1/ If there’s ever been a demonstration of the enterprise technology hype cycle in action, the #RPA market in ‘18-‘19 is it.
2/ Don’t get me wrong, there is clearly underlying business demand to quickly automate repetitive, heavy manual work in and across existing software.
3/ An order-to-cash process that involves 130 steps/variations across email, 90’s era, deeply custom SAP and mainframe software, spreadsheets, and a legacy web portal or two, glued together by humans OR by RPA is probably not the best way forward.
4/ There’s real value in making it possible for less technical people to do some UI-based integration and discrete task automation, and to free up some human/investment capital by doing so.
5/ But gen one of RPA is a band-aid, not a strategy. And the intellectual gymnastics of trying to transform it into an “AI strategy” breaks my brain. It’s marketing, not reality.
6/ Amazon became Amazon not by automating individual tasks in an incredibly complex digital-and-physical operational chain...
7/ but by (among other things) designing a cult-like culture, a self-reinforcing business model, a loyalty-inducing customer experience (assortment, price leadership, speed), and technology-driven supply chain with better speed, efficiency and flexibility than the competition.
8/ In 2013, McKinsey described Amazon’s level of investment in software as “maniacal” and like a tech company, 3X that of a retailer. 
9/ Is the investment level of your company in modern software-driven process and operations maniacal? If not, how can they hope to stay competitive?
10/ Every company over a decade old (and many younger) is going to have technology and process debt to overcome. But the reference architecture has to be something more ambitious than “more RPA with some OCR mixed in.”
11/ I see that as a temporary, valid piece of the toolkit that frees up some resources (but comes with its own maintenance burden).
12/ There’s no magic here — over the next decade, companies will have to shift to API driven, more flexible architectures, higher scale and speed data and analytics infrastructure, modern business applications that do more work for us...
13/ collaborative productivity and creative tooling fit for the modern workforce, and security that scales to support that. And that’s just the baseline.
14/ Technology will be the basis of competition in more and more industries: delightfully designed, personalized customer experiences that meet/set an ever-rising bar, and with machine learning integrated where possible — into both company ops and customer experience delivery.
15/ Becoming a software-driven, algorithmically-driven business is a big investment. Bigger than a lot of companies are willing to bear today.
16/ If it’s going to happen in (traditionally) capital intensive and low margin industry like transport, hospitality, retail (and now, clearly, financial services), what industry has more of a moat? Makes me excited as a consumer. :)
17/ A company that repeatedly says, we can’t possibly get off “XYZ old custom system that is the root of our process evils, not in the next decade,” will go the way of the dinosaurs.
18/ A leadership team and board that is thinking about low single-digit software R&D spend, and only invests in incremental technologies, without a technology talent strategy, will go the way of the dinosaurs.
19/ The challenge will be twofold from here: designing technology solutions that enable more companies to make that transition (at a speed and cost they can bear), and for executives to invest in the changes they need to compete for the future, rather than patching the past.
