Although robotic process automation (RPA) is at the heart of many digital transformation efforts. RPA is all too common for organizations when rolling out their software robots in a piecemeal fashion. For example, finance deploys its own set of bots, while manufacturing rolls out another — without coordination between the departments. A decentralized approach presents a risk for your company — one that leads to problems later. Here is how to avoid chaos at scale and prevent your robots from running amok.
Automated processes often require robots to interact with each other.
You want your robots to access and disseminate data. What this means is that these robots are often dependent on related systems and policies. But what happens when one of those policies change or a system breaks down? Your robots stop working and processes come to a grinding halt.
There’s no shortage of situations in which your robot will stop working.
Think about it: Legacy systems and websites evolve; applications are updated; passwords expire; spreadsheets get modified and security patches get applied.
Without some sort of standard or way of managing and maintaining your army of robots, when a policy is changed, the robots won’t know what to do – and they’ll run amok.
Organizations can prevent chaos by putting in a strong governance program.
A governance program becomes especially important as you scale your RPA initiatives. In fact, a lack of governance is one of the most common reasons that initial RPA projects fail, according to EY. Without a strong governance program and the right robot lifecycle management tools in place, organizations put their automation initiatives at risk.
Robots need guidance, management, and maintenance to continue to work properly and deliver maximum value to the organization. The organizations need to put three essential components in place: a guiding framework, a Centre of Excellence, and robot lifecycle management and analytics tools to support the program.
Lay the Governance Groundwork
To maximize RPA benefits, chief operating officers (COOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) must collaborate. With effective collaboration, the COO and CIO will establish an optimal software robot deployment and operating model.
In designing and implementing a guiding framework, they lay the governance groundwork for how their digital workforce will collaborate. This is very similar to the compliance policies that human talent sign when they start working for a company.
An effective robotics framework requires three elements.
An enterprise robotics council: This team spearheads the program, defines its scope, and sets targets for tracking execution efficiency and outcomes.
A business unit governance council.
This group is responsible for prioritizing RPA projects across departments and business units. An RPA technical council or Centre of Excellence (COE). The team designs standards, formulates working principles and guidelines and compiles best practices. Establish a Centre of Excellence
The Centre of Excellence is a group of core resources and people responsible for guiding everything related to automation, including managing and maintaining standards and vendors. They establish the best practices — training and so much more.
The Centre of Excellence members includes IT as well as subject matter experts from each business unit. With this collection of intelligence, the team is better equipped not only to make decisions on the right RPA tools to deploy. They also process prime candidates for automation.
There are three main CoE models, which differ according to how responsibilities are shared across the enterprise.
Centralized operating model — A single team is responsible for running and controlling all aspects of the program.
Decentralized — operating model: The responsibilities for running the automation program are replicated across separate business units within the organization.
Hybrid operating model — Some aspects of the automation program are run by a single, centralized team, while others are replicated across business units.
Organizations should choose the model that makes the most sense given where they are today and adjust down the road as needed.
Invest in Robot Lifecycle Management Tools and Analytics
Governance is easy to accomplish when RPA tools include management and oversight capabilities like version control. More sophisticated capabilities, such as Robot Lifecycle Management, help teams manage enterprise RPA robot deployments from hundreds to thousands of RPA robots.
For example, the tools help users keep track of changes, compare files and explore changes made. In addition, they also make it easy to store backup files so that if companies have to revert to a previous working version, they can do so effortlessly.
At scale, a strong governance and version control program becomes increasingly important.
When a robot breaks down, if you don’t have governance or digital workforce analytics, it’s almost impossible to track which one among hundreds or thousands is causing an issue or where one may have crashed into another and stopped a process in its tracks.
By leveraging a Centre of Excellence along with sophisticated tools like Robot Lifecycle Management, organizations can take a more business-centric approach to RPA that goes far beyond simple task automation.
Conclusion
A strong governance program is a key RPA success indicator. When it’s supported by Robot Lifecycle Management and digital workforce analytics, you reduce the risk your robots will run amok.
Image Credit: Elina Krima; Pexels -[my thoughts for pic are “crazy robots!” drr]
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