It seems like everyone is in the middle of a Digital
Transformation. Private Cloud, Public Cloud, Multi-Hybrid Cloud, Data Lakes,
Machine Learning, Inference, and Artificial Intelligence are all terms that
people are using today to describe their digital transformation, but what about
Legacy integration. No one ever talks about Legacy Integration. Why? Because it
is challenging to integrate Legacy applications, data, and security into your
new pristine Multi-Hybrid Cloud environment. That is one of the last things we
want to concern ourselves. If we don’t develop a Legacy strategy, then we have
a speedboat with its anchor down. It slows us down and keeps our boat stuck in
the harbor.
One of the growing areas to help with Legacy Integration and
automation of integration is the use of automation tools and frameworks. Over
the last 3 years, a significant emphasis on the automation of workflows with
legacy and new cloud-aware applications for information workers has emerged.
These tools sets are called Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
When I first started investigating Robotic Process
Automation (RPA) tools, I thought they controlled robots. I was all ready to
get my steel-toed boots and a hard hat and visit manufacturing facilities.
However, I quickly found out that RPAs mimic the way that information workers
work with the different tools they use. Some of the tools are Legacy tools, and
some of those tools are new modern applications. RPAs record how the
information worker uses the User Interface of the different tools and then
allow the recording to be played back, automating the Information Worker
workflow.
Surprisingly RPAs are quite a mature technology. Many of the
RPA companies have a heritage in the UI Test Tool marketplace. The ability to
capture user interaction with multiple application over time is critical for
developing a repeatable User Interface Test. These tools have been around for
over 20 years and are quite mature. These UI QA Test Tools have been rebranded and
repurposed for Information workers that want to automate their repeatable
redundant tasks.
Current Market Place – 2019
Investors see this market as a hot market and have invested
heavily in these technologies. Over the last three years, over $2.0 Billion has
been invested in the RPA marketplace. Three companies have taken a majority of
the investment:
- UiPath - $1 Billion investment on $300 Million in Annual Revenue
- Automation Anywhere - $500 Million investment on $100 Million in Annual Revenue
- BluePrism - $50 Million investment on $30 Million in Annual Revenue
Most of the investment has not come from traditional
high-tech Silicon Vally, but instead from the Financial centers like New York
and London, indicating that financial institutions are looking at RPAs to
automate many of their own information workers’ workflows and processes.
Place where RPA works well
The first vertical segments to adopt RPAs have been
Financial, Insurance, and Medical industries. These industries have looked for
ways to decrease variability, increased reliability, and decreased cost. Due to
a large number of information workers in these industries, they have looked to
RPAs to automate much of the work their Information Workers are currently
doing. To automate these workflows organizations need to understand how these
workflows get created.
First, let’s understand the information worker. Many of the
information workers spend time working with multiple applications, tieing
information, and applications together in an ad hoc way. As these workers
continue to work with these applications, they organically create workflows
coupling data and applications together in an innumerable number of
permutations.
Second, Catalog the workflows as best as you can finding
candidates for workflow elimination through duplication and redundancy. Now
that workloads are understood the next step is to prioritize and enumerate the
workflows. Focusing on most used workflows with the most significant number of
steps tends to be the best way to prioritize workflows.
Lastly, figure out how to automate the workflows with RPA
bots. The automation can be done through UI recording the workflow from one of
the information workers and annotating the workflow with variations based on
data entry and security credentials. Once the recording is complete, an RPA bot
is created to automate the workflow. Now you need to decide how you want the
RPA to run: Attended or Unattended.
RPA Modes of Operation
RPAs run in two basic modes of execution. Attended and
Unattended. Attended means, it runs on the Desktop or Laptop of the information
work. It aids the information worker by automating the work that they do
day-to-day. Unattended runs in a Virtual Desktop environment and are typically
kicked off via an event or trigger and runs without any interaction with the
information worker. There are benefits to running in both modes as described
below.
