A Digital Workforce helps you meet your digital transformation challenges. But when you’re reviewing your internal policies and procedures, it’s vital to tailor these for your digital workers.
By combining robotic process automation (RPA) with Blue Prism’s industry standard Robotic Operating Model (ROM) your organization has access to a pool of scalable digital workers. You need the right human roles on your automation team, of course, but you also need to factor in the changing procedural needs of your robot workers too.
Stepping outside the human perspective
Humans think like humans – we see things from our own viewpoint. So, from a historical process perspective, your policies and procedures will be built around the human workforce. Until now, that’s made sense. But humans are not the only workers carrying out tasks in your organization in 2018. With the arrival of the Digital Workforce, you have a talent pool that’s very different to your human talent, and that means there’s a need to reassess how you set out your business-wide policies – to take into account the non-human perspective.
Thinking about your security as an organization
When you start to implement RPA and a Digital Workforce, your first engagement is likely to be your security team, asking them to supply a log-on for your robots.
How you start this conversation can be critical. This may be the first time that your security team has been informed about ‘safe’ robots being allowed into their network, so their initial reaction may be more critical than positive – after all, they’ve spent their careers defending your network real estate against the ‘Invasion of the Bots’.
What’s important is to explain in clear detail how these digital workers are wholly security compliant. Digital workers are safe, secure and come with a logical access model that protects the network from any kind of malicious intervention. Have these conversation early and make security part of the digital transformation journey.
Revising your human-specific procedures
Digital workers work consistently, but they don’t think like humans (just yet). So internal policies that are targeted at your human workforce need to be revised. As humans, we’re used to software updates appearing on our desktops and for us to respond and execute these updates. But a robot won’t do that unless you’ve told them how to deal with it – so it’s important to include these version and software updates into your process architecture.
Have a process where any updates are cascaded out to your Digital Workforce at 2am each morning. That way it’s built into your procedures and you know it’s being taken care of. Tell the robots how to react in a given scenario and give them the information to carry out the required process effectively – that’s the key learning here.
Cascading a software update is a simple thing to do, but it’s an approach that will only happen if you’re truly embracing RPA and digital transformation in the right ways.
Does a robot need a screensaver?
Why do we have screensavers on our computers? We need screensavers because humans leave their desks. We go to the coffee machine, or we go and have a chat with our friends.
But a robot doesn’t have friends to chat with and doesn’t leave the desk – it just sits there working, 24/7. So why have a screensaver kicking in after 10 minutes of screen inactivity?
The answer is that it’s an outmoded policy – the robot doesn’t need it. We’ve seen organizations where a process nudges the screen every nine minutes to prevent the screensaver kicking in. But that’s a workaround, not a sensible policy.
So the question is why create a workaround for a human problem when you’re dealing with a Digital Workforce?
Policies that meet the needs of your Digital Workforce
To get the best from your digital transformation implementation, you need policies that are designed and built specifically for your Digital Workforce.
When I see examples of workarounds within the business, I know that that there isn’t a true cultural adoption of these digital policies across the organization. What’s needed is a top-down approach to updating your policies, so the whole business is bought into the digital approach.
It’s about evolving your policies to take into account your new digital workers.
7 Steps to Success
Keep an eye on our blog over the coming weeks as we continue to breakdown the whole ROM process into 7 key steps.
Teaming the Blue Prism ROM method with our code-free RPA gives you a successful automation implementation – with a Digital Workforce that’s both scalable and robust.
This reduces costs, improves customer satisfaction and empowers your people to take on new responsibilities, boosting employee engagement.
