can really help to fill in the details along the way. The RPA Center of Excellence has the technical expertise to understand the capabilities of the technology as well as the business insight to apply that technology to solving real-world issues.

The RPA Center of Excellence becomes the GPS for the journey, providing more practical, step-by-step solutions to help the organization stay on track. Oftentimes, business teams aren’t aware of the technology options that they can use to transform their work, and IT teams aren’t in-tune with the day-to-day activities within a business unit to know how to apply their technical expertise.

The RPA Center of Excellence bridges that gap by bringing both IT and business teams together to apply their joint expertise to the business.

The teams within the Center of Excellence offer technical training and exposure to new options, like intelligent automation using RPA, OCR and intelligent document processing (IDP), and natural language processing (NLP) that the business teams may not understand.

Additionally, by incorporating the IT teams into the RPA Center of Excellence, the business’ RPA vision and intelligent automation strategy can be more fully incorporated into the technology plans for the near and long-term.

The RPA vision provides the direction, but the Center of Excellence helps to answer the question - “are we there yet?” – by leveraging tools like process mining. Process mining offers new insights into how we work.

Often, the RPA vision can be seen as a bit vague, but process mining can sharpen the view of the road ahead to build real-world solutions that drive automation with intelligence. Process mining helps starting small by uncovering the hidden steps and tasks within a broader process and align them to the intelligent automation strategy and RPA vision by using objective insights from corporate data.

Without process mining, the Center of Excellence might run process-mapping workshops with various business teams to manually uncover processes that could be well-suited for automation. These workshops can be extremely helpful to not only discover potential processes to automation, but also prioritize these processes in context of one another.

With process mining software, the subjective exercise of process discovery is replaced with a more thorough dive into system-level data that can uncover new insights that might be missed during the manual discovery workshops.

Building a program in this way provides both the direction and the individual steps to move your intelligent automation journey further towards success. A clear RPA vision and intelligent automation strategy is important, but even more important are the people that are engaged in your organization on a day-by-day basis. They are the creative force that imagines work in new ways that can drive true innovation within your organization.

Alexis Veenendaal is an Associate Content Writer and Editor at SS&C Blue Prism. She’ll tell you all the cool tips and tricks for implementing intelligent automation into your workplace. She has lived and worked internationally as a professional writer and designer for nearly a decade after graduating from the University of Lethbridge for English Literature. Her personal pursuits include authoring books and digital cartography.