Automation has become more commonplace across many businesses with the growth of digital transformation. More specifically, robotic process automation is being increasingly used as a way to combat technical debt and to free up teams for higher-level work.
According to Tim Olsen, Intelligent Automation Director for Emposo: “RPA also addresses the ‘long tail’ of programs where there is a diminishing return on investment and areas which would otherwise have been left as a manual activity.”
However, there are still a lot of what Olsen dubs “automation anxiety” and he said a cultural shift is key to the success of implementing automation into any business.
“Similarly, uncoordinated, siloed approaches to automation spawn cottage industries with poor return on investment. It is important to consolidate automation governance within a center of excellence to sweat assets and leverage resources to maximize benefits.”
He added that intelligent automation is wider than just RPA and now includes optical character recognition, process mining, chatbots, machine learning and business process management systems. “The delivery team needs to understand all of these capabilities and be able to utilize them selectively to broaden the scope of automation,” he said.
In order to address the growing demand for automation, there is also a growing need for automation professionals. Olsen listed the 8 most in-demand automation jobs that are out there at the moment.
- RPA developers: These are low-code vendor-certified developers, working in UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and Power Automate.
- Business analysts: These professionals are engaging with SMEs, identifying and qualifying opportunities, mapping ‘as-is’ and ‘to-be’ processes, collaborating on solution design and supporting build and test.
- Solution architects: They design optimal solutions at a high level, ensuring connectivity to applications and environments (primarily cloud), assuring security and compliance.
- Process mining consultants: These would be experts in deploying, configuring and analyzing process mining applications, to identify automation and lean opportunities within an organization’s monitored processes.
- Project managers: They are orchestrating the resources and delivery according to agreed methodology and standards.
- RPA controllers: Their job is to perform service management, monitor bots, manage small change, optimize license usage and manage faults.
- Center of excellence leads: They would be accountable for the overall governance and delivery of the center of excellence, be the primary point of contact for business engagement, and manage strategy and vision as an automation evangelist.
- Testers: They are responsible for the testing process, facilitating system integration testing and user acceptance testing, test data readiness and preparation of environments.
