‘The Digital Workforce’ with Rob King — Webcast Q&A Transcript

Edward Brooks: Hi Rob how are you?

Rob King: Hi, very good thank you.

Edward Brooks: First of all Rob thanks very much for doing this.

You’ve done something which I’ve done twice and will never ever do again and that is write a book. It is absolutely the right thing to do in marketplaces, especially new markets, and a definitive starting point for much of the journey. It’s a very, very hard thing to do is write a book and complete it.

The first chapter is very easy, the second one is easy and then the last two or three — so anyway congratulations on that and also it’s a fascinating topic. I think one of the things that people always focus on is that ‘it’s about technology’ ‘it’s about technology’ but eventually, I think, what people start to realize more and more is that technology is part of it and the reason we’re all starting the journey but everything else is the exciting part and really the challenging part.

In terms of background tell us, you were one of the first people I knew who actually had done RPA. Tell us your view, a good story to start off with and the physical hands-on experience on the technology and the business side.

Rob King: Yeah sure so it doesn’t seem like it but it was over five years ago which is an amazing time frame because a lot of the players that are in the market today just weren’t around back then but the product was surprisingly mature.

“What can we do to make them more efficient and how can we automate them?”

So my role at the time was Lean and Six Sigma and I was doing a Lean transformation and of course when you’re looking at processes you’re always looking for ‘what can we do to make them more efficient and how can we automate them?’

And often you do little bits of automation using Excel macros here and there and you chop off a few seconds here and there and that’s how you automate processes. And sometimes you even get a budget and you can introduce some IT and make great improvements but RPA came along and I was actually amazed.

First of all how easy it was to implement, secondly it was like this is incredible it’s going to change the world tomorrow and of course five years later it’s still going to change the world tomorrow but it hasn’t quite got there.

I guess the first thing is, it’s been a surprise how long it’s taken to really catch on but also I think there were far fewer players in the field back then. The capabilities were far more limited and now I think you’ve got capabilities that fit any size of organization and any type of problem.

And I think then from that point of view it’s going to change the world tomorrow.

Edward Brooks: In terms of the book, what was the motivating factor for getting all these thoughts and experiences onto paper?

Rob King: First of all I’ve always wanted to write a book and over the past 20 years I started writing the first few pages several dozen times and never really got beyond that.

And really it sort of grew out of the fact that I really enjoy talking at conferences and talk a lot about RPA at conferences and it’s always, always very superficial. You’ve only got a very limited amount of time to give answers to questions.

There was a bit of personal frustration built in that was ‘I want to provide a much more detailed answer’ to some of those common questions and also to address some of the really silly misconceptions as well about RPA.

It really didn’t start as a book, I just started writing a lot and started blogging and writing articles and newsletters and guest blogs and eventually I reached that point where I had so much material, somebody said to me ‘you should write a book’ and it’s like ‘I’ve been thinking about doing that for years but never on this topic’.

From that point on I think it really became a labor of love and up until the end, exactly as you said all the way through to the first draft, it was fantastic and that was probably the halfway point as it turned out and the other half was really hard work.

You have to make sure everything is consistent; that it’s clear and it uses the right vocabulary. That actually simple things like the choice of words that can create a lot of misconceptions.

And you really, really became obsessive compulsive for a little while as it gets closer and closer to the end.

I guess the other thing you mentioned as well and that is the reason the book got called Digital Workforce in the end I guess all the time I was drafting it, it really had the most boring name probable which was just simply RPA.

The more I wrote and the more the book came together and the structure came together, the more it became clear that it wasn’t just about the technology, it was about the organizational structure, it was about the processes, it was about the people, it was about adoption and some of the challenges of culture.

By the time I finished the first draft, RPA was simply the wrong title because RPA was the enabler throughout the whole book but it was actually about all these other things as well.

And so the title delivered itself in the end and I think Digital Workforce is a term that’s used quite regularly by all the vendors and many other people in the industry and it does sum it up quite, quite nicely.

I think the other factor is that you occasionally get asked “Where can I go for some more information?” There were relatively few completely independent pieces of work out there that you could direct people towards.

All the vendors produce some fantastic material but of course it’s directed specifically towards their products.

Edward Brooks: I think one thing I do like about the vendors is that they do to a tee explain that this is not about technology. Yes, you’re buying technology and I actually feel that probably the buyers, the actual users just jump straight to the technology but don’t look at the bigger picture.

