Overcoming the Iceberg Effect

We say to ourselves "It’s obvious that if we can automate those processes, we’ll save thousands of hours, and we’ll be able to focus on much more interesting, important and profitable work.”

But there’s a catch. Among companies that have already started adopting RPA, very few are currently achieving the full benefits that a well-rounded RPA strategy can deliver. The most common complaint is that the RPA project has stalled and they don’t know how to move forward.

There are many reasons why RPA projects can go off the rails, but in most cases, there is a common pattern. RPA immediately resonates with most decision-makers because almost all businesses have a few processes that are so laborious and inefficient that they are already on senior management’s radar. These are often the processes that are easiest to automate, because it’s obvious what needs to be done to streamline them.

The RPA initiative therefore starts strongly — the company sets up an RPA Centre of Excellence (CoE) that has a clear idea of the first few problems it needs to solve, and the RPA team usually delivers these quick wins within the first few weeks or months.

However, as the afterglow of that success fades away, a difficult question arises. Now that the initial challenges have been solved, what should the CoE team tackle next? The lack of an innovation pipeline of automation opportunities makes it difficult to maintain much-needed momentum.

This is the Iceberg Effect. Like an iceberg which only has about 10% of its mass visible above the waterline, RPA has only a small percentage of potential use cases that are glaringly obvious to everyone in the business. The remainder glide silently beneath the surface, grinding down productivity and sinking morale without ever making enough noise to alarm the higher levels of the organisation.

The smoothest RPA journey allows businesses to start small, learn quickly and scale seamlessly. This helps to reduce the overall project risk and avoids the high upfront costs which can make achieving a positive ROI that much harder. Successful RPA initiatives look to the people doing the work throughout the business (known as "citizen developers") to kickstart the discovery and development of RPA opportunities.

To extend the iceberg metaphor, the CoE is like a ship’s engine-room: it does most of the hard work that powers an enterprise-wide RPA initiative, but it doesn’t necessarily have as clear a view as the people up on deck.

If these end-users are given help to automate the tasks that they find most tedious or time-consuming, it becomes much easier to identify a wealth of RPA opportunities that are normally hidden from view — even though they may seem obvious to the people trying to steer the business out of the iceberg’s path!
The CoE team can then start to join the dots — integrating individual tasks into larger, more sophisticated and robust RPA strategies and delivering greater business value. Successful RPA places as much focus on empowering the citizen developers as providing advanced software for the RPA experts in the CoE.

One business consulting company and provider of RPA which applies this philosophy is Softomotive. Its People1st Strategy puts people before robots, placing the power in the hands of the end user to help them discover and implement process automations quickly and safely, without having to write a single line of code. Softomotive uses the WinAutomation desktop automation tool a powerful Windows-based platform for building software robots; allied to ProcessRobot, an enterprise RPA platform, including security and controls, with links to best-of-breed AI technologies.