While RPA solutions solve one set of problems, they can create another, which can often inhibit their effectiveness. A new generation of No-Code Development Platforms is providing enterprises with an enticing way to overcome this gap and make legacy automation a sustainable reality.
Enterprise leaders have been whipped into a frenzy.
The constant barrage of articles and vendor talk tracks about the new age of automation and integration, and how Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow organizations to connect everything to everything has left them salivating to make it happen.
But then the sobering reality of the situation sets in.
While all the talk about APIs and modern interfaces makes sense in the context of the new applications that organizations are now deploying, there remains a huge gap when it comes to the countless legacy applications that most enterprises must manage — and which have limited to no API support.
It is these very applications, however, that often consume the majority of enterprise resources in the form of data entry and routine processing — and therefore are the very place that organizations need automation the most.
It is this situation that has given rise to the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) movement, in which so-called software robots interact with systems in place of humans, and leveraging the same user interfaces that humans would otherwise use, to automate these repetitive data entry and data processing activities.
The challenge, however, is that while RPA solutions solve one set of problems, they can create another, which can often inhibit their effectiveness.
A new generation of so-called No-Code Development Platforms, which enable business users to create applications on their own, is providing enterprises with an enticing way to overcome this gap and make legacy automation a sustainable reality.
RPA Closes the API Gap, But Creates Another
When the notion of RPA entered the enterprise consciousness a decade ago, it tickled the imagination of business process managers everywhere.
While digital systems of record were a significant advancement from the days of paper, as the scale and scope of enterprise organizations grew, they still required armies of people to enter data into these systems and then execute routine and repetitive business processes using them.
Many organizations turned to business process outsourcing (BPO) providers to defray some of the cost and headache of this work. The promise of RPA was that rather than outsourcing this work, enterprises could automate it instead.
The challenge, of course, is that using a software robot (bots) to interact with a user interface designed for a human is a messy process that often requires human oversight and intervention. No different than human workers, these bots needed direction on which work to execute and when, how to prioritize work, and needed a way for the organization to log and oversee the work they were performing.
It is really no different than the oversight required of a human worker, except that organizations now needed a whole new way to provide this oversight and management of their new robot workers.
While RPA was a huge step forward and enabled organizations to begin to automate business processes that would otherwise be inaccessible, the need for human intervention and oversight often created a whole new capability requirement: building and maintaining the RPA management infrastructure.
While RPA solutions offer a degree of this oversight and management capability, it is often insufficient as every organization and every business process is unique.
No-Code: Bridging the RPA Gap
Despite the need to create a management infrastructure, the promise and potential of RPA have mostly outweighed any concern.
As a result, enterprises are increasingly deploying RPA technology to gain the benefits of automating these labor-intensive business processes — and must, therefore, build a series of applications and support tools that will allow them to manage their new armies of software robots.
Organizations quickly discovered, however, that these new management tools were often costly and time-consuming to develop. Moreover, one of the great benefits of RPA is that it enables organizations to begin to reimagine and transform long-standing business processes (that have otherwise been too costly or arduous to change), but they often found that their new management infrastructure was the new bottleneck as it became difficult and expensive to update as business processes changed.
A new breed of RPA-friendly no-code development platforms has emerged to step into this gap. While their creators did not generally envision no-code platforms as a tool to enable RPA efforts, they have proven to be wildly useful for this purpose.
The nature of these new no-code platforms enables business users to rapidly define business process and form-centric applications that mesh well with the business processes that RPA is automating. Using these platforms, users can create process-specific applications that allow them to generate RPA logs, track performance, build management and prioritization models, and queue transactions for human review.
More importantly, the dynamic and graphical nature of these platforms enables business users to quickly and easily change applications they’ve built as the business processes they support change over time.
The potency of this combination also explains why RPA and no-code technology providers are beginning to build formal partnerships and integrations to make this process more accessible and seamless for business users.
The Intellyx Take
The promise of RPA is undeniable.
But like many promising technologies before it, that promise comes at a price and can create all new challenges in its wake.
It is also clear that the management challenges that RPA introduces are neither unexpected, nor unreasonable — but that doesn’t mean that enterprise leaders should accept their inevitability.
A new generation of no-code development platforms, such as ClaySys, are stepping in to give enterprise leaders another choice.
This new breed of platform recognizes both the power of RPA and the challenges the technology brings. More importantly, providers such as ClaySys are forming partnerships and creating functionality specifically designed to help enterprise leaders harness the power of RPA without succumbing to the management challenges of doing so.
This evolution is important in both technology domains as the combination of RPA and No-Code has the potential to help enterprise leaders make modern automation a reality across their entire stack.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. ClaySys is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper.
