Podcast 1:2 - Legacy integration with Robotic Process Automation

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

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