Is the RPA essential to digital transformation?

Digital transformation differs from organization to the other, but simply we can define it as integrating digital technologies to change how business operates and delivers value to customers transforming the business from the analog to digital state utilizing whatever suitable technologies to solve customer problems and deliver the desired outcomes.

Digitization is a continuous journey that requires cultural and mindset change to always fill the gaps between customers expectations and what the analog business delivers so whatever used technologies for designing the customer journey should have basic characteristics such as but not limited to low-code or no-code approach to empower business team to build, deploy and change customer-centric journeys reacting quickly to customer and business needs, integrate with other technologies to deliver end-to-end automated business process, the ability to expose a cross-channel content to ensure the delivery of the same customer experience across points of contact e.g. Web, Mobile, Stores, Call Center, Chat, Messaging, etc.

Robotic Process Automation RPA tools perform several technical tasks such as integrate applications, automate repetitive tasks utilizing the underlying application User Interface UI, inject new business rules without involving IT or the applications' vendors, extend legacy applications and monitor agents interactions collecting events to generate operational reports and all these tasks occur at the desktop level as scattered silos between different organizations’ business units.

RPA tool is needed during digitizing any business process to integrate with back-end application if it was hard or lengthy process to get Application Programming Interfaces APIs to achieve one step in the customer journey, and just to show the difference between APIs and RPA, you could think how long will it take you to get API to read or update a record in Customer Relation Management CRM application in big organization, if API is available then it could be even more stable and better alternative to the RPA, but based on experience this will rarely happen to get whatever APIs you need especially when the business team leads the digitization journey.

Digital Transformation targets customer experience concerns through improving the customer journeys exposed a cross-channel while RPA is one of the technical enablers, you may need while designing the customer centric journeys, that was mainly targeting organizations cost concerns, but it also beneficial for enabling business process digitization integrating with back-end applications wherever we have no APIs.

RPA is one of the main enablers during the digital transformation journey as the other technologies such as Natural Language Processing NLP, Optical or Intelligent Character Recognition OCR or ICR, Computer Vision CV, intelligent Virtual Assist IVA such as chat-bots, Digital Process Automation DPA and any other Artificial Intelligence based tools that imitate human behaviors adding some intelligence to the process to replace any analog part of it.

Answering the question, from my perspective, RPA is needed as one of the enablers for the digital transformation so most of organizations' CIOs are considering it now not only for cost reduction but also for the digitization, but RPA alone was not built for end-to-end business process automation that's why nowadays we hear new terminologies such as intelligent and HyperAutomation as a broad terms that combine several technologies together to deliver desired results.

Finally, do not forget that digital transformation is not only technology, but also you will need to consider cultural and operational changes, workforce enablement, etc. that we will discuss in details in other posts.