Attended
·
Handles tasks for individual employees
·
Employees trigger and direct a bot to carry out
an activity
·
Employees trigger bots to automate tasks as
needed at any time
·
Increases productivity and customer satisfaction
at call centers and other service desk environments
Unattended
·
Automates back-office processes at scale
·
Provisioned based on rules-based processes
·
Bots complete business processes without human
intervention per a predetermined schedule
·
Frees employees from rote work, lowering costs,
improving compliance, and accelerating processes
How to integrate RPA in your Enterprise
To understand how RPAs fit into your Enterprise, you have to
first look at the users of the RPAs. Specifically, there are three types of
“actors” that use, manage, or influence the RPA tools.
- Information Worker – This is the primary user of the RPA tools. Their manual processes are targets for automation.
- Application Developer – RPA bots change when applications are updated or created. Changes to User Interface require “re-recording” the RPA bots.
- IT Operations – Manage the RPA tools and deploy unattended RPA bots.
Managing Change
Managing the complexity of configurations and security are critical
factors to a successful deployment of RPA tools and bots. First, you need an understanding
of how the different users of the RPAs interact when changes to applications,
workflows, and processes. This understanding critical to managing change in the
RPA bots and the toolsets they use.
Small changes to applications can have a profound effect on
Information Workers and how they perform their day to day work, which in turn
means recording a new or updating an exiting RPA bot. Because of the coupling
of RPA bots to toolsets and workflows,
creating RPA bots when the workflows or toolsets are immature causes
unnecessary churn and fragility. Mature processes and toolsets are great
candidates for RPA automation.
Another thing to consider is where are the tools running
that you are automating with your RPA tool. Do they use Legacy applications and
infrastructure? Are they using Public or Private Cloud? How are the networks of
these systems connected? As the number of environments increases, so does the
complexity of maintaining and updating applications and RPA bots. Find ways to
decrease the number of environmental boundaries the RPA bot is traversing.
Managing Security
Another critical factor to consider is security for the RPA
bots. When an Information Worker records their workflow, they need to
authenticate (log in) to each tool they are using. Workers authenticate using
usernames and passwords, authentication keys, or even Corporate Single Sign-On
Tools. Either way, you need to manage the security of these tools in the
context of the RPA bot at execution. Any changes to authentication (username,
password, auth keys, or credentials) require changes to the RPA bot. Many of
the RPA tools consider this and have mechanisms to inject security credentials into
the RPA bot and authenticate with the tools at runtime.
Managing RPA tools and bots with SecDevOps Workflows
The complexity of RPA tools and bots lends itself very well
to well-known patterns in the SecDevOps world. Luckily, many of the problems
with managing configurations and dependencies are handled well with a SecDevOps
process.
RPA Bundling
One of the tricks is to treat the RPA bot as a complex-service
that contains several VMs or containers for each of the tools, a Virtual
Desktop and the bot itself. These services can be bundled together and managed
together like one package. A bundle includes not only the services but how the
services communicate (network) in a secure manner (Authentication).
Passing a bundle to a service orchestrator allows for
greater automation of network firewall management, security, and credential key
injection and lifecycle management of the RPA bot and the tools it consumes.
There are several tools in the Virtualization space (VMWare, and OpenStack)
that allow for the creation and management of these bundles. The container space has similar scheduling
and orchestration tools as well: namely Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm.
SecDevOps Pipelining
A simple SecDevOps pipeline manages the RPA bot bundle just
like any other traditional application bundle.
An Information Worker builds the RPA bot bundles by
recording the User Interface workflow in a development environment. The worker easily
records their workflow and then creates a bundle that gets “Checked In” to the
pipeline. At that point, the RPA bot bundle moves through a build, test, and
production cycle. Checkpoints at each step along the way, help guarantee the
quality of the RPA bot. Because the bundle can inject network and security
depending on different environments, the RPA bots can be reused by different
Information Workers and in different environments.
Another benefit of putting RPA bots into RPA Bundles is the
management of the tools and bots across multiple infrastructure environments
like legacy, private, and public clouds. Many of the Service orchestration
tools can automatically create connections between these infrastructure
environments through creating an overlay network. The pipeline decreases the
amount of “hands-on” work done by the IT organization, and in many cases, all
of the steps in the pipeline are automated.
