Will RPA Swing the Innovation Pendulum Back to Providers?

My colleague Mike Slavin recently made some provocative statements to CIO magazine, saying, in effect, that outsourcers were, for a number of reasons, doing a poor job at delivering innovation to clients. Further, Mike opined that many client organizations are reacting to their disillusion by seizing the reins and taking functions related to innovation back in-house.

Pretty harsh words – but the fact is I agree that Mike’s comments accurately reflect today’s reality. That said, I believe a longer-term perspective puts things in a different light. While insourcing may indeed be a viable innovation strategy today, in my opinion that will change, and in the relatively near future. And the main driver for that change will be autonomics and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

Specifically, every transaction engagement I’m involved in today has an element of RPA, cognitive computing or autonomics. I’m also seeing all the major providers developing impressive – and certainly innovative – proprietary RPA solutions to compete with off-the-shelf offerings from Arago, BluePrism and IPsoft. As RPA continues to gain traction and as these solutions are implemented, disruption of existing service delivery models will intensify, as processes are decomposed and reconstructed to incorporate new digital capabilities, as well as new roles and skill-sets for human workers. Putting that puzzle together is going to require innovation that few enterprises are going to have in-house.

Consider too the business plans of many of the providers, which call for significant sustained growth, but supported by very limited growth in staffing. Clearly RPA has to drive that model, and clearly the commitment to invest and build the knowledge is there.

In this context, while we may be seeing a pause in innovative energy from the service provider community, I suspect it’s the pause that happens before a pendulum swings back full-speed the other way.

About the author

Jeff offers more than 28 years of experience in the sourcing industry, including five years as the CIO for professional service firms and 23 years providing IT outsourcing services to global fortune 500 companies. His main ares of expertise include building and launching commercial markets and high visibility alliances for innovative products and technologies.