Eating into IT jobs
Not long ago, RPA was “a total mystery” to most organizations, but its potential is now grabbing the attention of IT consulting and advisory firms, outsourcing providers, and enterprises alike, says Frank Casale, a longtime outsourcing expert and founder of the newly formed Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA).
“I would say most IT infrastructure support jobs will be eliminated over the next three years.”
-- Frank Casale, founder, Institute for Robotic Process Automation
“This is a flash trend driven by a combination of really powerful process automation software and artificial intelligence, and following a lot of trial and error” by vendors in the market, Casale says.
IRPA touts the technology’s potential to significantly reduce risk in regulatory reporting, thanks to improved analytics and increased data accuracy. But its estimate that RPA could save companies 20 to 40 percent in labor costs is sure to raise eyebrows, signaling RPA’s clear potential to wreak havoc on the IT workforce.
“I would say most IT infrastructure support jobs will be eliminated over the next three years,” Casale says. “I’ve already seen [deployments] where there was 60-plus percent labor automation.”
This includes jobs related to IT help desks, data center and server support, network support, and other areas of IT maintenance. While the technology does not currently replace functions such as application development and maintenance, that’s not to say future RPA technology won’t be able to handle some of those tasks, Casale says.
If that sounds ambitious or even unlikely, it still underscores the ongoing evolution of automation toward higher-value jobs.
RPA is most likely to replace data entry and data rekeying or data assembly and formatting tasks, which are rules-based, Gartner’s Tornbohm says. “Almost any type of computer-related process which is rules-based [and] which a human performs today could be affected at some point in its lifecycle, where [RPA] could mimic what a human does,” she says. “It has affected IT in many ways, often in software testing.”
Earlier advances in automation eliminated “blue collar jobs, ones we cannot even remember today, like tape changers,” notes Chris Boos, CEO at RPA provider Arago. “RPA moves the focus of automation up the value chain. At the same time, demand for IT experts is growing for even higher-value jobs, because most companies are struggling to keep up with high-tech development, and this is why RPA is a relief to most IT people.”