The world of RPA needs Open Standards

As a technology develops, proliferates, matures along with demand, people start questioning its ability (or lack thereof) to deliver on promised improvements in innovation, new (or increased) revenue streams and cost savings and the like. Those three are the final outcomes in any case. And now, those questions are being asked of Robotic Process Automation because of the increasing frustration over it’s failure to deliver on those outcomes.

We had written on the topic of ROI erosion from RPA investments in the past. The world has changed since and there is plenty of finger pointing for the current automation situation. The blame is being attributed to improper process selection, missing out hidden costs, lack of governance, high non-standard pricing mechanisms and so on. The overarching problem looming over is perhaps the missing accepted by the industry framework for standards. Essentially, the need to describe, in a standard way, what each candidate process does in a way that all automation tools can comprehend.

To create an end to end automation value chain, it is likely that one will need a platform, and a set of complementary and adjacent tool set. The complexity arrives, with no alternative, because all these tool sets talk a different language and describe and detail process automations differently. This complexity creates inefficiency, lengthens GTM and certainly adds to TCO.

All RPA platforms (rather vendors) use different, proprietary and exclusive mechanisms to detail process automations. This implies that cross functionality and interoperability between tools sets or platforms (from different vendors) becomes a challenge. There is no industry standard for portability across RPA platforms. In the eventuality that an organization does not like the current platform anymore (or would prefer to port a different platform for integration, capability or cost reasons), switching over to another platform can be done only by starting from scratch, for all practical purposes. So what happens if the current platform can not be used anymore, or if the platform provider goes out of business? See the problem?

This abscence of RPA interoperatbility and design standards is also a contributor to choked pipelines in automation programs. Integration is becoming a challenge in organizations which need to run multiple platforms in an overall large and spreadout business process. Even process discovery tools, the trigger point in an automation program, detail the processes differently. This causes users to end up manually document these processes before development and deployment can start and eventually the program to stall and start creating a sinkhole.

This lack of interoperability, and getting locked in is causing organizations to rethink progressive automation related investments. The lack of open standards will also impede the collaborative growth in the automation platform provider space. An effective example of what could have been (or could be) achieved is provided by the ISO standards on Cloud Computing, starting from terminology level to reference architecture.

Establishing common RPA standards will aid in connecting data commonalities into a readily understandable format across the tools eco-system. This will help user organizations to migrate not only their processes from one platform to another, but also workforces across automation platforms with much lower investments in cost, and time.

The advent and use of open and uniform standards, on the ground level, will also allow programs (for designing automated processes) to run across platforms and lead to creation of design-to-code generation tools which could run across platforms. The corollary then is that these standards assume an amount of encapsulation of the technical innards of a platform, and thus separate the design from implementation. The next step is for a business process user to use the platform, and automate processes on her own. Not just as in the sales brochures, but in reality. Not only just automation programs, but also digital transformation programs would get accelerated. Overall, the impact will be huge unlocking the entire market and taking it to new value realisation levels.

Over the last few years, much advancement has happened in the field, but RPA is really nowhere near where its potential is. Creation, acceptance and establishment of universal and open design standards can take the RPA market to the next level. The resulting portability, interoperability will fuel DX and enable RPA to be truly transformative.