So in terms of the challenges you see organizations facing, do you want to talk me through the top three?

Rob King: I think the very first challenge that we see the most is that confidence in taking the first step and I’ll be honest, the barriers to entry have fallen.

You can start for free; the cost is no longer about a barrier. The range of capabilities that these products provide from very technical through to very simple for smaller businesses through to those that are business technologies designed for business users.

So the range of capabilities is pretty wide as well. Actually I think there is the right solution for every organization out there but for some reason even saying all of that, I think there’s a little bit of lack of confidence in taking that first step.

You see a long gap between the education and ‘this is what it is, this is how you can use it, these are the potential areas in your business where it would make a really big difference’ compared to taking that first step and running a pilot and actually getting started.

It’s hard to explain why. I think it should be much easier than it is but I think maybe the second point is one of those reasons and that is once you do get started, you do face a lot of cultural challenges and one of the things I think in the UK that we struggle with is the number of negative headlines that have hit the newspapers.

For example “the rise of the robots and they’re here to take your job” type of messages. So you’ve got to be very sensitive when you start an RPA type project to make sure you’re addressing those employee concerns right from there, right from the very beginning.

I guess my last comment is, I heard you say it earlier, that someone sees this amazing technology and goes “Wow I want one” and jump straight in. I do think now because you do have that breadth of capability one of the most important things to think about is “Well which is that one capability I actually need that is going to fit my future needs as well as my current needs?” rather than just the first one that happened to come along.

Edward Brooks: Yeah exactly, there’s so many things in this, the employee change journey, that kind of thing is overblown because people don’t like change generally but the employee’s marketplace is very low on employment globally, especially in the key economies.

So it’s really imperative on the employers to make the workplaces a more pleasurable place to turn up to so the fear factor should not be what it was ten years ago in a struggling economy.

So I think ignoring the potential issues is a big problem but addressing them head-on is key, especially because of the cost of actually bringing on new people.

If people are walking out the door, it’s huge; one organization quoted $30,000 for their cost of recruiting someone. So with that kind of investment required to bring on one new person, it’s just cheaper to reeducate your existing staff and reassure them that they are valued.

Rob King: Yeah and I guess to clarify my point is that fear comes from the lack of understanding and knowledge before you start. Once people start to understand what it does for their role and their job and their satisfaction, you more often find people actually really do, they become super advocates of it once they understand it fully.

Edward Brooks: Yeah well what we’ve found on the training side is there’s just incredible excitement about the classes. A CIO turned up to one of our classes last Monday while they were merging with another company, so there is actual excitement, which I think is kind of apparent but it’s impossible to ignore the fear factor.

So I mean in terms of your advice to people still with any doubts or uncertainty, what would you say to them?

Rob King: Well the very first one that I mentioned earlier is that there is the right solution out there for you but do spend a little bit of time just thinking about what that might be and there’s something for every size of business and every size of budget but one should get started, start small and think big.

I think that’s the real key component because you really can learn by doing. It’s a very rapid, rapid development environment. I think there are lots of debates and arguments about traditional IT methods like Waterfall versus Agile etc.

My background is Lean which tends to be a little bit more towards the Agile side of things and that works brilliantly with RPA because you’ve got those very rapid iterative cycles of development that can deliver improvements and benefits to the business in small slices but also lower risk because you’re only making small changes with each new iteration, so I think it’s very easy to get started.

I think the last one is avoiding unrealistic expectations and this goes back to the misconceptions I talked about earlier, is that you run into two extremes. One of the very first meetings I walked into where I was explaining what RPA was and the different types and how it might help the business and somebody said “Oh this is amazing!”

And I thought “Great I’ve got them sold” and they said “We’ve got this process that all our people really struggle to do, we could automate that” and my heart sank because at that point they hadn’t got it and that’s exactly the type of process that would be terrible for RPA because it has to be very clearly defined and understood.

It also scared me a little bit, it’s like you’ve got a process that nobody understands. I’m sure somebody would like to know about that.

It is not a magic wand or a silver bullet but it does what it says on the tin very, very well which is automate standardized tasks very rapidly and can provide the volume of business to take the robot out of the human because we all do these very repetitive, very mundane tasks every day.

And if you can just save a few minutes everyday, those benefits will start to add up.

Edward Brooks: Yeah people always think it is cheap, easy, fast and it’ll take minutes just to change the world but in reality that’s the wrong starting point.