Pitfalls of RPA bots
Here is a list of somethings to watch out for when using RPA
bots in your enterprise systems.
- Security can be a gaping hole if you don’t pay attention to it. One of the biggest mistakes is running applications in an RPA bot in privileged mode or with a “global” account credentials.
- RPAs bots tightly couple to User Interfaces of multiple applications, any small change to an application means you need to re-record the RPA bot.
- RPA bots cannot hand change very well they are very brittle to change in applications and even configuration of applications.
- Reuse is minimal due to the tight coupling with the application user interfaces. Some tools use tags instead of the absolute position of cursor and clicks.
- Some User Interfaces do not allow themselves to RPAs because they are dynamic. Which means they are hard to record.
AI to the rescue of RPAs
As mentioned in the pitfalls of the RPA, bots reuse is a big
problem that the industry is looking at fixing. One of the techniques they are
investigating is the use of AI and Inference to handle dynamic user interfaces
and small changes to applications without re-recording RPA bots. Pattern
recognition and Optical Character recognition are two areas that are being used
to train AI models to be used to identify fields and segments of User
Interfaces.
With these AI models, bots can be more flexible lending
themselves to reuse across multiple toolsets, and similar process/workflows.
Another area that RPA vendors are investigating is process optimization using
AI and ML.
Legacy Migration is a journey
The RPA marketplace has caught new energy as companies are
looking to modernize their IT infrastructure and processes. Automating current
manual processes through recording is a quick win that many organizations are
getting the benefit. However, RPA should be considered a stop-gap mechanism
instead of the end state. Why? Many of the current information processes require
legacy systems and policies. Automating an old process on new infrastructure is
similar to automating the creation of buggy whips for an automotive factory.
There may be a benefit at first, but in the long term, the process is highly
inefficient and antiquated. No matter how fast it runs reliability, it just may
not be needed.
Conclusion
Robotic Process Automation tools are another set of tools
that can be used to help organizations with their digital transformation from
Legacy to more modern Computing infrastructure and processes. The tools by
themselves are not enough, and you need to plan how you are going to use,
manage, and eventually replace them. Here are some helpful tips when working
with these tools.
·
Treat RPAs as Complex Services running in your
Multi-Hybrid Cloud
·
Run you RPA bots through SecDevOps Workflows
like other applications.
·
Inject Security and Auth at runtime into the RPA
tool.
·
Find ways to reuse RPA bots in different parts
of your organization.
·
Have a plan to replace your RPA bot with a
simplified integration
·
Look for ways to decrease the Legacy applications
(Replace or Remove)
ReplyDeleteThis article is a creative one and the concept is good to enhance our knowledge. Waiting for more updates.
RPA Training in Anna Nagar
Spoken English Classes in Velachery
Tally Course in Anna Nagar
Dot Net training in Velachery
graphic design courses in porur
Python Training in Tambaram
Android Training in Anna Nagar
Graphic Design Courses in Porur
Hadoop Training in T Nagar
Android Training in Chennai
Those rules moreover attempted to wind up plainly a decent approach to perceive that other individuals online have the indistinguishable enthusiasm like mine to get a handle on incredible arrangement more around this condition
ReplyDeleteBusiness Management Software
You have provided a richly informative article about digital system. It is a beneficial article for me and also helpful for those who are searching for this type of blog. Thanks for sharing this information here. Phone Systems Houston
ReplyDeleteThis is really informative blog, I have to thank for your efforts. Waiting for more post like this.
ReplyDeleteBlue Prism Training Institute in Chennai
Blue Prism Online course
Blue Prism course in Bangalore
Great Blog with Good Information.
ReplyDeleteRPA Training Online
RPA Training in Chennai
RPA Training In Bangalore
This is a good post about Marketplace automation tools . Thanks for sharing with us, Excellent work and I really appreciate your work.
ReplyDeleteclearly, It is an engaging article for us which you have provided here about Best Customer training software for industry This is a great resource to enhance knowledge about it. Thank you
ReplyDelete