Most businesses find automation effective but hard to deploy and maintain: Pegasystems survey

Pegasystems, a digital transformation software company, announced the results of a global survey that found robotic process automation (RPA) and robotic desktop automation (RDA) to be highly effective in streamlining work – though achieving and maintaining those results isn’t as simple as it seems.

The survey found most respondents gain significant value from automating their operations with bots. In fact, 67 percent said that robotic automation is even more effective than they originally anticipated, while only eight percent felt it was less effective than expected.

But getting to that point and staying there can be more challenging than expected. Survey respondents report the following issues:

• Organizations are spending more time and effort getting bots up and running than anticipated. Deployment ranked as respondents’ top bot challenge, and half (50 percent) said bots are harder to deploy than they first thought. On average, only 39 percent of bots are deployed on schedule, and it typically takes 18 months on average to successfully push bots live into production.

• Inevitable changes to the underlying enterprise architecture will likely lead to increased bot breakage over time. Already, 87 percent of respondents experience some level of bot failures. 44 percent said the amount of bot breakage is small, but 37 percent said it’s a moderate amount, and six percent think it’s quite large. Overall, maintenance ranked as the second biggest problem bot users face.

• With bot breakage a near certainty, RPA and RDA can’t be viewed as a set-it-and-forget-it task. 41 percent of respondents said that ongoing bot management is taking more time and resources than expected. Bots also add another layer of complexity to IT. 38 percent felt their use brought more complexity than expected, while 26 percent said they added more ‘shadow IT’ issues than expected.

Despite these issues, one thing is clear: bots deliver on their promise when deployed in the right situations. 66 percent think bots bring more value and return on investment (ROI) than originally expected, while only 13 percent have been let down by the amount of value and ROI they’ve seen.