And obviously you find the easy places to start but in terms of the problems that they are going to cause across the organization, it’s never the case. So I’m a big believer that expectation is key, especially in the early days.

We spend a lot of time with companies that are just coming off the stage where they’ve had consultants and they are looking to stand on their own two feet. They can’t justify having ongoing consultant support so therefore they have to move to a self-supporting model pretty quickly.

It is good generally, it’s good business discipline but it really exposes them to doing it for themselves rather than relying on other people to do it. That’s kind of where it gets scary.

I mean obviously the book, it illustrates your personal journey and how you’ve focused on RPA based on the digital workspace, so what did you learn along the way?

Rob King: I think my first lesson really was that this whole journey takes a lot longer than you can possibly guess. Once you get started I think the opposite is true you can start to deliver benefits far more quickly than you would expect but overall I think bringing everybody along on that journey to getting started and actually dipping their toe in the water takes a lot longer than you would believe.

I also think back to this, it does kind of bring us back to the book that technology is just the enabler.

It’s fantastic technology and what it’s capable of is incredible but it only really works when you have put it together with effective processes, a good organizational structure and a clear set of objectives.

I think it’s almost like people who struggle with RPA or report problems with RPA projects almost feel like they temporarily lost their minds when they saw it. They thought “this is incredible!” and ran off and did some RPA and forgot all about those good practices they’ve been doing in their business for years.

Actually all those good practices are still true particularly as you start to scale. Good practices like nice, clear optimized processes, good practices like change control still are important to successful implementation.

I think the other one is I had come in from a Lean background as well. This one’s interesting because I think Lean came out of Japan and when it first started it had a lot of Japanese words in the vocabulary and over time they suddenly got softened out of the general usage.

That was a barrier in those early days and I never really perceived that RPA had the same jargon and experienced the same problem at the start but it does have a problem because everybody is very inconsistent about the vocabulary that they use.

I was in a in a workshop earlier this week and people used the term “Smart automation, Intelligent automation, Digital processor automation” — every variation of the combination of those words that you could believe. In their own way, they all were referring to something specific that they knew they meant but nobody else did.

I think the jargon can be really challenging and I know from a consulting perspective one of the early steps is always to try and provide a common understanding but it’s a common vocabulary to be able to have these discussions clearly and not miscommunicate with a common language.

Edward Brooks: Yeah I mean RPA, I always liked because it was kind of reasonably succinct in my mind but then I realized that what I was hearing and seeing was quite different from everyone else. It gets even more challenging when you move to things like AI where it means different things to different people in different sectors, so any advice in getting round that?

Rob King: Yes my first bit of advice is perhaps read the book because that’s exactly where I would start. What is it? I spend the whole first chapter talking about “What it is” and create a consistent vocabulary that I can use throughout the rest of the book which, at a simplistic level, boils down to the fact there are broadly five types of automation.

The first is the type of automation you’ve probably seen pre-RPA which is macros and things like that, it’s the automation that you see in many of the tools that you have today. There’s attended automation, which is the type of automation that runs alongside the person on the desktop.

So you do a bit of the process, the robot does a bit of the process and it just speeds up the mundane tasks of what you’re doing. Then you’ve got the unattended automation which is that it can actually do the whole process in the background in a black box without any human interaction needed at all.

So you can run the whole process uninterrupted and of course once you can do that you can also start to run 24/7 for example. So instead of just running the process 9–5 you can now gain some benefits from the fact that the robot doesn’t have holidays and doesn’t have to go to bed and go to sleep.

Then I think you’ve got the topic of chatbots and the ease of communication that they provide. I think chatbots and virtual assistants and all the different names out there are becoming much easier to implement particularly at the simple level and they provide quick access to automating activities based on your voice.

And then of course finally you mentioned it, there is the topic of artificial intelligence which I think is simply an example of a different style of programming. In the past we used to have to program things and know every outcome in order to put the program in place.

The thing about machine learning of course is you don’t know everything and it learns it so the programming is what’s there to learn from the data that it’s given. So that’s the big difference about machine learning and artificial intelligence.

That opens up gateways to lots of different things that would have required a lot of programming effort in the past but now can actually make some of those tasks much simpler. The most common being OCR but I mean you even see things like third parties just selling you a pre-learned module and a pre-learnt algorithm that understands invoices or understands receipts.

