RPA as a Service: Bot as a Service
A bot is defined as a configurable piece of software that is typically used to execute repeatable, structured human activities. It is most commonly built using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools. This definition and scope of bots can be expanded to include other forms, such as chat, voice, unstructured data and more, but we will focus on RPA tools.
Before getting to Bot as a Service, it is important to define the three types of RPA bots: Attended Bots, Unattended Bots and Hybrid Bots:
- Attended Bots are designed to cooperate with employees in business activities where human intervention is required.
- Unattended Bots operate without human touch and are managed remotely, such as scheduling, workload management, reporting, auditing and monitoring.
- Hybrid Bots allow the human and virtual workforces to pass tasks back and forth with full visibility, working together.
Bot as a Service requires a bot-configurable piece of software; a platform required to build, run and maintain the bot; and skills, a team and capabilities required to design and build the bot.
Here are some of the considerations that go into choosing Bot as a Service:
- Business and IT skills to design, build and run bots (automation)
- Time, cost and effort involved from plan to management of bots
- Complexity, compliance and governance of process to be automated
- Length of time bot will stay in place and execute task/process
- Evolution of RPA and Intelligent Automation technologies
- Avoiding vendor lock-in
- Maturity of organization and more
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