A few months ago I had written about the impact of RPA on
traditional back-office and rule based activities performed by humans.
The key impacts that are evidenced in various industries and
by analysts are:
- Jobs that had been traditionally “out-sourced” or “off-shored” are brought “in-house” or “right-shored”. This is evident in many “off-shored” or “out-sourced” services being bought back “in-house” or moved back to developed countries and economies.
- The skill-sets needed for fulfilling the replaced jobs are not same as those that are being replaced. The new jobs are more to support and maintain the RPA. As an example if the “bot” hits an error in the process, it alerts for human intervention. This requires task to be performed by “specialized” human support, maintenance and QA – a new set of job roles.
Who benefits?
·
Employers benefit from lower costs, higher
efficiency and less errors. This savings in-turn can be invested to focus on better “customer experience activities” and a more focused “customer centric”
approach to business operations. In combination with Big Data, Business
Analytics and Natural Language Processing, this will drive better customer services
and lay the roadmap for future “cognitive” technology implementations.
·
Employees benefit from a new set of job roles
that are specialized in nature and not “repetitive” in nature. There is an
ample scope of people being trained on new analytics and data mining
technologies that will help drive the future growth of individuals as well as
organizations. More jobs will open up in area of direct customer interaction
and providing better “customer experience” that machines cannot yet replicate
in the near future.
The disruptions looks scary and has an impact in the short
term. However, newer sectors of job roles opening up will make it more interesting
for workers as well as helping organizations run better customer centric
experiences.