So you don’t even have to do it yourself, you can always buy it off-the-shelf from the supermarket, say “I’ll have that bit of machine learning and plug it into my RPA”. So that’s quite exciting now because I think that’s where RPA will lead you to in the long term.

Edward Brooks: Yeah that’s the exciting part. We can have a Rob-based conference on that! In terms of the struggles we’ve got with RPA alone, I just feel like we should keep a fence around the conversation and not let people drift into what could happen. We should focus on a very clear starting point.

So what would be your 30-second giveaway?

Rob King: Yeah I think number one is the barriers have absolutely fallen. There are options out there for you; big and small enterprise and small business and the right ones there at the right price and the right capability for you, so get started now.

I guess that comes with a warning which is “If you’re not starting your competitors probably are”, so even to keep up with your competitors, you need to be doing this. Then I think the last one is, if you do RPA well, it will give you a platform that is the gateway to starting to take advantage of some of these more advanced techniques that come from AI.

Edward Brooks: Perfect! There are obviously tons of materials out there, one of the purposes of these webcasts is to get access to more detailed information and we’d like you to ask any questions at all.

If there are things you would like me to cover, please let me know. Anything you might like to add, Rob?

Rob King: There’s a chat comment from the audience on the screen, it says “I find a lot of resistance to introducing RPA at workplace mostly from management”.

I think this is not uncommon and actually it doesn’t tend to be so much senior management, it is often the middle management. You do tend to find that the people who use RPA love it, the people at a senior level can see the opportunity it will provide the business and why they might want to use it but middle management tend to be a tougher nut to crack because they’ve worked through their career to build up a team of people.

They now actually measure their work by the number of people that they’re looking after rather than actually the output that they’re producing which the Digital Workforce of course will provide them.

So it is a massive, absolutely massive challenge and I think the way that I’ve seen organizations circumvent that when they struggle to get it started, has been to be able to run a small pilot or activity within the business and then just showcase it.

It’s a very naughty way of doing it but showcase it when the opportunity arises to get that broader recognition of what it’s capable of and then get the top down buy-in that you absolutely need for a successful RPA project.

I mean I think a colleague of mine uses the phrase “If you can’t change the people, change the people” which is a bit extreme but it is the problem that is being faced there.

Edward Brooks: We’re all viewed in the RPA world as this kind of exciting digital journey but in reality any middle management would always have multiple challenges and this is one of the many things to be addressed.

In terms of selling it internally, Hemant’s question about ‘how do you actually sell this without selling it too much?’

My response is obviously you have to sell it to any organization. You need people who actually articulate and sell it internally — that’s what we do. Really, you have to learn how to sell this. I think a lot of what we talked about is if you are building an RPA strategy, you are educating and you are showing your vision by selling in just a different format.

Have you seen anything work successfully Rob?

Rob King: I guess two things come to mind; one is I think particularly in the early days when there was less understanding of what automation was about, you saw a lot more of the Finance and Accounting teams using RPA so it sort of grew from there and that’s not a surprise because you saw this, the larger the business the more a simple transactional processes exist within finance and accounting functions.

So I think one used to go ‘go talk to your finance guys because they normally have some money as well’, that’s a good thing about finance and accounting but I do see that the bigger picture is about a virtual circle if you like — get some experience and then showcase that experience then bring more people on and start based on those small bite-size chunks.

A lot of organizations follow that methodology. It’s a variation on the methodology that’s described in the Lean Startup really which is simply build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn and you’re constantly going through that cycle of learning as you go but delivering something in each cycle.

So you can start really, really small with these tools.

Edward Brooks: Yeah absolutely and finance is a great place to start. The Lean Startup book should be compulsory reading for everyone because it’s that mentality shift that can be used for startups as well as big organizations. But it really is about getting started, not worrying too much about all the things that could go wrong. It’s a game changing perspective.

So we have achieved what we wanted to achieve in terms of doing this in 30 minutes. Technology did not play out perfectly, but we’re doing this for the first time as a trial run.

We will get the video recording up online and there will be a transcript coming out as well. If you have any questions at all just reach out to Rob or me directly and we’ll be able to help you from there.

Thanks very much.

Rob King: Yes thanks Ed and also thank you to Patrick who’s obviously read the book in the comments — so well done, thank you very much.

Edward Brooks: Thank you, take care guys.

Rob King: Bye.