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)

What RPAs are NOT

  • A method to control and manage Robots
  • Process automation for factory machines
  • A way of replacing workers

What RPAs are

  • A way of automating Information Workers redundant tasks
  • A set of tools that records how Users interact with applications and plays it back
  • A way to decrease errors in highly repetitive, user interface intensive Tasks

Current Market Place – 2019

  • 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

Place where RPA works well

  • Financial Institutions
  • Medical Field
  • Insurance
  • Any place where lots of Information Workers do highly repetitive manual tasks
  • Understand your Information Worker

RPA Modes of Operation

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

  • 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

  • Decrease number of updates to applications and user interfaces
  • Decrease number of steps if possible.
  • Decrease the number of tools integrated together.

Managing Security

  • Find a tool that allows for the injection of security credentials into the RPA bot
  • Look at auth keys instead of username and passwords

Managing RPA tools and bots with SecDevOps Workflows

RPA Bundling

SecDevOps Pipelining

Pitfalls of RPA bots

  • 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.

Tips and Tricks

· 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)

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