Before I profess my thoughts on this one, let’s first look to the experts in the field who are implementing RPA. The big consulting shops or boutique services companies who are also fighting for your business. Groups with hundreds of onshore and offshore employees dedicated to building RPA bots for their clients. Surely the truth of this business user RPA battle lies within their four walls.
A quick Google search on RPA Jobs or LinkedIn profiles for RPA developers should be your first stop. Don’t worry, in the spirit of RPA I saved you a few clicks and included the link for you. As you will read, this is a recent job req for a consulting company hiring RPA developers who have familiarity with three of the well-known vendors in this space but what do you see when you look at the required qualifications?
Required and desired qualifications:
- Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, IT, MIS, Engineering, or related fields.
- 3+ years of software development experience
- Experience in HTML, SQL, and either .NET/C# or Java.
- Familiarity, certifications, and/or experience with RPA software tools highly preferred.
- Experience with BPM workflow platforms highly preferred.
Is this honestly the qualifications of a business user? Not the kind that I run into day in and day out in these organizations. So, if the very people consulting with you are hiring developers to build this stuff, why are you being told by vendors that business users can or should build these tools?
So, IT is the answer??? WHAT!!! Another technology you are asking me to throw over the wall to IT and hope for the best? Well, we all know how that story ends but maybe there is a middle ground based on this business user vs IT story that may help us adapt our current RPA approach into a more enterprise RPA strategy. To get to that point, however, we need to solve for something much bigger than just the question of who builds the bots. If we want to solve this one the right way, a deeper root cause analysis of how we got here (Business wanting to build automations / applications) is required before we can suggest the right path forward so let’s dig into this one a bit further and see if we apply a “cause vs symptom” approach to help us solve for this RPA scale challenge once and for all.
About the author
Scott Merritt is a passionate advocate of “Responsible RPA” having spent the last 15 years embedded in the process optimization and RPA space performing over 100 process automation assessments and supporting over 50 RPA implementations. As Global Head of Automation for Uniphore, Scott leads the go-to-market strategy for their automation portfolio and works as a trusted advisor for customers and prospects actively pursuing a digital transformation strategy. Scott has 20+ years’ experience in enterprise technology, serving in consulting, sales and sales leadership roles and carries with him a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt which he acquired earlier in his career during his tenure at Cardinal Health.
