What CIOs need to know about RPA in IT operations
The past year saw a bump in robotic process automation adoption, but figures also revealed that RPA’s use isn’t equally distributed across the enterprise.
A 2020 survey conducted by Forrester on behalf of RPA vendor UiPath showed that companies were using RPA and intelligent automation technologies at an increasing rate in response to pandemic-induced business pressures. Just under half of respondents said they plan to up their automation investments in the coming year as a way to increase agility, resilience and efficiency.
But according to researchers and management advisors, most RPA investments are made in less strategic IT operation areas.
“IT operations constitute a very small portion — about 4% — of the RPA market, and major use cases are primarily in the IT service desk,” said Amardeep Modi, a practice director with the management consulting and research firm Everest Group.
That being said, CIOs shouldn’t discount the value of RPA in IT operations, particularly as a way to eliminate inefficient, time-consuming tasks related to legacy systems such as ERP that don’t have the embedded automation and intelligent capabilities found in more modern applications.
“RPA is a perfect way to address issues if you’re not at the point where you can sunset certain legacy systems confidently or on a reasonable timeline,” said Kevin Martelon, a process consultant and automation partnership manager at Saggezza, a global IT consultancy.
Martelon pointed to a recent RPA deployment he helped a modular storage company deploy. In this case, the field workers are using tablets to evaluate returned rental units but with the data collected being sent and stored in a legacy application. That data is then extracted, coded and sent to a financial system — a task that IT handled manually until it deployed bots to do the extraction and recoding.
The company will eventually need to modernize the legacy system but in the meantime, RPA is providing the bridge to a future state and is saving hundreds of hours of manual work, Martelon explained, which proves the value of RPA in IT operations.
CIOs have varying levels of opportunities to use RPA in their own department operations based on where they are in their digital transformation journey, said Cathy Tornbohm, an analyst at Gartner. While some may already be using automation technologies included in modern applications to support help desk operations, those with older help desk systems have more places to use a dedicated RPA tool. That’s the case throughout IT operations, Tornbohm said, adding that CIOs are most likely to deploy RPA only where legacy systems are still in use and, thus, where embedded automation or APIs aren’t available. A fair number of CIOs are in that situation, according to IT advisors, whether it’s because they’re still in the early or middle stages of digital transformation or they work in established companies with legacy systems that are harder to replace due to the size and complexity of operations.
