{"id":3947,"date":"2017-04-21T10:37:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T10:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/revisiting-intelligent-automation-continuum_042117\/"},"modified":"2017-04-21T10:37:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T10:37:00","slug":"revisiting-intelligent-automation-continuum_042117","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/revisiting-intelligent-automation-continuum_042117\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting the Intelligent Automation Continuum"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Being a trained historian, I was delighted when on a recent HfS webinar on “Beyond RPA”, I got dissed by participants for a slide that I had drawn up four years back for a similar webinar, albeit for a different organization. When I say being drawn up for a webinar I really mean it, as I would never have expected that this slide would still be in use today albeit in expanded versions and some refer to it as an industry model. And to make my smile even bigger, I revisited those old slides and the title at the time was:” Beyond the Hype: Assessing the Evolution of (Robotic) Process Automation”. You can see the original slide above. As HfS is all about facilitating discussions among the industry’s stakeholders, I am truthfully delighted for all those questions and challenges. That being said, it is time to take stock where the industry is actually at!<\/p>\n

Why<\/strong> are we still talking about RPA?<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the danger of sounding like a broken record, we have to stop confining discussions on service delivery to the topic of RPA. Last year I wrote a blog<\/a> that summarized many of those arguments. Yet, despite a lot of noise in the industry we are getting pulled back and end up discussing RPA time and again. Granted, as nothing is defined, for many RPA is just a placeholder for what HfS would term Intelligent Automation. But beyond semantics, why are we paying lip service to broader notions of automation such as cognitive computing, AI, and self-learning as well as self-remediating engines? Service delivery is not just about business processes. If HfS’s contention about the journey toward the As-a-Service Economy and the OneOffice has any merit, we have to overcome those organizational silos and mental stovepipes. But we also urgently need to expand the set of stakeholders educating and talking about automation. While we have to give a lot kudos to the RPA providers and consultancies who singlehandedly educated the market, the reluctance of the IT juggernauts to enter those discussions is leading to distortions of the direction and dynamics in service delivery.<\/p>\n

Revisiting the “Continuum” – and a plea for service orchestration<\/strong><\/p>\n

To go back to my academic roots I am tempted to quote the Cambridge English Dictionary which describes a continuum as “something that changes in character gradually or in very slight stages without any clear dividing points”. If truth being told, I didn’t consult the dictionary before drawing up this slide four years back. But from the beginning, the thought-process was the following.<\/p>\n

To help overcome the blurred perception and often confusion that I have tried to call out, HfS did introduce the Continuum of Intelligent Automation to start discussions on the evolution and innovation in service delivery. It is not meant to be an answer to the ever-increasing questions. This model is by no means perfect and we have developed additional slideware that is trying to capture the evolution toward more data-centric models. In this context, I would like to call out just a couple of the points that we are trying to get across with this model:<\/p>\n