Administer and govern a low-code intelligent automation platform
Robotic process automation (RPA) and hyperautomation in general remains one of the fastest growing segments of the software market. It is increasingly seen by organizations as way to achieve operational efficiency by integrating disparate enterprise applications. Microsoft Power Automate is striving to provide customers with a single intelligent automation service that covers all aspects of hyperautomation: API, UI (RPA), and AI.
One of the challenges organizations face in accomplishing digital transformation is business process automation spanning legacy and modern technologies. RPA is a key technology to address many such challenges, but it requires a patchwork of automation services that need integration and management before the real work can get done. In enterprises, this involves integration with complex legacy systems and meeting stringent compliance and security requirements. Given the organizational complexity, RPA deployments can take time.
By following the best practices, an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) can ensure that the organization can realize automation and productivity objectives. By democratizing who can and build out automations, they can allow the organization to scale their automation practice.
Focus of this article is to streamline the exploration, implementation, security, governance, and scaling of process automation across your organization
The article is based on HEAT (Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques), which is a collection of learnings from deploying hyperautomation solutions at many enterprises.
Here is a quick summary of various sections:
Empower: The start of any successful automation project is to ensure that the key stakeholders understand the automation capabilities of the platform. In this stage, users new to Power Automate can learn about the automation capabilities in Power Automate.
Discover & Plan: Once empowered, it is important to discover existing processes within your organization that may be well suited for RPA. Post that, it helps organization to plan its RPA environment including provisioning compute, network, accounts, and security.
Design: Next critical phase is establishing a consistent set of organization- level policies for your RPA solutions. Next critical phase is the right considerations for building high-throughput and scalable RPA solutions. This includes a discussion on common components such logging, credential management, and testing. Finally, it is important to keep in mind reuse and sharing the RPA solutions build.
Build & Test: Another critical consideration is to dive deeper on planning, building each of the components that attribute to RPA solution, managing on-premises connectivity using direct connectivity, securing sensitive information, custom logging capabilities, and more considerations for building a robust RPA solution.
Deploy & Manage: Next phase is planning the lifecycle of an RPA solution and deploying it safely to production. Also critical is to consider about administering the deployment process using various tools and using the robust analytics framework to monitor the operational aspects of the solution. Finally, it important to build reports out of the monitoring data to address any operational challenges proactively and reactively.
Secure & Govern: Finally, its important to establish a baseline security posture for your organization. It addresses extending the framework around different layers of security: identity management, endpoint, network, infrastructure application and data. Also consider building a vast and robust framework to enable proactive and reactive monitoring across your organization with respect to your RPA solutions.