07 Jan RPA, AI – is BPM redundant?
To some business users Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), sometimes referred to as Machine Learning, appear to offer technical solutions to process building, so it may appear that Business Process Management (BPM), which is the methodology for designing business processes, is no longer required.
First of all RPA is only good for highly repetitive and structured processes. For more complicated and less structured processes the use of data mining and analysis will merely extract current practices. RPA applied without good process design will therefore merely automate current practice (AS IS) and entirely miss the opportunity to optimise processes, which BPM is designed to do. So if you are considering introducing RPA for other than highly repetitive and structured processes then BPM is, if anything even more necessary because RPA is not the tool for redesigning processes, merely automating them.
Given RPA is not the answer does AI offer an automated alternative to BPM? This is the more interesting question, which will not really be answered for most organisations for some time to come. AI is a machine intelligence that so far cannot offer ‘general intelligence’ that humans display, however AI can surpass human intelligence and performance when applied to a narrow area of knowledge. In theory therefore if the business is reasonably specialised AI might be able to improve processes over time.
However we are not there yet and what is emerging is Intelligent Automation (IA), whereby the strategic thinking is still done by humans, who use technological agents (‘Bots’) to do a lot of the time-consuming work. This means BPM is still needed by humans for process design but after the high level design is completed the rest can be automated using RPA. To use AI requires a lot of data and RPA can assist with this task until such time as IA can be used, and one day perhaps, AI.
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