Thinkstock Prepare for some turmoil
Regardless of how RPA plays out within organizations, it’s likely the movement will touch on passions around the possibility of job loss or the need for new skills. Companies will need to address these challenges in order to make a smooth transition to a more automated IT support infrastructure.
It certainly won’t be the first time there have been significant shifts in IT workforces within organizations. “We’ve seen this movie before with the emergence of the Internet, outsourcing, and with all forms of disruptive technology that have forced the reallocation of jobs,” IRPA’s Casale says.
But RPA could create turmoil on a fairly large scale as more organizations adopt the technology. “There are some natural resistances to the implementation of this type of technology, mostly around the potential impact to people,” Hanna says.
No doubt RPA will continue to touch on passions, given the potential for workforce upheaval. But those at the front lines of the technology say the sky is not falling for IT professionals.
“In many ways the RPA movement has been more readily embraced than traditional outsourcing,” says Sean Tinney, global head of innovation and transformation at Sutherland Global Services, a service provider that has helped companies in a half-dozen industries deploy RPA.
“An RPA solution opens up more opportunities on or near shore than a traditional sourcing model, as well as creates new roles both for the sourced and retained organizations, in order to manage a fundamentally changed environment,” Tinney says. “In our experience, the passion around RPA has been solely positive and quite often readily embraced.”
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