The demand for cloud services continues to soar. Gone are the days when “the cloud” was simply a mysterious space to be feared or a worn-out buzzword to be ignored. 
Today’s executives are increasingly adopting cloud computing across their entire organization and leveraging everything the service has to offer.
In the process, they are improving business agility, lowering operational costs and increasing their propensity for innovation.

Millions of organizations have now adopted cloud computing, but many are still missing out on the full spectrum of benefits that the cloud can deliver.

Implementing RPA solutions has allowed many organizations to see some very powerful results.  In this blog, I will highlight some of the key “lessons learned” from implementing and operating RPA solutions. They are based on our experience in working with both our internal operations as well as with external clients.

Shared Services and Outsourcing have both proven to be a great business model for reducing operating costs and gaining greater operational scalability for your back office while maintaining a high quality of customer service.

In a recent blog post, I discussed the “hype and noise” around RPA, and shared my thoughts that, while RPA is clearly something that is coming to your back office operations, it is still somewhat of a work in progress, and that many organizations are trying to figure out how to get started on their RPA journeys.

You are hearing about it every day. According to HfS Research, there was a 63% growth in the global market for RPA software and services from 2016 to 2017. And there´s no sign of it slowing down.

While Robotics Process Automation (RPA) continues to grow across many industries, many decision makers still haven’t been convinced of the strategic benefits that automation can bring to the enterprise. Misgivings about RPA can emerge from any part of a company.

By now, most organizations understand the benefits, and more importantly, the need to shift to an agile, DevOps model to survive in today's rapidly changing and hyper-competitive digital world. In our four-part series, we have discussed how DevOps can transform your organization, and how to prepare for the transformation through the critical first two steps of the DevOps journey:

Recent developments in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) look a lot like the development of self-driving cars―as seen in the rear-view mirror. RPA has historically involved business process automation with little or no human intervention (unattended) while fully autonomous vehicles are 

According to the latest forecast by Gartner, worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2018, an increase of 4.3 percent from 2017 estimated spending of $3.5 trillion. In a recent Tech Pro Research survey, respondents reported that their organizations will be prioritizing spending on security, cloud services and hardware in 2018. 

The typical back-office of most organizations spends 75-80% of their time “keeping the lights on.” This means transactional processing and non-value added activities. This dynamic leaves only 20-25% of your capacity for business growth activities such as strategic planning, customer insights, and analytics.

I suspect that a high percentage of people reading this article are already familiar with the basics of Robotics Process Automation (RPA), and the significant cost savings and efficiencies that RPA can bring to your organization by automating high volume, transactional processes in multiple functions including Finance, HR and IT. 

In a recent post, I shared 5 Lessons Learned on How to Get Started with Robotics Process Automation (RPA). These lessons ranged from “don’t drink the vendor Kool-Aid” to “embrace your workforce” to “start small.”

Today’s competitive business landscape calls for aggressive and sustainable ways to cut internal costs without compromising the service levels of the organization. One area that has been prone to drive cost-cutting initiatives, and will continue to do so going forward is the back office through the establishment of shared services and outsourcing models.

In our ongoing series, we started by highlighting the challenges businesses face in today's rapidly changing world of technology and services and the benefits that an agile, DevOps approach can bring to your organization. In short, you need to either be first to deliver new digital capabilities to your customers or be prepared to catch up with more innovative competitors faster than ever before. While the case for DevOps sounds great in theory, implementing it effectively is another story, and it's not a one-off activity, but rather an ongoing journey, beginning with governance which we discussed in the last blog. Moving along, the next step involves implementing workforce management.

So, you have determined that implementing an agile DevOps framework and related business processes is the best strategy for your organization. The benefits are clear after all  ̶  faster time-to-market for new applications and services, better cross-team collaboration, increased organizational efficiency and higher quality code. As we noted in a previous blog, however, making the move to agile is not as easy as it may seem, and the transformation requires more than just deploying technology and finding the right talent. Rather, you need to approach DevOps as an ongoing journey and build these new capabilities into your organization systematically to align IT initiatives with your overall business strategy. 

Today, companies in all industries rely on software to meet customer and user demands. Besides, peoples' expectations have changed dramatically in the last few years, as they demand instant, convenient and reliable access to services that are continuously improved - and those requirements are changing at a rapid pace. To meet these demands, you need to innovate faster than ever before. Rapid innovation, in turn, requires you to transform your business into an agiler software development organization if you want to remain competitive.

Enter DevOps.

In today's rapidly changing world of technology, businesses must be flexible and agile to adapt quickly when delivering critical IT services or risk getting left behind. This means setting up a wide range of processes, policies, controls, and activities to ensure that IT becomes an asset to the business and that your customers' ever increasing demands are satisfied in a cloudy, "as-a-service" world. When in discussions about this issue, two acronyms always come up: ITSM (IT service management) and ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) ̶ however, though complementary, they often get confused.

It's official, Robotics Process Automation (RPA) has survived the hype cycle and is now one of the leading disruptive technologies of 2017. In other words, RPA is not just a thing of the future, it's a proven technology and already up and running in many organizations. There is a good reason for this. Today, organizations are under pressure to digitize and innovate faster than ever, and automation is one of the key ways to achieve this. To put the market potential into perspective, earlier this year McKinsey released a report stating that 51% of total employment in the US can be automated, while Gartner predicted that the RPA software market would grow 40% year-over-year through 2020.