Leslie Willcocks

Professor Emeritus

London School of Economics and Political Science

“So, do you think Centres of Excellence is the way to go?”

Yes. We concluded this between 2016 and 2019, and then we saw the Centres of Excellence moving from just RPA Centres of Excellence, to automation Centres of Excellence, and then, certainly in the digital leaders, linking up with digital transformation efforts. More recently, what we also found in many big companies was that there was this hole, where automation initiatives were not connecting up with the team running the digital transformation initiatives. New siloes were occurring in these big organisations, so the digital transformation was tending to be driven top-down, and the automation tended to be driven from the Centre of Excellence at best, and very often bottom-up. And there was little integration of the automation technologies—though people were increasingly getting into intelligent automation

So, during 2023 we were finding that people were going digital but in a relative fragmented way, and that’s a problem. In terms of the sweet spots, first they have to get fundamental about process, which is best driven from the middle of the organisation, linking it with business imperatives. Then you organise your data and technology around that. And then you create the link from the middle of the organisation with the digital transformation efforts in order to start integrating what you're doing with the automation, and what you're doing with the other technologies. This is the sweet spot because digital technologies really gain their massive value from integrating with other digital technologies. When you start linking blockchain with automation; when you start linking seriously advanced automation technologies with RPA, you suddenly start getting much more value. You start getting what we call an automation platform—then eventually a digital platform. And it's the platform that enables, not just new business processes, not just new business development, but new businesses can spin off the digital platform, as we've seen with many cases—not least Amazon.

So, as a summary answer to the question, one of our fundamental findings from looking at RPA from 2014–2023 was that you have to centralise governance more than you think. That's why we keep saying you have to start in the middle. You can't really start bottom-up. You know it's nice to try out a few things, but that's a very low-level fruit that you're picking there and you have to start much higher up in the organisation in terms of governance. And on a bigger scale of whole organisation digital transformation, assuming this has to be, in fact an evolution, governance from the middle becomes a key factor, particularly in organising processes, people technology and data, and integrating bottom-up with top-down perspectives.