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RPA: What is it, and why should I care

On July 11^th, 2019, Amazon pledged to upskill 100,000 U.S. employees for in-demand jobs by 2025. The giant will invest over USD 700 million to provide upskilling training programs for one in three of its employees across the U.S. to help them move into highly skilled technical and non-technical roles across the company or pursue a career outside of Amazon.

In the last five years, Amazon fastest-growing highly skilled jobs included data mapping specialists, data scientists, solution architects, business analysts, logistics coordinators, process improvement managers, and transportation specialists. This trend is consistent with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. However, there are other considerations to how this labor trend may change in the short term. Probably, the one that can significantly reshape the workforce estimates is the emergence of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software solutions that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate high-volume repeatable tasks that have been performed by humans until today.

RPA: What is it, and why should I care?

The term “robot” comes from a Czech word, robota, meaning "forced labor. It was first used to denote a fictional humanoid in a 1920 play by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek but it was Karel's brother Josef Čapek who invented the word (Source: Wikipedia.)

RPA uses software robots that can reproduce repetitive tasks done by humans such as logging into an application, collecting or entering data, performing calculations; making decisions by applying rules or protocols, and completing a process, delivering an outcome, sending notifications, and logging out. RPA objective is making companies more efficient by reducing costs through automation, and freeing up employees to focus on creative, innovating, and intellectual work.

According to the New York Times Kevin Roose article “A Machine May not take your Job, but One Could Become Your Boss,” “The goal of automation has always been efficiency, but in this new kind of workplace, A.I. sees humanity itself as the thing to be optimized. Amazon uses complex algorithms to track worker productivity in its fulfillment centers and can automatically generate the paperwork to fire workers who don’t meet their targets, as The Verge uncovered this year. (Amazon has disputed that it fires workers without human input, saying that managers can intervene in the process.) IBM has used Watson, its A.I. platform, during employee reviews to predict future performance and claims it has a 96 percent accuracy rate.”

Roose explains that Management by Algorithm, something introduced in the early 20^th century, aimed at measuring each aspect of a job to improve efficiency. As an example, some companies, like Uber and Lyft, push for extreme efficiency and have are already outsourced traditional HR tasks to computers. It seems that RPA is already changing the nature of work. More so in industries such as Manufacturing and Technology.

Who are the main players?

On May 2019, Gartner published its first Magic Quadrant for the Robotic Process Automation market (Source: Siliconangle, Gartner) signaling the importance of this rapidly growing technology segment. The analyst firm estimates that the RPA market value will rise from USD 850 million a year to USD 2.4 billion a year by 2024. Gartner also identifies RPA as the fastest-growing subsegment of enterprise software they track, estimating an annual growth of 63% in 2018. According to Gartner, RPA drives fast growth because it helps companies to “automate their business processes without needing to replace their legacy computing systems. RPA is, therefore, proving to be particularly popular with enterprises that maintain larger amounts of legacy information technology infrastructure.”

Gartner’s RPA Magic Quadrant recognizes UiPath as the current leader in the market closely followed by Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. However, UiPath’s first place has been attributed mainly to have raised USD 568 million in venture capital funding at a USD 7 billion valuation, which provides a clear indication of the RPA’s perceived value, and the power that timely investing can deliver.

How RPA will transform Project and Resources Management

I can think of several consequences to traditional project and resources management:

1. Replacing the human workforce by robots whose capacity could be unlimited will eliminate a typical constraint in current resource management. Infrastructure and technology capabilities could be determining capacity rather than human labor availability. Capacity and Demand would be negotiated in a completely different context.

2. Defining tasks or processes will be a matter of enabling work templates by coding or configuration.

3. Project changes could become tickets to the IT department or Help Desk.

4. Approvals could be controlled by adaptative AI/ML algorithms and only exceptionally by managers.

5. Change Management will no longer be an issue since the adoption process will disappear or be minimized.

6. Costs will be mostly associated with processing use, technology, scalability, and infrastructure, minimizing labor costs.

7. Could Adaptative AI/ML algorithms replace Project and Program Managers?

8. RPA professionals can create and launch projects minimizing human intervention.

I would agree that this narrative looks like a dystopian scenario; however, it may very well become a reality. We must recognize that the way organizations work, and the type of resources they use to deliver work are changing. These changes require to adjust tools, methodologies, and paradigms. For organizations like Amazon, the future is already here, and they are responding to it. We can either ride the wave or be wiped out.

Source:

1. Recode Daily

2. https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-pledges-upskill-100000-us-employees-demand-jobs-2025

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/technology/artificial-intelligence-ai-workplace.html

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/business/economy/productivity-inequality-wages.html

5. https://siliconangle.com/2019/07/11/gartner-reveals-first-magic-quadrant-robotic-process-automation/