In my opinion, in 2023 we will see more sense of urgency in building out intelligent automation capabilities within automation programs, and perhaps even at the citizen developer level.
Unstructured data is the #1 (IMO) reason traditional RPA cannot be used in a massive number of firms. As IDP capability gets 1) easier to deploy, 2) better at processing multiple page files, and 3) more widely licensed and available, businesses will be jumping all over this functionality.
The year 2023 is all set of building several bots in action. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way and parameters considered to calculate ROI. Many organizations are now transform themselves to digital, IPA will play a significant role in achieve that feat. Along with that tools are also getting matured day-by day with lot of meaningful offering and stable products. The developer community has also realized that IPA is their future.
2023 will be undoubtedly an interesting year for automation - RPA with increased application of artificial intelligence and machine learning with API management and unstructured data processing to realize intelligent automation.
Love the article by Reveal Group, they are always pushing out great content to consolidate trends in a digestible format. I am going to put my HR hat on here, but its fascinating that Forrester is predicting a skill shortage in 2023, which I believe is less of an issue of lack of needed skills and more of what the demand is in the market and the “required skills” these roles are centered around. You can teach RPA to most people that are technically inclined/process oriented, which are the competencies you should be focusing on to grow your IA teams. Most developers, architects, etc that are currently working in RPA/IA came from analyst level roles and were self-taught or learned by automating, so why is there such a push for having required skills in roles be 3-5 years of Automation Anywhere experience.
In terms of where I see the industry going, I think we will start to see companies pushing the boundaries on “Traditional RPA” with screen scraping and seeing companies combine the use of RPA with leveraging API, OCR, etc.. to make their automations more scalable and resilient.
Establishing Citizen Development may be a priority for many, but I find most people I talk with still find the governance, controls, and creating a effective program throughout a COE or federation incredibly challenging. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see many more companies adapting an “Citizen Development Lite” program, think of it as your free version of a paid platform, where companies will adopt Citizen Development on a much smaller scale with buckets of Governance and Controls owned within business/functions
