These are really exciting times for the services industry, where little upstart “Born in the Cloud” As-a-Service providers can sneak up on the traditional service providers and deliver pure cloud-based services in a model that was designed to be in the cloud.
And when you design services for pure cloud delivery, they have to be seamlessly automated at their very core. The services ethos is about enterprises operating smarter, not cheaper… and as a result will likely save a ton of money because they end up simply running more effectively.
One such irritant to the traditional services model is OneSource Virtual (OSV), which has built up a compelling business delivering business process service offering for clients around Workday’s HR and F&A SaaS platforms. OneSource Virtual is an As-a-Service provider – there is no transition to becoming one, it was born as one with As-a-Service as it’s intended delivery. And when you consider one of OneSource’s clients is Uber, it just makes for one harmonious As-a-Service mash-up…
The exciting value OSV is bringing to the table is its services are focused on real business support areas, such as organizational design and workforce analytics, in addition to the transactional needs of clients in areas such as payroll fulfillment, or accounts payable. And this also creates exciting jobs for onshore staff who can apply more consultative, value-based capabilities to service their clients. This is the As-a-Service Economy, where service jobs are becoming more challenging and interesting, where real business services are delivered on-tap and clients can access services designed to meet the needs of the modern business, not just some legacy back office designed on a mainframe cluster back in the late 1970s…
OneSource Virtual’s service delivery was built with RPA at its core
We’ll admit it. We didn’t see the robots for the trees. We’ve been so focused on how Robotic Process Automation is being implemented across legacy application environments, we missed how it is also being rolled out in “Born in the Cloud” business environments.
Last Friday, we spent time with the As-a-Service provider OSV, which has built business process service offerings around the Workday SaaS platform for HR and F&A. While it is true that Workday itself has automated many processes that require more manual intervention in other applications, OSV has gone taken this one step further.
With the development of its proprietary service delivery environment Atmosphere, built on force.com, OSV has created a platform for the extraction – and then automation of – recurring processes across their base of hundreds of clients. This is a critical development, because together, with consistency in the code base of Workday across clients, the automation in Atmosphere allows OSV to establish very high levels of productivity in tasks where human agents are still required.
Especially compelling is that fact that OSV has not developed its Atmosphere and this model of shared automation after years of running individual silos of client delivery, as several other service providers are now trying to do. Instead, OSV was founded on this principle of shared automation from its inception.
In essence, this means that OSV is already operating at the highest Level of the HfS Maturity Model for Robotic Process Automation that we released in November 2014. This Level, “Institutionalization” describes a common theme of broad strategic commitment by a service provider to the transformational potential of RPA on their clients’ business and operations. Any service provider characterized by this Level is making a sizeable investment in RPA, with a view to creating a fundamental change in the commercial and delivery operations of their clients’ business operations.
Other service providers are striving to move aggressively into the Institutionalization Level, however, they are doing it by retrofitting RPA into their established business, as opposed to develop new client delivery environments with RPA at the core.
Net-net, it’s time to really get down and dirty with RPA as a core component of the service delivery platform – get ahead of this unstoppable trend as opposed always chasing it…
Posted in : Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, HfSResearch.com Homepage, IT Outsourcing / IT Services, Robotic Process Automation, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and BPaaS, sourcing-change, Talent in Sourcing, The As-a-Service Economy
[…] (Cross-posted @ Horses for Sources) […]